Christmas and Holiday Rom-Coms - Here We Go!

Whaaaa? Did I miss 3+ weeks of Hallmark Holiday Rom-Coms because I was too focused on Halloween and, like, the rest of regular Fall life? Apparently! YIKES! Hallmark started rolling out its 2023 snow-filled holiday romcoms in mid-October this year (maybe that’s normal and I’m always behind?). I should have been more clued in, because people have been getting my Christmas monologues for months now. I love it! YES! Christmas theater and movies are here!

(And if you want to try your own hand at a holiday romcom, check out my “HOW TO WRITE A CHEESY HALLMARK CHRISTMAS ROMCOM.”
btw—I totally embrace “cheesy” for Christmas romcoms!)

So what can you expect from Hallmark this holiday season? From a planetarium to to an aquarium, fashion to photography, travel around the world (France, Scotland, Norway, Germany, England and more) and of course, a bit of time travel, a time loop, a magic pen and there’s gotta be at least a little bit o’ royalty — and loooots of stuff in between, you’ll get that predictable jingle-bell cozy atmosphere Hallmark is known for. Hallmark isn’t exactly known for their diverse casting of leading-ladies (have you seen the meme-calendar of blonde-haired, fair-skinned leading ladies from Christmases past?), but this year, they have some romcoms with different hair colors, skin tones, at least one different body shape, one romcom of two leading ladies who fall in love, and one Hanukkah romcom.

What lessons will you learn? I have only seen a few of these romcoms so far, but I think Christmas By Design sums up one common lesson well when a big industry person says he thinks the female lead is brave for “giving up your dream to be with your family." Yeah… So… the lesson? “If your dream job pulls you away from being in your small hometown at Christmastime…then most likely, you need to give up that dream and move away from the big city back to your childhood home.”

I gotta give up my DREAM?

Okay, this isn’t always the lesson, but the theme runs fairly deep! Hallmark goes a little overboard sometimes, because hey, the woman in Christmas By Design was given permission by her family to be a little late to the pajamarama thing that started at 8 (and she’d been to all the other events that week and she was still going to be home, just a little late… BUT hey. Give it all up because it might be the “only” chance you have to confess your love for the man who, um, LIVES in that town and isn’t even moving away or anything and you’d still see him later anyway).

Still—I let plot holes and corniness slide because, well, it’s the genre! And the theme of “put family before work” is actually a good one that works well sometimes, and we should be reminded of year-round.

And if you tire of this particular theme or style, you can always slip over to Netflix’s version of Hallmark Christmas romcoms. Where at least we have a magical advent calendar or toy soldiers coming to life and women don’t always have to move to small towns to find love and Christmas. Sometimes the men even move to the big city and Christmas does just fine there too.

If you are curious about what Netflix has in store for the 2023 Christmas season, they don’t have a handy week-by-week calendar like Hallmark, and they certainly aren’t churning out 3 new Christmas romcoms every week. They aren’t even putting out any new romcoms (that I can tell) until November 16 (the audacity! ;) !

But here are three coming up which I’ve found so far:
Best. Christmas. Ever.
Christmas As Usual
Yoh’ Christmas (a 6-part romcom).

And you can always check out their long list of previously Christmas romcoms. As you can see by my handy-phone-image here, there isn’t much info on the Netflix app yet about these three new movies, but you can set reminders so Netflix will nudge you when the movies are released.

And if you’re curious about some of my classic non-romcom Christmas favorites, you can read about three of my old favorites here.

Enjoy the season!