’Tis the season for Mr Napkin Head and Hugh Grant wiggling around No. 10, folks! Time for all you romantics to cosy up to rewatch the classics and add the same-same-but-new Christmas movies to your watchlist. To soak up that G-rated goodness of snow-covered small towns draped in enough fairy lights to illuminate another Taylor Swift world tour, perfectly coiffed people dressed in ridiculous Rudolph sweaters, and mistletoe-induced closed-mouth kisses between would-be lovers.
Christmas movies are basically my kryptonite. I love them. Always have, always will. When I was a kid, we went to New York in December three years in a row and I will never forget marvelling at the skyscrapers wrapped in giant ribbons next to skyscraper-like Christmas trees, cruising the aisles of Toys‘R’Us and Macy’s while high on candy canes, and listening to Jingle Bells and Silent Night on repeat in every store, supermarket, train, hotel, restaurant. The holiday cheer was unmissable. My brother and I would inhale our breakfast staple of hot chocolate and head out for snowball fights with our cousins (we’d usually come back inside when someone started crying after getting hit in the face). I also remember moments of pleasant hibernation where all of us would be huddled together in the cinema watching Bill Murray get punched by a fairy in Scrooged, still one of my all-time favourite Christmas movies. It’s the perfect comfort watch—no matter how messed up things get, everything will turn out okay in the end. And it’s that feeling of easy, perfect joy that keeps me coming back to Christmas movies, year after year.
To be clear, there is absolutely nothing original about the Christmas movie. If you’ve seen a Christmas rom-com before, you know exactly what’s going to happen from the moment you hit play. It’s all about the formula. Disillusioned corporate stooge in high heels winds up stumbling into Hope Springs/Holly Hills/Mistletoe Valley, where she not only finds true love (and hiking boots), but also a renewed spirit/life’s purpose/the meaning of family. Elderly townspeople say things like, “Follow your heart” and “You have to step into the cold to find your warmth.” Teenagers in buttoned shirts say “I love you” to their wrinkle-free parents (it’s a Christmas miracle!) as they work towards saving their family drive-in theatre/windmill farm/inn, and every single sentence ends with festive cheer. And let’s not forget Santa. Every year, the poor chap is either crashing his sleigh, losing his reindeer, getting kidnapped, or worse, passing his mantle to the least Christmassy person of all time.
Clichéd as they are, these formulas work for the same reason that makes romance novels (I wrote one too called The Grand Samara) the most popular genre in the world. Life is hard. There are wars, turtles are eating plastic straws. There is a limit to how much chocolate we can consume in a day without getting sick. Research says our brains find comfort in patterns, so watching a Christmas movie is almost like self-care—we can escape for a few moments to the predictable warmth of a perfect and magical world.
You know else I’m loving about Christmas movies these days? How they’re becoming more inclusive, and for us, more relatable. No longer is the Brown/Black girl just the best friend sub-plot who shows up to console our sobbing heroine in matching pyjamas during the 20-minute misunderstanding she has with our dashing hero. Now, she is the sobbing heroine. And our dashing hero is Henry Golding (Last Christmas—so swoon worthy). Then there are Christmas movies like Single All The Way (Jennifer Coolidge, Michael Urie, Luke Macfarlane) and The Happiest Season (Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Aubrey Plaza), which feature gay couples and star-studded casts. There are even Indian holiday movies like Christmas As Usual, which has Kanan Gill taking ice baths in Norway, and Christmas With The Singhs, which stars Anuja Joshi and a Hallmark-style Punjabi family, that you can add to your watch list.
That said, can I also tell you what I hate about Christmas movies? The ratings. Yes, they’re supposed to be family movies, but let’s face it, no kid over the age of seven wants to watch a feature-length film anymore. They’re all on YouTube Shorts. So, let’s relax those ratings a little and maybe show me a grown-up kiss at the end—a la Adam Brody from Nobody Wants This, which was probably the hottest onscreen kiss this year. We are in 2024, but only one Christmas movie, Our Little Secret, starring Lindsay Lohan and Ian Harding, actually showed real kissing, along with other naughty things like swearing, getting high, and underage drinking.
That apart, I’m still powering through this year’s offerings, but I liked Hot Frosty on Netflix, mostly because I used to dream about the snowmen I made as a kid coming to life. Whichever one (or many) you choose to watch this year, here’s my only unsolicited advice to make the most of your Christmas movie viewing: Suspend your belief. Sceptics and realists have no place in our formulaic end-of-year wonderland. This is a place of fantasy, wishful thinking, and childlike enthusiasm, capiche!
Trisha Das is the author of Never Meant to Stay, Misters Kuru, and The Grand Samara
