“So, what do you do?”

The no-nonsense nurse asked my wife, Carlie, and me while we waited in the hospital for labor to be induced. We told her we were writers. She nodded. “Anything I’ve actually seen?” Feeling like I had been transported back to a Los Angeles networking event, I led with a critically acclaimed sitcom I had written on. “Never heard of it,” she said, with the tone of a busy studio exec rather than a Massachusetts medical caregiver. 

Then Carlie chimed in. “We also write Hallmark movies!” I tensed up. My lifelong need for external validation had already been tested once. Surely a delivery nurse, of all people, knew how fragile first-time fathers could be. I held my breath as the nurse’s eyes widened. “You write Christmas movies?” Her stern face broke into a grin. “Oh my gosh. I’m the biggest Hallmark fan there is!”

Word spread fast in the delivery ward. Within minutes, two more staff members came in to tell us how much they loved Hallmark. Over the next two days, as we waited for our son’s arrival, nurses, midwives, even food delivery staff kept stopping by to share what the movies meant to them. The women were direct about it. “It’s how I recharge after a long shift,” one nurse told us. The men tended to confess it in a whisper. “My wife loves Hallmark. But, uh, yeah, once in a while I’ll watch.” One of these guys casually asked for our titles, then recited the plot of one of our most obscure movies in remarkable detail.

You may wonder how hard that could really be. Aren’t Hallmark movies kind of all the same? Two hours of escapism bordering on anesthesia? A story about as deep as the Christmas ice-skating rink where the protagonists share their first kiss? Over the years I have been asked polite versions of these questions by fellow writers, old classmates at my high school reunion and, most pointedly, by myself as I wrote my first TV romance. 

It was nearly a decade ago and I was working at Loyola Productions, the Jesuit production company, by day and writing my own scripts at night. My boss, Eddie Siebert, S.J., graciously vouched for me with a producer who needed a writer for a TV movie on one of Hallmark’s smaller competitors. It was not a Christmas movie, but I dove into that first script with sheer Christmas-morning excitement. That excitement, however, quickly transformed into a determination to reinvent the romance formula, certain that audiences would be grateful for my gravitas, wisdom and wit. I proudly turned in an ending more evocative of French existential cinema than happily ever after. The producer was not impressed. “People watch these movies to get away from all the depressing and hopeless crap out there. Don’t let them down.”

I had moved to Los Angeles believing God had called me to write screenplays that would have a lasting impact. Naturally, I assumed that meant writing an HBO dramedy with equal parts laughter and darkness, not a romance about a reality TV star finding love in Amish country. But I had (just enough) humility to remember how lucky I was to have a screenwriting job at all. So I rewrote the ending, making it happy with a capital H. 

Shortly before the movie aired, I visited my college mentor, John Spencer, S.J., and the Jesuits he lived with in Boston. Over Rob Roys, they asked about the movie. I feigned uncertainty about the airdate, certain the sophisticated sons of Ignatius would deny ever knowing me if they saw my Amish romance.

After dinner, John took me aside and asked why I had been evading their questions. Annoyed that I hadn’t fooled anyone, I quoted back to this wise Jesuit all the Ignatian lessons about vocation I had learned at Boston College, arguing there was no way this movie was the lasting impact God had in mind when he called me to be a writer. John listened with what I now see was angelic patience.

“How long is your script?” he asked.

“A hundred and five pages,” I said.

“A hundred and five pages,” he repeated. “And you’re sure God couldn’t find his way into a single one?”

Despite all my gravitas, wisdom and wit, I had remarkably little to say in response.

Not long after it aired, I was in an Uber in Los Angeles and had a driver who treated me more like family than a transaction, showering me with bottled water and mints. She had a couple of family photos of her husband and sons taped to the glove compartment and started telling me about her life. She mentioned how in her spare time she had recently taken to watching romance movies. “My sons tease me about it, but those movies make me feel good,” she said. 

I told her I had written one, and to my surprise, she had seen it. She caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “Thank you,” she said. “Your story made me feel like love was actually possible again.” 

I double-checked that she was indeed talking about my Amish romance. She insisted good love stories are universal. Then she told me she was a widow. I don’t remember what I said back, just the lump in my very humbled throat. I had been so sure what I had written would not matter to anyone. I had been waiting so intently for God’s plan for me to begin that I had nearly missed the fact that it already had.

After that Uber ride, I found myself thanking God for not allowing my French existential ending to get approved. I still dreamed of writing that HBO dramedy someday, but here I was with an actual writing credit in a genre I had never considered. I had a choice to make, and I said yes to the path God had put in front of me. That meant setting my sights on the North Pole of TV movies: Hallmark.

A little over a year and many pitches later, Hallmark hired me to write my first Christmas movie. This time I brought curiosity and humility instead of hubris. I got a crash course in the nine-act Hallmark story structure, learning which beats viewers expect and where you can experiment with something new. What people call the Hallmark formula was far harder to master than I expected. 

Nine acts means eight commercial breaks, and each one needs a cliffhanger strong enough to keep the viewer from changing the channel. On another network, an act might end with a gunshot, the discovery of an affair or the protagonist jumping into bed with someone. Hallmark writers don’t get those shortcuts. My job was to build eight equally compelling cliffhangers out of a Christmas Eve wedding whose planner had just quit. Making it slightly more challenging was the fact that viewers already knew how the movie would end.

But I came to realize that the guaranteed happy ending I once looked down on is actually the whole point. Viewers are not wondering whether the heroine will find love, only how. She can’t get there, though, without an “all is lost” moment of darkness (admittedly, Hallmark’s version never gets too dark). It might be a bakery facing closure, an ex-fiancé coming back to town or a carefully planned Christmas celebration falling apart. Whatever it is, having finally opened her heart, she wonders for a moment whether love will win after all. But the audience does not panic. From the couch, they can see what she cannot, and they settle in, trusting that the darkness will not overcome the light.

I have met so many people who turn to these movies when life gets hard. Some are grieving, some are yearning for love, and some just need a break and enjoy predicting the plot with friends over a bottle of wine. The trust they place in a happy ending is one of the things I love most about writing them, and it has been on my mind as we enter Advent. In my own life, I have been more like those Hallmark heroines than the audience watching them. When a dark night comes, my first instinct is to assume it is permanent. Advent reminds me to wait in the dark like that trusting audience, for a light I know is coming.

The summer our son was born, I needed that reminder long before December.

Which brings me back to the hospital. Carlie’s labor went extremely well, and not just because she was treated like she was Lacey Chabert. When our son Julian was born, we both felt a kind of joy we never knew was possible. But a week after his birth, we were at the pediatrician’s office when Carlie, who had not been feeling well, started shivering, though it was the middle of summer. The doctor took one look at her suddenly blue lips and called an ambulance. Back at the hospital, we learned she had sepsis. She was separated from our newborn while the doctors treated the infection.

Days passed, and Carlie barely improved. I rushed between her bedside and our newborn at home and felt I was failing on both counts. One evening, as Carlie slept, I went to the hospital chapel and admitted to God that I feared this dark night would be permanent. I did not know how our story would end, and the writer in me had already drafted about 19 terrible versions of its conclusion. So I asked God for the grace to lay down my pen and just wait. Could I trust God to write the ending instead of me? 

Light broke after six days, when Carlie was finally well enough to come home. Our own Advent ended the way every Advent does, with a mother and her newborn. As I watched Carlie hold Julian in her arms, whatever was left of the young writer so set on unhappy endings disappeared. I felt a profound gratitude to get to write the other kind, the ones that remind people love always has the last word.

A week later, we went back to the pediatrician’s office to thank them for rushing Carlie to the hospital. “So, what do you do?” a nurse asked. This time, I didn’t lead with the critically acclaimed sitcom. I smiled and told her, “We write Hallmark movies.”

John Eliot Jordan is a writer and director whose projects have appeared on Netflix, Hallmark, and Amazon. He is the co-author, with his wife, Carlie Mantilla-Jordan, of the forthcoming book Journey to Forever.