PicoBlog

We need to find pockets of joy even in gloomy times, especially when those gloomy times encompass the winter holidays.

To help me kindle sparks of cheer this holiday season, I turned to the editor of Carrying Capacity (and more), Alyssa Napier. Alyssa has been behind the scenes since I started this newsletter last Valentine’s Day, brainstorming content, offering feedback, suggesting corrections, and adding links. She is decades younger than me, but we have a lot in common as Black women who love learning, devouring books, and falling into the more than occasional escapist narrative. Our go-to escapes include romance novels, mysteries, and cotton-candy Christmas movies. (The latter have all morphed into “Hallmark Christmas movies” in my mind, but I remember first watching them on Lifetime, and now I also stream them on Netflix and Hulu. Alyssa has deemed this genre “cheesy holiday movies” to encompass the new breadth that sometimes includes Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Day.)

I invited Alyssa to write a joint piece for the holidays with reviews of these movies for you. She had a better idea, to share her ingenious method of getting skeptical friends to watch with her: the invention of Cheesy Holiday Movie Bingo. I have never played the game, but after reading her examples, I bet I would score pretty darn well. I have watched many of the films that she describes, and I love Christmas cookies.

Alyssa and I have by now had several conversations about the whys and wherefores of these alluring films. She asked me what I like about them. I found the answer difficult to pin down and uttered something about charming settings in small, snowy towns; uplifting holiday decorations; and the fantasy of regular people finding true love and lasting happiness by the end. All of that is true enough, but this week, I discovered another answer. On Christmas night, I walked with my family through the neighborhood of relatives we were visiting. Many of the homes on these blocks showcase bright displays. One home had, and I am not exaggerating, around twenty huge blow-up holiday figures. The Santas, Grinches, snowpeople, and cutesy animals were all lit inside and out, and some were even animatronic. The figures lined the side of the yard that abutted a narrow public path (a pedestrian alley leading down to a busier street). The homeowner had adopted the path for the holidays, creating a canopy of red and white lights across its length and naming the passageway Candy Cane Lane. Delighted by the surprise and generosity of this gesture, I twirled down Candy Cane Lane, marveling beneath the lights strung by a private citizen for all to enjoy. At the end of the path, the creator had placed a bowl of candy canes on a pedestal. The moment was so magical that I told my family, “I feel like we’re in a Hallmark Christmas movie!”

That’s when I knew how to answer Alyssa’s question. I watch those movies to chase a feeling like snowflakes melting on my tongue -- the feeling of unexpected delight that flows from the closeness of family and the kindness of strangers all wrapped up in a magical holiday bow. The films can’t always capture this feeling, but once in a while they get close. And that once in a while is enough to keep me coming back for more.

Enjoy Alyssa’s fresh take on the cheesy holiday movie genre below! Happy Holidays and a Merry New Year!

None of my friends love silly, made-for-TV holiday movies the way I love them. So I have to trick them into watching one with me. My favorite trick is to bake cookies for them to decorate (either sugar cookies or gingerbread) while we play Cheesy Holiday Movie Bingo.

Cheesy Holiday Movie Bingo works because these movies are comfortingly—some might say cloyingly—formulaic. A heroine is somehow broken due to not living up to some conservative ideal of femininity. Maybe she is too cynical about the holiday instead of being open-hearted to simple Christmas cheer. Or she prioritizes her career over spending time with her family. Or she’s in love with a man who wears expensive suits and lives in a big city instead of a man with a scruffy beard who moved into the house his grandparents left him in the small town they grew up in. Whatever her problem, viewers are assured by the formula that she will be fixed within 90 minutes, right in time for Christmas.

A game of bingo while watching Netflix’s A Christmas Prince would be over pretty quickly, as Christmas movie tropes abound. Our lead is a Clumsy Woman who befriends a precocious child on her quest to get the inside scoop on a Fake European prince’s inauguration. (Which I would count as “Taking over the Family Business”—arguing over what “counts” is half the fun of this game!)

Lifetime’s Christmas Move Magic involves a Sad Career Woman journalist who pursues the salacious secret behind a beloved classic Christmas movie to earn herself a big promotion, but winds up falling in love with the owner of a small town movie theater and learning to believe in love and Christmas (because in these movies “love” and “Christmas” are synonymous).

In Tubi original A Chance for Christmas, a social media influencer is cursed by Santa (who is Real, Actually) to re-live Christmas Eve again and again until she discovers the True Meaning of Christmas by choosing connecting with her family over earning millions of views.

My favorite of these movies is MarVista’s A Christmas Movie Christmas, in which two sisters—one a cynical Grinch, and one a Christmas movie devotee—get blessed (cursed?) by Santa to find themselves trapped in a cheesy Christmas movie. They must live out Christmas movie tropes in order to return home, but along the way they realize that they prefer their imperfect life with each other to living like a Christmas movie.

I love these movies because I love genre media—works in which writers play around with well-worn tropes that consumers have come to expect. I want to see how various science fiction writers tackle the ethics of robotics that look too human or different romance writers take a couple from just friends to happily ever after. Like science fiction and romance, the genre of cheesy holiday movie offers a sandbox with clear boundaries within which writers can play. I know that Sad Career Woman will inevitably learn to deprioritize work and reconnect with her family, but how does a new writer, director, or actor interpret that same story differently? How does this production try to make their version unique? If it's not unique, is it still fun? (I can forgive a movie a lot of things if it’s fun.)

All that said, I can understand some people’s discomfort with a genre that has been narrowly exclusive in its vision of a merry ending. Only in the past few years have queer couples been given the same opportunities to star in holiday movies, such as Lifetime’s The Christmas Setup and Hulu’s The Happiest Season. This genre is also overwhelmingly Christmas-centric, with only a few movies each year focusing on other winter holidays, like Hannukah or Kwaanza. Despite streaming services and traditional networks like Lifetime and Hallmark making their holiday movie line-ups more racially diverse, this change has only really happened in the past 5 years. When searching for Christmas movies to watch on various streaming services, the thumbnails are overwhelmingly white couples in green and red sweaters, reflecting that historically the genre has been racially monotone.

If that turns you off, I get it! I don’t have an easy explanation for why I tune into the genre every year despite those points. And even if I did, I don’t think the explanation would convince a skeptic. But if you’re like me, delighting in the sickly sweetness of cookie-cutter movies, I encourage you to give Cheesy Holiday Movie Bingo a try next year. Happy watching!

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A little about me – I am an associate editor at a university press, with an acquiring focus in Black diaspora studies. I love musical theater, tabletop role-playing games, and Black history. The last book I read was Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo, and I’m currently playing the video game Hollow Knight.

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