In a Holidaze

The romance genre’s key elements focus on building a core relationship and nearly always conform to the expectation that the story ends happily, with all major conflicts and tensions resolved. Romances focused on holiday events often bring out themes of identity, family, and self-discovery, with the requisite happy ending occurring amid the wider context of a joyful celebration with family and friends. Some recent holiday romances are clearly inspired by the plots of holiday films, such as the 2021 anthology Amor Actually, which features plots loosely inspired by the 2003 movie Love Actually and is set in an interconnected Latinx community as everyone celebrates Christmas Eve, or Nochebuena. Throughout the holiday romance genre, the primary characters take new risks, embracing their genuine feelings and navigating family dynamics. 

The structure of this particular novel deliberately echoes (and explicitly references) the film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, becomes trapped in a time loop and repeats February 2 over and over, making different choices and mistakes each time. Like Mae, Phil’s experience culminates when he grows more emotionally authentic and finds a genuine romantic connection. The convention of time travel and the invocation of alternate futures in holiday-themed literature also has its roots in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, but unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, who faces daunting futures if he does not reform, Mae is shown the value of her own agency and the importance of the relationships that she already has.

In recent years, efforts have been made to diversify the romance genre, and this trend is reflected in a variety of holiday romance subgenres. For example, Kelly Farmer’s novel It’s a Fabulous Life is based on the 1946 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey. Like her original counterpart, Farmer’s protagonist, Bailey George, learns the value of her role in her own small town and finds love during the Christmas holiday. In the novel, she finds happiness with her longtime crush, Maria (who loosely parallels George’s wife, Mary), and Clara Angel is Bailey’s guide throughout her spiritual and emotional journey, rather than the angel named Clarence who is featured in Capra’s original story. 

Similarly, Alison Cochran’s Kiss Her Once for Me is an LGBTQ+ romance that is loosely inspired by the romantic comedy While You Were Sleeping. In Cochran’s version, the protagonist goes home for the holidays with a man, only to find that she knows his sister from a prior brief relationship; she then falls in love with the sister instead. The sibling tensions between Andrew and Theo reflect this broader trope, though Mae never seriously considers Theo to be a romantic option. One reason for the popularity of the holiday romance genre is that the scenario of the requisite family gathering lends itself to the common trope of forced proximity, and characters who are forced to spend time together are less able to avoid one another and must therefore face their messy emotions head-on.

In further attempts to diversity the genre, other romances involve non-Christian characters who find love during their own holidays. For example, Jean Meltzer’s The Matzah Ball features a Jewish romance novelist who secretly writes Christmas stories and struggles to find inspiration for a Hanukkah romance until she has an unexpected reunion with a childhood nemesis. Other romances feature Jewish characters navigating their own feelings around Christmas, such as Helena Greer’s Seasons of Love, which explores an enemies-to-lovers romance set at a Jewish-owned Christmas tree farm. In another example, Adriana Herrera’s novella Just for the Holidays features a reunion of former lovers over Nochebuena and Christmas as they navigate the expectations of their families and the pressures of their celebrity status. As demonstrated by these and other diverse titles, the holiday romance genre is capacious, allowing for rich explorations of culture, self, and personal meaning.