In the last days of November, a debate raged over Twitter about a movie hardly anyone was talking about just days before, and whether one of its characters deserved the happy ending she got. In
Happiest Season, Harper (Mackenzie Davis) asks her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart) to hide the nature of their relationship while visiting Harper’s old-fashioned, politically ambitious family for Christmas.
Harper then spends much of the film leaning into the lie, frequently sidelining Abby while spending time with her ex-boyfriend Connor (Jake McDormand), leaving Abby to strike up a friendship with another of Harper’s exes, Riley (Aubrey Plaza). The film divided viewers into factions of #TeamHarper and #TeamRiley. While the discussion never became as heated as, say, arguments over what was up with the spinning top at the end of Christopher Nolan’s
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In 2000, the Hallmark Channel aired its first original holiday-themed movie, The Christmas Secret, about a professor who sets out to prove that reindeer can fly, and later meets Santa. In the 20 years since, other networks, notably Lifetime, have gotten in on the game, turning end-of-year programming into a nonstop marathon of tinsel, kisses and Christmas dreams coming true.
But the genre hasn t always brought good cheer to viewers, many of whom noticed a distinct lack of marginalized groups. As Salon s Amanda Marcotte pointed out last December, running down this year s schedule of Christmas movie offerings is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color. It s like watching The Stepford Wives, but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.
That little girl knows we shouldn t be gathering. HAPPIEST SEASON. Having made no secret of my childlike but abiding love of Christmas movies and despite our conventional notions of time and meaningful dates of demarcation having slipped away in 2020, I feel compelled to watch them. Maybe it s a passive version of the denial that has led swaths of the populace to wantonly infect each other, maybe a minor act of nostalgia hard to say. But the tree is trimmed, stockings by the chimney (not far from a similar display of masks), the door is bolted and I m watching holiday movies.