I’m almost ready to start dealing with the holiday season. I’m planning to put up my decorations and start my holiday movie viewing this weekend. For some reason, I’ve developed the kind of reputation for being a Christmas movie fan that has people tagging me on posts about Hallmark movies and sending me memes, but I should clarify that I like some holiday movies. I’m actually pretty picky about them unless I’m hate-watching to snark on them. This is one of those things where I like the idea of them more than I like the actual things. I like the idea of a romantic comedy, especially with a touch of magic, in a holiday setting but I’m generally disappointed by what I see.

I’ll confess that I’m not a huge fan of any of the Hallmark movies, especially the ones from the past eight or so years — when they took over the holiday movie trend and theirs all started following the same pattern, with the person from the city going to the small town and falling in love with the small-town person. While I’m currently planning to move from the city to a smaller town, the town I’m planning to move to is more than five times as big as the small town where I went to high school and it feels like a city (though I’ll admit that this town is right out of a Hallmark movie). And since this isn’t a town I’m from, I won’t have to worry about getting back together with my high school boyfriend (definitely not high on my list of romantic fantasies, plus I didn’t have a high school boyfriend) or keeping my family business running.

I prefer the movies with a touch of some kind of paranormal element, though not the “Santa is real, and he/his son/his daughter is hot!” storyline. I’m a little creeped out by any story that requires an adult to believe in Santa Claus. I’m more up for the Sliding Doors or Groundhog Day kinds of stories, or things that make wishes come true, various versions of A Christmas Carol, that kind of thing. About the only “Santa is real” movie I’ve liked was one in which a woman got her hands on the Naughty List and started out using it to get revenge on people who’d wronged her (Naughty or Nice, currently available on Prime Video).

I’m also not a fan of the royalty movies in which our main character ends up with a prince/princess/duke, etc. That works in fairy tales in fantasy worlds, but that’s not a fantasy I can buy into in the real world today. It seems like all the obscure royalty comes crawling out of the woodwork during the holiday season, based on the number of “Christmas prince” type movies.

I think the first TV Christmas movie I noticed and found myself thinking “I like this!” was one called The Christmas List that aired on what was then called The Family Channel (now Freeform) in the 90s, in which a department store employee made a wish list just for fun, then her co-worker stuck it in the mailbox in the store’s Santa display as a joke — and then all her wishes started coming true in weird ways that ended up complicating her life (this doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, but there are bootlegs on YouTube). Some of those early movies were really out there, like one that involved a frantic mom crawling through her clothes dryer into an alternate reality where she was a single woman. Lifetime got involved somewhere along the way, and that was when we got more of the regular rom-com style. A lot of these could have been romantic comedies that took place at any other time, but they were set at Christmas. I remember one year when I still had cable when I found Lifetime’s schedule and figured out which ones to watch when. Then Hallmark made it their brand, and the other channels seemed to back off and produce fewer movies. They became depressingly unoriginal and cliched.

Probably my favorite Christmas rom-com type movie is The Holiday, though it’s actually more about the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It kind of skips over Christmas itself. I think I mostly enjoy the idea of spending a vacation holed up in a cozy cottage with a stack of books. I do like that the holiday content is mostly to provide the situation and some emotional stakes without it being rammed down your throat.

I’ll need to scroll through the menus of services I get to see what I want to watch this year. One of my favorites, The 12 Dates of Christmas (basically a Groundhog Day story) is on Prime, and I’ll have to re-watch it. I haven’t watched While You Were Sleeping in a long time, but I think that’s one for between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Any recommendations for things currently on Prime Video? I don’t have Netflix, so don’t even think about recommending something there.

My book Twice Upon a Christmas actually started as my attempt to write a screenplay for one of these movies. I decided I didn’t want to deal with trying to figure out how to get a film agent and sell the screenplay, so I rewrote it into a novel. Every year or so my agent gets a nibble from a production company, but nothing’s ever come of it. I was targeting Freeform, and they’re one of the ones that nibbled, so I figure I was on target. I keep saying I need to write another one, but I only really want to write that sort of thing around the holiday season, so it takes planning my work schedule in advance. This year, I’m working on a different project, but maybe I’ll plan next year to write a Christmas rom-com, and then it’ll be ready for the year after that.