Alison Sweeney is the MVP of Hallmark’s holiday movies

As one of the Hallmark Channel’s most in-demand holiday heroines, seeing Alison Sweeney without a grove of festively-decorated Christmas trees or the glow of twinkly lights is disorienting — like finding out the truth about Santa.

“I know,” she said. “I’m used to walking around and just seeing trees and wreaths and Christmas lights everywhere.”

Before becoming MVP of the network’s Christmas movie industrial complex, Sweeney was best known for her time on “Days of Our Lives” as Samantha “Sami” Brady, the manipulative troublemaker daughter to Deidre Hall’s Marlena Evans.

“I loved playing Sami,” she said. “It’s a huge part of me and my character and who I am. However, playing part of that ongoing story for all of those years, it kind of never ends; you’re out of the frying pan, into the fire, back and forth, the whole time. Playing a story where you read the whole script and you know how it ends, it’s really satisfying.”

Her latest, “This Time Each Year,” marks her 30th film for Hallmark, many of which have been holiday-themed. Sweeney plays Lauren, who is nearly a year into her separation from her husband, Kevin (Niall Matter). He is determined to win his family back, but in the meantime, they are focused on co-parenting their young son, Charlie, as Christmas nears.

The film, which Sweeney also executive produced, is one of 47 holiday movies Hallmark is releasing this season.

Sweeney has done non-holiday movies for Hallmark, but she has been drawn to the holiday universe.

“I had not realized how valuable these Christmas movies are to people in their own holiday traditions,” she said.

But while the holidays might be filled with laid-back socializing, Hallmark takes the genre very seriously.

" I didn’t know what I was getting into when I did the first one. It was sort of stressful because they have really high expectations. You’re sort of like, ‘Oh, let’s make a Christmas movie; that sounds fun.’ Then you find out they’re not kidding around. This is serious business.”

That was a lesson quickly learned on the set of her first holiday movie.

“We were doing a shot where I am walking down a hallway, and it’s a hotel at the holidays [in “Christmas at Holly Lodge”] and I guess a Hallmark executive had contacted [the producers] to say there’s not enough Christmas decorations in that hallway. So they were all lined up on one side of the wall for that shot, and then they all moved to the other side of the wall for the other shot.

“I had thought it was Christmas-y enough when I first walked in. But oh no, that’s not Christmas. It needs to be more Christmas. And they busted out more Christmas.”

There was am era when holiday movies were devalued by Hollywood, but with the audience for them exploding, Sweeney thinks the tides are shifting.

“There was a time when it was classified a certain way, but obviously the fans did not feel that way. Now, here we are. The fans have spoken that it’s important to them, and Hollywood had to follow and listen.

“Some of my favorite movies are Christmas movies. ‘Miracle on 34th Street,’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ — those are movies that were just the epic, some of the most important movies of all time. Then I think they fell into a pattern or a formula or a habit and got shuffled to the side.

“The success we’ve had in this genre, not just that they’re about Christmas, but people really love that tradition of ‘I decorate the tree, we have eggnog, we watch Christmas movies together.’ Those are synonymous.”

Hallmark’s holiday movies often are criticized as being formulaic. Sweeney doesn’t challenge the description, but she doesn’t consider it an insult, either.

“What I admire and appreciate about what Hallmark is angling for, and what I would want as a fan, is to know it’s going to be OK,” she said. “I know I can sit down and watch this whole thing and I’m going to be happy and satisfied at the end.”