Meet the lawyer behind the Hallmark Hall of Fame holiday favorite

November 24, 2025 Legal Writing

Meet the lawyer behind the Hallmark Hall of Fame holiday favorite

By Amanda Beam

The Hallmark movie A Dog Named Christmas includes all the elements typical of the company's feel-good formula: festive lights, a wholesome family and adorable dogs searching for their forever homes.

Greg Kincaid, an Overland Park, Kansas, attorney, wrote the 2008 book that inspired the 2009 movie.

The tale drew on his rural upbringing. After Kincaid's father retired from the Navy, the fifth grader and his family moved to his grandparents' Kansas farm and spent their days in nature with horses and, of course, dogs.

"I wrote about these stories, in part, because they were the parts of my life that I liked best and wanted to share the most with others," Kincaid says.

Hallmark also turned Kincaid's prequel to A Dog Named Christmas, Christmas with Tucker, into a made-for-TV movie in 2013. Altogether, he's written six novels and a children's book.

Now, the best-selling author has turned to nonfiction, drawing on decades of experience as a divorce mediator. Tentatively titled "The Marriage Paradox-How to Solve It and Find a Happier Life Along the Way," the book blends his relationship insights with research from evolutionary psychology. Its goal is to help couples repair their bonds rather than sever them. A release date has not yet been determined.

"I'm trying to write this marriage book, frankly, because I think it's the one that can help the world the most," Kincaid says. "I've been helping families for 30 years get divorced. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to help families stay married?"

Off-page, Kincaid has found marital bliss. The twice-divorced father of five wed for the third time three years ago. His current relationship is "a different kind of marriage" that has fueled his current self-examination.

Psychology has long intrigued the attorney, who once considered a career in the field during his university days. The 1982 University of Kansas School of Law graduate eventually came to realize that an understanding of human nature was fundamental to effectively guiding his clients through divorce. He also began to recognize recurring patterns.

Curious to test his observations, Kincaid turned to science. To Kincaid, it all leads back to Darwin.

"All human behavior, all animal behavior, is motivated by survival and reproductive success, and we enter into marriages basically because we think it'll aid what we describe, in modern terms, as survival," he says.

In Kincaid's view, not enough attention is paid in relationships to the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy-survival and safety needs. Couples want to focus on their loftier goals of personal achievement rather than evaluate the failures at the bottom of the triangle, he says.

Put simply, humans, like animals, respond to stimuli.

"We have lots of scripts running subconsciously that affect our behaviors that we're just not that cognizant of, and once we become more cognizant of them, the hope is that we manage those aspects of our lives more skillfully," he says.

That self-examination includes pondering the factors that may have influenced his writing of feel-good stories, like A Dog Named Christmas.

"Perhaps the psychological explanation is that I've dealt with a lot of fractured families, so I wanted to create a family that really functioned well together, and maybe it was just to prove it could," Kincaid says. "Maybe it was to show others how it might be done. Maybe it was to show myself what it might look like."