We recently published Margaret Roach’s delightful “I regret to do this to you, but this is fan fiction based on Hallmarks A Timeless Christmas.“

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I have to admit, I am not a Hallmark movie kind of person. So my first question is what is the deal with A Timeless Christmas??
So, usually, Hallmark Movies follow a template. It’s the narrative arc that people use when they make fun of them. A city woman moves to a small town and meets a small-town boy. She finds purpose, love, and the meaning of Christmas in two hours with generous commercial breaks. It’s amazing. I love those movies. I’ve been watching Hallmark movies since I was in high school and they’ve become part of the holiday tradition for me. I’ve seen at least a hundred and they usually follow a set format. Sometimes though, Hallmark gets a little silly with it. A Timeless Christmas is wonderfully weird. 
A Timeless Christmas tells the story of a man who travels a hundred years into the future with the aid of a magical clock and ends up waking in his house which is now a museum. In this museum, all his loved ones and staff are played by actors.  The female protagonist works at this museum and plays his maid (who is her ancestor!). He then learns that he disappeared a hundred years ago suddenly and now he has to figure out how to get back to the past! He pretends to be an actor who’s playing himself. The story ends with the two falling in love and him staying in the future.   The movie follows this strange mix of hallmark tropes and time travel tropes. It manages to do neither well. I adore it. They released a new time travel romance this year called A Biltmore Christmas which also fills me with dread and I also love deeply. If I were to write a Hallmark movie, I would like to write one like these — upsetting and sweet. 

2) Though (obviously) you don’t need to be familiar with the Hallmark movie to fall in love with this story! And I adore the way the narrator tries to hew so closely to the Christmas romance tropes she embodies. Do you think things will work out the way she expects them to? Or is she only just playing along with what she thinks is supposed to happen?
In my head, this story is about the narrator coping with the strange reality she now finds herself in. She’s just had this whirlwind blur of a romance where this man has traveled through time and has given up everything to be with her. It has to work out for her because her whole life has suddenly centered around this man. The narrator in this story has no choice but to stick to the Hallmark movie plot that she’s been placed in. A magical clock has told her that this man is her soulmate and she can’t escape from that idea. Usually, Hallmark is not magical. Their films are about chance and serendipity. Her narrative is not governed by these rules. The universe told her that she was in love with this man and she is agreeing with it. I think that she will do her best to make the best out of a very strange situation because she feels that she can’t deny a magical clock. This story is about a loss of agency in the narrator. She may want something else, but she’s following along with the story that she’s found herself in.