Advent Calendar of These Times
Christmas RomComs perpetuate Systematic White Supremacy and Gender Norms but I love watching them anyways.
Welcome to my Substack #18. I wrote everything I had ever wanted to write about Christmas in last year’s substack here - read it first. Soundtrack for this post: Hallmark Channel’s Christmas Album (seriously)
Advent Day 1: As I said in last year’s Christmas substack, I am obsessed with the Christmas RomCom movie genre. It used to be a secret shame, searching in weird nooks and crannies of streaming services for all the Christmas movies that I secretly loved. But in the past few years, Christmas RomComs have gained mainstream traction and I now shamelessly pay for a subscription to FrndlyTV to get access to record and stream all the movies on Hallmark, Lifetime, and the rest of the channels dedicated to this genre. I have gone full on obsessive.
Advent Day 2: The movie that started my love for Christmas movies was of course the classic Home Alone. Watching this movie has become an annual tradition at my dad’s house during the holidays – it’s one of the few movies he actually laughs at, each injury a source of intense joy. When I started watching Christmas RomComs in the living room at my dad’s house, it turned out to be one of the most halal movies to watch with my dad – they were all G rated, with no kissing, perfect to watch with a super Muslim dad. The movies are sanitized to be incredibly secular and the intense sexual tension with no kissing was reminiscent of 80s Bollywood movies. Totally halal.
Advent Day 3: When I tell people I love of Christmas movies, they first react with intense discomfort and a side-eye of elitist taste, and then , an assumption that Love, Actually must be my favorite movie. But I still just don’t get it. It falls so far from my list. It’s missing the Christmas magic factor, the little tantalizing element that something magical could actually happen. All the best Christmas movies have this, a hint of dystopian, a touch of make believe. For me, that movie was Edward Scissorhands, my favorite Christmas movie, and yes, it is a Christmas movie. His finger scissors creates snow on the suburban town every year, truly a magical event. Next on the favorites list are of course, The Holiday, where a home exchange encourages vacation romances, and Last Holiday, where Queen Latifah, after learning she has weeks to live, decides to spend all her money and live the life she’d always wanted to live.
Advent Day 4: Of course, a Hallmark Christmas movie is incredibly formulaic in trope. The protagonist is almost always a woman, and she is almost always strong minded, high achieving, and independent. There is almost always someone dead, like a parent, to show some sort of persistent underlying sadness or loneliness. There is usually a child, usually belonging to the small town man, and he’s almost always looking for a wife to be a mom to his motherless child. It is surprising of course that there are so any single small town men with dead wives who died at young ages, but we don’t acknowledge this epidemic of murders of the small town women in this dystopia. Lifetime movies are just as formulaic, but a little more risky – in these movies they might kiss in the middle of the movie, and acknowledge that sex might happen, in a PG way. And they will maybe cast people of color, and possibly have a side character who might be queer. So progressive.
Advent Day 5: I’m pretty sure my obsession with this specific genre of movie happened when I watched Spirit of Christmas randomly one holiday. It’s a movie about how the “12 days before Christmas, Kate is trying to close the sale of a historic inn, only to find Daniel, the ghost of a man who died a century ago, and he needs her help to unravel the mystery of his annual holiday haunting.” She falls in love with this grumpy ghost who is in solid human body for 12 days and watches her while she sleeps (because he can’t sleep). He spends his human days eating (because he misses the sensation of eating) but Kate thinks he should break the curse and figure out who killed him. Honestly, none of the movie makes any logical sense (HDTGM podcast covers it really well) but the absurd storyline is what I loved about it. Logic has nothing to do this with storyline, and they still made it! There is no way a big budget movie with a big production house would have let this movie fly. But in Christmas movies, where quantity over quality is the name of the game, all kinds of weird storylines get a pass.
Advent Day 6: For people that know me, my favorite Christmas RomComs are the ones that have to do with bringing home a fake boyfriend for the holidays (especially to a holiday wedding), to alleviate the stresses of being single around nosy family members. Almost always, inevitably, the fake boyfriend turns into a real crush and then of course, and accidental engagement. A Holiday Engagement, a December Bride, Mistletoe Promise, Snow Bride, Marry Me for Christmas, are the classics in the Hallmark library, but you also have Netflix’s Single All the Way, Holidate, and Love Hard. They are all slightly different but equally amazing. If should be no surprise to learn that I too took a fake boyfriend date to my college Ex-Boyfriend’s wedding. You know, because I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by showing up as a single woman and to have someone to talk to. It worked so well that when I got invited to a wedding in Chicago and learned four weeks before the wedding that the ex-boyfriend that broke my heart was bringing a date AND that we were being seated at the same table, I insisted that I get a plus one. I found a plus one in a guy I had gone on one date with. We met in Chicago and by the end of that wedding weekend he was professing his love to me. That romance would become the premise of the The Merry Muslim Christmas Rom Com I wrote (and am currently pitching, get at me, producers!)
Advent Day 7: Lifetime released 26 Christmas movies this year and Hallmark released 43 Christmas movies and I tried to watch them all. There are a few I will skip - the ones with dancing, theatre, military and country music. This year I decided to skip the Hallmark Movies & Mystery channel movies – someone is always dying or grieving or getting horribly sick – and I just couldn’t deal with that level of grief at year three of the pandemic. The movies from this brand just amp up the sadness to really make you want to cry. Personally, Christmas RomComs are supposed to be joyful fantasies. It’s White Exotic Science Fiction. White culture at its finest and weirdest. The colorful lights, the gingerbread baked good, the jolly laughter of a fat man with a beard and a grumpy sexy man that turns smoldering and an independent woman that allows herself to be swooned. This is what Christmas is all about! I gleefully checked off each movie I watched in the Hallmark Movie app, starring my favorites and feeling a sense of accomplishment that I checked-off something on a list this winter. I will always watch the scripts featuring people of color, of course - but knowing very well they won’t be the best movies with the best scripts - but we have to show the Hallmark overlords there is a demand! The best scripts are always reserved for Candace Cameron, Lacey Chabert, or Melissa Joan Hart but I will support Tiya Sircar and Nazneen Contractor in every bad Christmas movie they are in because that’s where my politics lie. It’s not their fault they don’t have fantastic scripts written for Brown dynamic women. The typical male leads for these movies are unfortunately unremarkable and can’t be picked out of a lineup – except for the ones that were teen heartthrobs in now adult roles, like Chad Michael Murray, Mario Lopez or Jason Priestly. But these movies aren’t about the male heartthrob anyways - they are the accessory in these female centered narratives.
Advent Day 8: I do love a good time travel movie. The best ones are the ones that hint at travel and have low stakes at changing the course of history. Apocalyptic time travel movies are horrendous, the stakes so amped up with The End of Time risk that there is nothing joyful about them. In A Timeless Christmas, an inventor into the 21st century through a Christmas clock (spoiler alert, he stays in 2020, because of love and electricity) and in Journey Back to Christmas, a WWII nurse finds herself in the future (spoiler alert - she goes back!). In Next Stop, Christmas a magical train transport the protagonist a decade earlier where she gets a second chance at falling in love with the one that got away. There is, of course, the “Groundhog-Day-style of time travel tropes, which I absolutely hate. The anxiety I get in 12 Dates of Christmas as Amy Smart’s character keeps waking to re-live the day is astounding. Finally, the Christmas Carol adaptations are plentiful as different kinds of ghosts make scrooges have various redemption arch (Spirited, Ghosts of Christmas Always, Boyfriends of Christmas Past). There seems to always be a Dickens festival, or play, or musical. The takes (for non-copyrighted Christmas IPs) are astounding!
Advent Day 9: I love the movies about writers. There are so many. It’s such an easy female protagonist to create, whether they are writing books, or blogs, or articles for a newspaper. In these movies, they are all single women who, strangely, own their own homes on a twenty something writer salary, and they all recently got out of a relationship with a man that doesn’t read. Some of them are famous and rich, achieving the kind of notoriety unexpected in today’s IRL publishing world. In A Kismet Christmas she is a famous children’s writer who has to bake a magical matchmaking cookie; in My Southern Family Christmas her editor hires her to secretly spy on and write about her absent father; in a Big Fat Family Christmas she reluctantly writes about her family’s epic Christmas party while falling for her photographer; in the Mistletoe Inn she goes to a two week Christmas writing intensive workshop; in Christmas Next Door he is the austere bachelor famous writer who gets interrupted by his niblings need for Christmas trees; in Tis The Season to Be Married Rachel Leigh Cook wrote about a pretend boyfriend in her non-fiction book, then spends the holidays re-writing it after the editor finds out the lie. On the flip side, there are the struggling writers with unfortunate meetcutes where a hapless handsome man interrupts a serene writing retreat quiet cabins in the woods (The Christmas Cabin, Christmas Getaway) - it feels like it should be a horror movie but weirdly works. And this year a writer with a writer’s block finds herself magically transported INTO the storybook land of a children’s book she loved as a kid (Fabled Holiday)
Advent Day 10: My favorite Christmas movie of 2022 is Something From Tiffany’s on Amazon Prime. I love that the villains are barely villains and everyone is just positively stumbling through the holidays. And of course, we love how charming Kendrick Sampson is as a male lead, always. On the Hallmark side, my faves this year are the one about a Christmas light decoration competition (Haul Out the Holly), the one with the class reunion over the holidays (Christmas Class Reunion) and the oh so meta one about the Christmas movie being filmed and a boutique owner gets pulled into doing costumes (Lights, Camera, Christmas!). On the Lifetime side for this year, Rita Moreno starring as a drill seargent at a Santa bootcamp was absolutely delightful (Santa Bootcamp). The Alaskan set of Single and Ready to Jingle was a close second, but that might be because I love any story that can tie in the aurora borealis into a plot line.
Advent Day 11: Have you ever fallen in love? It’s so messy. It’s chaotic and kismet and dramatic. Like that real real falling in love where you fall in love at first site over the Bollywood vinyl stacks at the record store, or after hours, days, years of chatting with the singer of your favorite band wondering if the chemistry will be just as sparky in person. These kinds of love can’t be summed up in a 90 page, 90 minute formulaic script. The risk is too grand, the fights too wordy, the sacrifice and compromise too much for anti-hero protagonist. I ounce tried to fall in love in this boring way, a simple smalltown meetcute with escalating romantic gestures to a safe halal kiss. He ended it in 6 months because he could tell I was holding back and just going through the motions. It would have made a good Christmas movie, but these boring safe 90 minute romances aren’t for me - after you’ve had the world falling apart type of love it’s hard to make your heart feel otherwise. It’s been a while since I dated and a really long while since I’ve fallen in love, but I’m still obsessive about these RomComs. They make it so simple and are sci-fi fantasy in more than one way - in these worlds falling in love is sanitized and baggage is easily processed. It is understandable and makes sense. There are no married men on dating apps looking for a second, or unemployed men with mommy issues or men married for “greencard reasons” or HPV turned cervical cancer. There are carriages with hot chocolate, or baking cookies together or saving the family business. It’s all so fantastical.
Advent Day 12: With so much research under my belt, surely, I must have ideas for my own potential Christmas RomCom. I do, I do! I have so so many! You can even listen to my audio short The Christmas Jinn on the Dec 2019 Good Muslim Bad Muslim podcast! I’m working on them all but here are my freebies and if you use them you must invite me to cameo on set.
A time travel Christmas movie where a South Asian Mughal Princess gets transported into the present day through the Koh-i-Noor diamond and she can only return to the past if she can steal the diamond away The Royals by Christmas Day. It’s a movie about royalty, squared. Royalty is a big Christmas trope.
A Christmas Chutney movie about how the hot guy’s cow keeps ending up in the female protagonist’s yard and having a romance with her cow. The guy and the girl try really hard to build a fence and keep their cows apart, but then they fall in love. Chutney songs are always either about cows or bread. Anyways, this movie really is just a way to push for an amazing Christmas Chutney soundtrack.
A Bengali Mishthi family business in Little India is going out of business so their entrepreneurial Ivy league MBA daughter decides to make Christmas Mishthi boxes to “expand the market” but she gets into a volatile back and forth with the halal bro cook in the back who makes the Mishthi for the family. He’s also weirdly into unpasteurized raw milk, which is a thing halal bros are really into.
Our female protagonist consults a psychic and does a jinn conjuring spell to find the love of her life. Turns out the jinn that helps her is really Santa Claus cuz Santa Clause is obviously a jinn.
Our female Muslim single woman protagonist is flying out a solo tropical holiday, but her plane plops her in snowy Christmas town. She has to explain to everyone she meets that she doesn’t celebrate Christmas, she doesn’t eat ham, and she doesn’t drink alcohol, and that yes, Jesus was a prophet. Turns out there is a local hot Muslim man that ALSO lives in Christmastown who does all the Christmas things that she herself doesn’t do and it has confused all the locals. She hates him immediately, but he’s the only café in town that sells zabiha (secretly) hot chicken sandwiches so she keeps having to eat his food. And he slowly wins her over because he hasn’t seen another Muslim woman in 5 years.
Yes, Christmas may over, but remember the holiday season ends with the holiday hangover of the first week of January so you still have a week left to watch holiday movies. It’s a lunar calendar thing. It’s also still not too late to get your friends gifts - I have new prints available on my Etsy shop now.
Merry Christmas to all Happy New Year and to all a good night!
Once again, it’s time to watch Christmas rom com.. I come back and reference this post for Christmas movie that I have yet to watch. I think Dash and Lilly series, a Holiday in Harlem, The Noel Diary was nice last year. . I am patiently waiting for 2023 Christmas rom com recommendation from you.
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