That’s because Connecticut — the location for at least 22 holiday films by Hallmark, Lifetime and others — is promoting tours of the quaint Christmas-card cities and towns featured in this booming movie market; places where a busy corporate lawyer can return home for the holidays and cross paths with a plaid shirt-clad former high school flame who now runs a Christmas tree farm. (Spoiler alert: they live happily ever after.)

“It’s exciting — just to know that something was in a movie and we actually get to see it visually,” said Abby Rumfelt of Morganton, North Carolina, after stepping off a coach bus in Wethersfield, Connecticut, at one of the stops on the holiday movie tour.

Rumfelt was among 53 people, mostly women, on a recent weeklong “Hallmark Movie Christmas Tour,” organized by Mayfield Tours from Spartanburg, South Carolina. On the bus, fans watched the matching movies as they rode from stop to stop.

To plan the tour, co-owner Debbie Mayfield used the “ Connecticut Christmas Movie Trail ” map, which was launched by the wintry New England state last year to cash in on the growing Christmas-movie craze.

Mayfield, who co-owns the company with her husband, Ken, said this was their first Christmas tour to holiday movie locations in Connecticut and other Northeastern states. It included hotel accommodations, some meals, tickets and even a stop to see the Rockettes in New York City. It sold out in two weeks.

With snow flurries in the air and Christmas songs piped from a speaker, the group stopped for lunch at Heirloom Market at Comstock Ferre, where parts of the Hallmark films “Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane” and “Rediscovering Christmas” were filmed.

Once home to America’s oldest seed company, the store is located in a historic district known for its stately 1700s and 1800s buildings. It’s an ideal setting for a holiday movie. Even the local country store has sold T-shirts featuring Hallmark’s crown logo and the phrase “I Live in a Christmas Movie. Wethersfield, CT 06109.”

“People just know about us now,” said Julia Koulouris, who co-owns the market with her husband, Spiros, crediting the movie trail in part. “And you see these things on Instagram and stuff where people are tagging it and posting it.”

Christmas movies are big business — and a big deal to fans

The concept of holiday movies dates back to 1940s, when Hollywood produced classics like “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “Miracle on 34th Street” and “Christmas in Connecticut,” which was actually shot at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California.

In 2006, five years after the launch of the Hallmark Channel on TV, Hallmark “struck gold” with the romance movie “The Christmas card,” said Joanna Wilson, author of the book “Tis the Season TV: The Encyclopedia of Christmas-Themed Episodes, Specials and Made-for-TV Movies.”

“Hallmark saw those high ratings and then started creating that format and that formula with the tropes and it now has become their dominant formula that they create for their Christmas TV romances,” she said.

The holiday movie industry, estimated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has expanded beyond Hallmark and Lifetime. Today, a mix of cable and broadcast networks, streaming platforms, and direct-to-video producers release roughly 100 new films annually, Wilson said. The genre has also diversified, with characters from a wider range of racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as LGBTQ+ storylines.

The formula, however, remains the same. And fans still have an appetite for a G-rated love story.

“They want to see people coming together. They want to see these romances. It’s a part of the hope of the season,” she said. “Who doesn’t love love? And it always has a predictable, happy ending.”

Hazel Duncan, 83, of Forest City, North Carolina, said she and her husband of 65 years, Owen, like to watch the movies together year-round because they’re sweet and family-friendly. They also take her back to their early years as a young couple, when life felt simpler.

“We hold hands sometimes,” she said. “It’s kind of sweet. We’ve got two recliners back in a bedroom that’s real small and we’ve got the TV there. And we close the doors off and it’s just our time together in the evening.”

Falling in love again… with a state

Connecticut’s chief marketing officer, Anthony M. Anthony, said the Christmas Movie Trail is part of a multipronged rebranding effort launched in 2023 that promotes the state not just as a tourist destination, but also as a place to work and live.

“So what better way to highlight our communities as a place to call home than them being sets of movies?” he said.

However, there continues to be debate at the state Capitol over whether to eliminate or cap film industry tax credits — which could threaten how many more of these movies will be made locally.

Christina Nieves and her husband of 30 years, Raul, already live in Connecticut and have been tackling the trail “little by little.”

It’s been a chance, she said, to explore new places in the state, like the Bushnell Park Carousel in Hartford, where a scene from “Ghost of Christmas Always” was filmed.

It also inspired Nieves to convince her husband — not quite the movie fan she is — to join her at a tree-lighting and Christmas parade in their hometown of Windsor Locks.

“I said, listen, let me just milk this Hallmark thing as long as I can, OK?” she said.

Alphabet Inc. is set to book another sizable paper gain after SpaceX completes a tender offer that effectively values the closely held company at about $800 billion.

The shooting was a “targeted attack” on the Jewish community, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at a late-night press conference. He described the incident as an “act of evil anti-Semitism, terrorism that has struck the heart of our nation,” and flagged an uncompromising crackdown on anti-Semitism. 

“We will eradicate it,” he said. 

Australia’s Jewish population was estimated to be 116,967 in 2021, one of the world’s 10 largest. Bondi, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, is among key Jewish communities in the nation. 

One of the gunmen is dead and a second is in a critical condition in the hospital, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon told reporters at a media conference, where he designated the incident as a terrorist attack. At least 29 people, including two police officers, were injured and taken to hospitals across Sydney, he added. 

The incident is Australia’s deadliest mass-shooting since a lone gunman killed 35 people at Port Arthur in Tasmania on April 28, 1996.  

“There are nights that tear at our nation’s soul,” Albanese said. “In this moment of darkness, we must be each other’s light.”

The gunmen opened fire just after 6:45 p.m. local time as more than 1,000 people attended the Chanukah by the Sea event on a warm summer evening. 

One of the victims said he only arrived in Australia in recent days from Israel, where he had lived for 13 years, to help the Jewish community in Sydney cope with anti-Semitic incidents. Speaking with Channel Nine television, his face bloodied and head swathed in bandages, he said the community would pull even closer together in the wake of the shootings.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. showed footage of two black-clad gunmen firing on people from a footbridge near the beach. In another unconfirmed clip, a bystander is shown tackling and disarming one of the gunmen — actions that New South Wales Premier Chris Minns described as genuinely heroic, saying the intervention likely saved many lives. 

An improvised explosive device was found in a car linked to the dead offender, Police Commissioner Lanyon said. Police are also investigating whether there was a third offender, he said. 

Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, said the national terror level rating remains at “probable” despite Sunday’s incident.

Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa’ar said the shootings “are the results of the anti-Semitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years,” adding that “the Australian government, which received countless warning signs, must come to its senses!” 

Speaking at an event recognizing the extraordinary achievements of immigrants to Israel at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the shooting was a “cruel attack on Jews who went to light the first candle of Chanukah on Bondi Beach.”

Several synagogues in Australia, along with Jewish businesses and homeowners, have been targeted following the outbreak of the conflict in Gaza triggered by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. 

In October last year, two masked men torched Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Bondi after dousing it with accelerant. The following month, assailants sprayed anti-Israel graffiti and set a vehicle alight in Woollahra — a suburb with a large Jewish community — damaging more than 10 cars and several buildings.

Last December, offenders broke into the Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea, Victoria, and spread accelerant in what police described as a probable terrorist attack. Days later, another graffiti-and-arson attack targeted a street in Woollahra that perpetrators selected because it was considered a Jewish area.

Around the same time, about 20 members of a neo-Nazi group gathered outside a Melbourne government building with a banner reading “Jews hate freedom.”

This year, Albanese said Australia uncovered intelligence that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps directed at least two of last year’s arson attacks — including the Bondi restaurant and Melbourne synagogue incidents — prompting Canberra to expel Iran’s ambassador, its first such move since World War II.

Gun Crimes

The Bondi attack has refocused attention on gaps in Australia’s gun-control framework, a system often cited internationally as a model. However, it’s still marked by uneven implementation.

A January report from the Australia Institute found that all states and territories fell short on core benchmarks for effective oversight, including transparent data reporting and limits on how many firearms an individual can legally own.

The Australia Institute report also showed how concentrated gun ownership has become: the average license holder owns more than four firearms, and two residents in suburban Sydney hold upward of 300 each.

Using scorecards to rank jurisdictions on measures such as ownership caps and data availability, the Institute assessed New South Wales — home to Sydney — as the strongest performer on transparency, even as broader national shortcomings persist.