6. escaping the holidays through holiday books
I’m not a holiday person, which I hate saying because I sound like your average pick-me, also known as Girl Pretending to Be a Grinch Because She Thinks It’s Cool to Hate Popular Things, but I’m not a holiday person. I enjoy general seasonal vibes and the opportunity to see my family, but I can’t get past the idea that we’re all just covering up our stress and resurfaced childhood trauma with destructive consumerism, only to crash after the new year once we’re forced to confront our feelings and empty bank accounts, sorry! Also, I turned 30 within the past month, and I am being insufferably existential about it, so this year I’m even less of a holiday person than usual.
However, I do like holiday books and movies because they’re an idealized version of what I naively think the holidays are going to look like. They’re the perfect escape from reality. Just like perennial Hallmark-esque books and movies, we have low expectations of them, from a literary standpoint — the entire point is that they’re silly and unrealistic and cliched. They’re here for entertainment purposes, so let yourself be entertained.
Here are the winter holiday books I read this year. These are supposed to be light-hearted and idealistic enough to not remind you of your own problems, so I’m not applying the same critiques that I would to something like lit fic.
The Holiday Swap — this book has a Parent Trap–style plot, where twin sisters switch places around Christmas. They’re both bakers, with one being a famous TV host and the other a baker at their family bakery in a predictably charming small town, which is inexplicably close to LA while still getting walloped with snow in December. This one was cute, but it requires more suspension of belief than some others. To me, that means there were a lot of plot holes, and the characters’ motivations didn’t always make sense. It’s downright unbelievable in the name of being cheesy at times. But if you want to turn off your brain and dream of baked goods, this might do it for you.
Always, In December — I’ve spent a lot of time whining about how this book duped me already, so I’ll just say that I’ve learned to be wary of marketing. While this book has a cutesy cover and a cutesy title, it’s anything but light-hearted and relaxing. It relies on trauma porn as a plot twist, which feels very different than a book centering trauma as the entire point (A Little Life is one of my fav books, ffs). If you are a true grinch who wants their seasonal reads to be sad with no hope of a happy ending (my default mood the rest of the year), then I guess dive right into this one. I can’t figure out why it has a 3.89 star rating on goodreads.
The Matzah Ball — I was looking forward to reading a Hanukkah rom-com instead of another typical Christmas one, but this didn’t blow me away. The protagonists are annoying people who need therapy. Their romance was a boring, unbelievable one, which can probably be explained by the fact that they fell in love in eight (8) days. And I really didn’t love that this was sold as a “second-chance romance,” meaning we’re supposed to call their 7th grade mutual crush + one chaste kiss the “first chance.” Like isn’t that sexualizing 12 year olds and a little creepy? Even if you don’t want to go that far, you can’t convince me that a 7th grader is experiencing fulfilling adult love. And if you’re a grown ass adult still hung up on a 7th grade crush whom you haven’t so much as laid eyes on since braces, call your therapist and download some dating apps! Actually, if you’re hung up on middle school drama at all, sweetie, babe, it’s time to move on.
The other thing that irked me about this book is that it made a couple of insensitive jokes about the IOF, essentially making light of Palestinian genocide. I just can’t see a scenario in which that’s appropriate or necessary.
A Holly Jolly Diwali — another rom-com I read to break up the slog of Christmas novels. While cute enough, I was frustrated with how this felt like a novel written for clueless white people rather than Indians or Indian Americans. Virtually all the characters serve as one-dimensional vehicles to explain certain aspects of Indian culture. This isn’t necessarily bad, especially as I’m sure the author was trying to make this approachable, but it was still pretty awkward and not even all that enlightening. For example, the main character goes around asking “why do we celebrate Diwali” to everyone she runs into, which is clearly a device to explain to white readers what Diwali is, but then no one (NO ONE) is able to give her a straight answer. Readers have google! What I did learn, I appreciated, and it was nice to have most of the book set in India instead of like, some idyllic small town.
The romance here was also tepid, unfortunately. I don’t need a steamy romance by any means, but I do want to be convinced that the characters like each other more than they like their aunties.
A Season for Second Chances — speaking of small idyllic towns, A Season for Second Chances has the ideal one. It’s so atmospheric, and I truly want to live inside this book. U.K. writers just do better with this kind of scene setting, if I’m going to make sweeping generalizations. It’s not very Christmas-y and it’s not much of a romance, but it’s so relaxing and soothing that it didn’t feel like those elements were missing. Plus, the protagonist is a middle-aged adult handling her shit like an adult, which is refreshing after so many of the hem-and-haw relationships of rom-coms with 20-something characters. It’s the equivalent of Adele’s 30, tbh. We want well-seasoned protagonists and love interests who have been to therapy!
The author has another atmospheric winter novel, The Twelve Dates of Christmas, which is more of a romance but just as cozy. I didn’t like it as much as A Season for Second Chances, but it gets an A+ for scene-setting.
Last year, in addition to the aforementioned Twelve Dates of Christmas, I also read In a Holidaze and One Day in December. The former was pretty cute, and the latter was also more of a “serious” read — maybe books by British authors with “December” in the title are just out to break your heart.
And if you’re too high-brow for rom-coms (I won’t judge you but I will beg you to give them a chance), there are so many atmospheric winter reads too. I haven’t read all these (which I note), but I’m making winter-ish books a January 2022 priority.
Reprieve by James Han Mattson — I included this in my spooky szn post because it technically falls in the horror genre, but something about this gives me winter vibes too. You might be freaked out, but you can be freaked out while cozy.
One by One by Ruth Ware — I grabbed this out of my regular little free library a few months ago, but I’ve only read a few pages. It’s a thriller set at a ski resort in the Alps (I think), and I mean, the entire cover is just snow.
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips — this was a five-star read for me in 2020. It’s set in the extremely remote Kamchatka peninsula of Russia (literally in 2021, it’s cut off from the rest of Siberia and has to be entered via boat or plane — it’s a great wikipedia/internet rabbit hole, when you need one next), so the weather itself is enough to classify it as wintry. But it’s a mystery of sorts told like short stories, each from the perspective of a different woman in Kamchatka, and it’s honestly just really beautiful.
The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah — like Disappearing Earth, this one gets included because of the setting: remote Alaska. This is a classic Kristin Hannah, meaning it’s dramatic and depressing and requires a heap of content warnings. All of her books rely on tired tropes at times, but they’re pretty entertaining when you just want a quick paced read. I consumed this one as an audiobook ages ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but I do remember crying in my car while listening :’)
Winter by Ali Smith — lol self-explanatory. I haven’t read any books from Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, but I have Winter on hold at the library right now. I’m technically skipping #1, Fall, in starting with Winter, which will bother me to no end, but I’ve been told they work as stand-alone novels and I’m hoping that’s true.
The Tourist Attraction by Sarah Morgenthaler — I honestly hated this book because the writing and the romance is too cringe-y for even me, but I’ll include it here because it’s set in Alaska. However, this particular one is actually set in the summer, which makes me think the author doesn’t realize that Alaska has seasons judging by the cover. But the other books in this series really do take place in the winter, so they count. Also, sometimes we just need a book we love to hate.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë — also self-explanatory. The last time I read it was in a 200-level Brit Lit class I just needed to graduate, and I didn’t like it probably because of that, so I want to re-read as an adult. I think a lot of the classics have a winter vibe, including Jane Eyre, Little Women, and Anna Karenina. And Rebecca fits the bill for both spooky szn and cold szn, I think.
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason — I love this book in all seasons, but I could def picture a romanticized version of myself reading it by the fire with a cup of tea, avoiding the cold weather, because why not.
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh — I’m still disappointed in myself for not liking this after loving My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but maybe I just didn’t ~get it~. Still, it embraces the perfect amount of unsettling eeriness that I associate with winter, please psychoanalyze that.
Seeing as I can hardly remember I even have a substack, this is sure to be the last post of 2021. So farewell, and may you have a happier holiday season than the characters in some of these books. We probably have an avalanche of Covid literature barreling downhill us in 2022 and beyond, so maybe enjoy your Christmas romances while you can — and while you’re hiding at home like a gremlin, wondering if the omicron variant is actually a time machine that’s sent us back to spring 2020.