50 free Hallmark trivia questions with answers. Hallmark is two things at once: a 115-year-old Kansas City greeting card company that also owns Crayola, a department store and a Christmas ornament empire, and a cable channel that has turned the two months before Christmas into a genre of its own. This quiz covers both. Expect the postcard-selling founder, the goldsmiths' mark that named the brand, the 3x5 card the slogan was written on, the 1951 opera that launched Hallmark Hall of Fame, and the astronaut who sued over an ornament. The channel half runs from its origins as a religious cable feed through the 2009 birth of Countdown to Christmas, record-setting premieres, the Queens of Christmas, When Calls the Heart, the mystery wheel, Hallmark+ and the rival network built by its former boss. Easy questions cover the headquarters city and Crayola; expert ones get into architects, executives and 1980s acquisition prices. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or an official page, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each question, so you can settle a couch argument during the next movie premiere.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where has Hallmark Cards been headquartered since its founder settled there in 1910?
Kansas City, Missouri
The company is still privately held and family-owned, and about 2,700 of its employees work at the headquarters campus.
Q 02In what year did Joyce Clyde Hall arrive in Missouri with little more than two shoe boxes of postcards?
1910
He had quit high school that year; his brothers' Norfolk, Nebraska bookstore had been selling postcards since 1905.
Q 03Hallmark's founder sold door-to-door at eight for the company that became which brand?
Avon Products
His father, a traveling Methodist minister, had left the family, and young Hall felt the Lord could use a little help providing.
Q 04In 1917 the Hall brothers 'invented' modern gift wrap by selling what when colored tissue ran out?
French envelope lining paper
The substitute sold out again the following year, so the brothers began printing wrapping paper of their own design.
Q 05The brand name Hallmark, introduced in 1928, borrowed a mark used by which 14th-century London tradesmen?
Goldsmiths
That same year the company began printing the name on the back of every card and became the first card maker to advertise nationally.
Q 06Hallmark's first national advertisement, written by J. C. Hall himself, appeared in which magazine?
Ladies' Home Journal
It made Hallmark the first company in the greeting card industry to advertise its product nationally.
Q 07In what year did Hallmark adopt its slogan 'When you care enough to send the very best'?
1944
Marketing executive C. E. Goodman came up with the line, which the company has kept ever since.
Q 08The company was called Hall Brothers until it changed its name to Hallmark in what year?
1954
The Hallmark brand name had already been printed on the back of every card for a quarter century by then.
Q 09Hallmark Hall of Fame debuted in 1951 with which work, the first opera written for television?
Amahl and the Night Visitors
The broadcast went out live from NBC Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center, and Hallmark restaged the opera several times over the next fifteen years.
Q 10Which composer wrote the one-act opera that opened the Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1951?
Gian Carlo Menotti
He took his inspiration from Bosch's The Adoration of the Magi at the Met, and finished the score so late that his partner Samuel Barber helped complete the orchestrations.
Q 11The original host of Hallmark Television Playhouse was an actress and the daughter of which world leader?
Winston Churchill
She was the third of five children and was named after her ancestor the Duchess of Marlborough.
Q 12Roughly how many Emmy Awards has Hallmark Hall of Fame collected, the most of any anthology of its kind?
81
It has also picked up nine Golden Globes and dozens of Peabody and Christopher awards, and remains one of the last shows with its sponsor's name in the title.
Q 13After NBC dropped Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1979, which network carried it for the next decade?
CBS
The series bounced to ABC in 1989, back to CBS in 1994, and finally moved exclusively to Hallmark Channel in 2014.
Q 21Which architect drew up the master plan for Crown Center, around Hallmark's headquarters?
Edward Larrabee Barnes
The complex is named after Hallmark's corporate crown symbol; the city approved the plans at the end of 1967.
Q 22Which Crown Center hotel was the site of the 1981 walkway collapse that killed 114 people?
Hyatt Regency
It remains the deadliest non-deliberate structural failure in American history; the hotel is now a Sheraton.
Q 23When the founder retired in 1966, which member of the family took over as Hallmark's chief executive?
Donald, his son
Q 14Hallmark began manufacturing its dated Keepsake ornaments in what year?
1973
Each design is available for one year only, which is exactly what turned collecting them into a hobby.
Q 15How many ornaments were in Hallmark's very first Keepsake collection?
18
Six of them were glass balls; by 1998 some 11 million American households were collecting the line.
Q 16Which astronaut sued Hallmark in 1994 over an ornament using his name and his famous quote?
Neil Armstrong
The settlement money went to Purdue University, and the case made NASA far more careful about licensing astronaut likenesses.
Q 17In 1984 Hallmark bought Binney & Smith, the Pennsylvania maker of which brand?
Crayola
The subsidiary renamed itself after its star product in 2007 and also owns Silly Putty.
Q 18How much did Hallmark pay for crayon maker Binney & Smith in 1984?
$204 million
The same year it spent $52 million on the 114-year-old British card maker W. N. Sharpe.
Q 19Which children's TV host molded the 100 billionth crayon at the Easton, Pennsylvania plant in 1996?
Fred Rogers
The brand's crayons had already been featured on both Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
Q 20The name of Hallmark's crayon brand pairs 'ola' (oily) with the French word 'craie', meaning what?
Chalk
Alice Binney, a former schoolteacher and the co-founder's wife, coined it in 1903.
The founder spent his retirement pushing to revitalize the downtown around headquarters, which became Crown Center.
Q 24What is the name of the bull terrier who often accompanies Hallmark's Maxine?
Floyd
The pair got their own animated special, Maxine's Christmas Carol, in 1999.
Q 25On August 6 of what year did the Odyssey Network rebrand as Hallmark Channel?
2001
Executives said viewers had mistaken 'Odyssey' for a travel or science-fiction channel.
Q 26Which partner joined Hallmark Entertainment in buying major stakes in the Odyssey Network in 1998?
The Jim Henson Company
The two had already partnered on the 1996 Gulliver's Travels miniseries and an Asian pay-TV venture called Kermit Channel.
Q 27Hallmark Channel held its first Countdown to Christmas programming event in what year?
2009
It was the first cross-promotion between the channel and Hallmark Cards, complete with a hoops&yoyo movie night on Fridays.
Q 28How many original movie premieres did the first Countdown to Christmas feature?
4
By 2013 the event had grown to 12 new films, and by 2017 to 33.
Q 29The 2014 film Christmas Under Wraps drew a record audience for a Hallmark premiere; who starred?
Candace Cameron Bure
Its success is why Hallmark ramped up its original movie output so sharply in the years that followed.
Q 30How many original holiday films did Hallmark Channel premiere in 2017, up from 28 in 2016?
33
By then its library held 136 Christmas-themed originals.