This year I started watching holiday movies on Halloween. Lifetime was hosting a marathon of the Merry Liddle Christmas series featuring Kelly Rowland (aka my favorite holiday movies after A Diva’s Christmas Carol with Vanessa L. Williams) and I had to tune in. I used to be a traditionalist—in the “Christmas music/movies only after Thanksgiving” kind of way (not the Candace Cameron Bure way), but it’s safe to say the pandemic broke me.
In a year full of doom and gloom, a tripledemic and more stress than I can handle, I try to find my joy where I can, which this year meant getting a head start on those ridiculously cheesy, yet feel-good holiday movies and (gasp!) putting up our Christmas decorations before we carve the turkey.
And I’m not the only one. In fact, in my book club I was the last one to start watching holiday movies. My friend Sierra has been watching them since this summer. “I watch them year round when I need a serotonin boost, but I would say October/November is when I start watching them back to back to back,” she says.
Our friend Heather took it a step further. She binged-watched Hallmark’s Christmas in July marathon while working on a snowflake quilt “for the vibes.” But after Daylight Saving Time ends, she’s in it to win it. “It’s dark, it’s cold,” she says. “Give me some predictable plots and blandly attractive people.” She may be on to something.
“Holiday movies make us happy for the same reason that watching any favorite movie makes us happy—the ritual, routine and familiarity of it,” says Courtney Cope, licensed marriage and family therapist and senior manager of clinical operations at BetterHelp. “For humans, there is something soothing to our nervous system about those elements. Also, we typically watch the same Christmas movies every year and that gives a sense of order and calm to an often unpredictable world.”
There’s also something about knowing it all works out in the…