Reading a holiday romcom like a great piece of literature

Because who's to say it's not?

Dec 19, 2024

In October I did an experiment. I closely read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, then did a comprehensive reflection afterwards. I asked myself how the book affected me, why I cared about it, and what themes I picked up on.

The experience was transformative for me. It helped me understand the book better and made me think about every subsequent book I read differently. My reading eye is simultaneously more critical and more awe-struck after having paid such close attention to a book. I’d been wanting to do another reading reflection since then and have been waiting for the right book. Then it occurred to me:

What if I did a deep reading of the wrong book?

What if I treated a book that was meant to be breezy and lighthearted as if it were one of the greats, like The Remains of the Day?

What if I closely read and deeply reflected on a holiday romcom?

Painting and photo by Marissa Trarback. I saw the painting on Substack and fell in love with it. Marissa is allowing me to use it for this essay! I’ve linked to her in the footnotes.

This season I was gifted four holiday romcoms1. The beautiful thing about uplifting romcoms is the cheerful worlds we get to escape into. When you pick up a romcom you are given a promise by the author and the publisher: this book will have a happy ending. It’s one of the conventions of a romcom, so it’s safe. You know that no matter how many awkward moments or clumsy mistakes2 the protagonist makes in front of her crush, she will end up happy. And so will we, the readers.

Once I began thinking about approaching a romcom as if it were a part of the Great American Canon, I realized there’s much more to the genre than I thought. There are stakes, desires, misbeliefs, and complex characters, just like all the greats. If there weren’t these components, we wouldn’t like be reading the book; it just wouldn’t be sellable.

So what makes a holiday romcom work? Why are they so beloved?

I found out. Using a hybrid of deep reading and reflecting practices I’ve gleaned from readers I admire, I closely read and analyzed The Christmas Countdown by Holly Cassidy3.

In my own words: the summary

The purpose of this reflection question was for me to summarize the book in my own words to find out what it meant to me. I took out my notebook and pen and wrote two pages of summary. Here is a condensed version:

The Christmas Countdown is about a woman named Callie who was brutally dumped by her boyfriend Oliver after 10 years of dating. The two grew up next door to one another and their eventual marriage was considered a “foregone conclusion” amongst their families. Callie moved from Virginia to New York to accommodate Oliver’s promotion, then was swiftly broken up with and left friendless in a new place. At least she had her big sister, Anita, with whom she now lives.

Formerly an unwavering Christmas fanatic, Callie is feeling Grinchy this year — and it concerns Anita. To revive Callie’s typical Christmas spirit, Anita creates an advent calendar for Callie that alternates between treats and tasks, all of which are supposed to help Callie out of her anti-holiday spirit. If she does all the tasks, Anita will stop begging her to go home to Virginia with her for Christmas and she will stop trying to set Callie up. Plus — Anita will be there to do the tasks with Callie so she won’t have to do them alone.

The first task is to get a Christmas tree, so they head to the local Christmas tree farm, where Callie picks out a depressing Charlie Brown tree. It’s there she meets Marco, a handsome local baker. When her next task finds Callie and Anita baking cookies at the Cookie Bonanza under Marco’s tutelage, the two exchange information because Marco needs help with some accounting work and Callie happens to be a pro.

Callie is warming up to these tasks and treats, until Anita gets called out of town for a couple weeks for work, leaving Callie to do her tasks alone. When Marco hears of this, he offers to be her task buddy in exchange for her accounting work. As Christmas looms and the advent calendar dwindles, Callie’s frozen (and damaged) heart thaws and she finds herself warming to Marco and Christmas, but not the idea of going home.

I won’t spoil the book. It’s too cute to ruin for you; too perfectly holiday romcom.

How it affected me and why I care

I wouldn’t say this book affected me so much as grabbed me, and once I began reading it, I was completely inside that world until the day I finished it. It’s festive without using painfully on-the-nose analogies like “his sweater was as red as Santa’s suit” or “he was as sweet as the cookies he baked.” Instead, the cozy warmth readers seek comes by way of the festivities Callie is tasked with, like sledding and caroling and volunteering. In my house, our Christmas tree goes up the first weekend in November. For the duration of the holiday season, I seek the exact feeling I got while reading this book.

There’s also a strong message about not being someone else’s anchor at the risk of uprooting your own. It talks about trusting yourself rather than just listening to well-meaning friends and family without taking the time to consider whether it’s right. Like all good books, the character undergoes a transformation, and what Callie learns throughout is something all readers (particularly women) should know how to do: hold space for themselves.

Themes

This is the part of the reflection process that I find to be so transformative. As I did with The Remains of the Day, I underlined in pencil while reading The Christmas Countdown, then when I finished, I wrote out the above answers in my notebook. Only once I was done with that reflection did I go through the book and re-underline my pencil markings in pen. At first I wondered why this was a process deep readers took the time to do, but now I know: you capture the sentiment in pencil, then when you go back to underline with your pen, the themes begin to reveal themselves.

What I learned from fellow close readers is that the valuable part of identifying themes is to pay attention to the themes that matter to me. One theme of this book is the importance of not taking yourself too seriously. That’s not a problem I have, so it was a theme I acknowledged but didn’t pay further attention to.

After re-underlining everything I had marked in the book, I landed on the following themes:

Tradition / nostalgia
Culture / heritage / travel
Reinvention
Holding space for oneself
Vulnerability / surrender

What does it mean?

This is the point of reading reflections. All the other work — underlining, identifying themes, figuring out why you cared — leads to this part, which is: what does it all mean?

What was the author trying to say, and did it work?

I think the author had a lot to say, and this surprised me. Weren’t holiday romcoms written for pure entertainment? Maybe, but I don’t think this one was. I read in the author’s note that she is half Swiss and she lived for 35 years in Switzerland. You can feel the importance of culture in the book, and that was the part I liked the most. I love to travel, and so do Callie and Marco. There are many discourses about where they have traveled and where they’d like to go, and all of it ties back to a sense of heritage and tradition. Tradition then connects to the nostalgia of family celebrations, which this book is full of. While reading about Callie and Marco’s nostalgia for holidays past, I experienced my own bout of nostalgia.

Aside from the themes of family and culture and tradition, the through-line about reinvention and finding your voice is powerful. Really powerful. In fact, I created a vision board for 2025 yesterday and I glued on the following words I cut out of a magazine:

The one with the voice.

Having your own voice is important. Learning how to use it is divine.

Sara Hildreth

Petya K. Grady

, and

haley larsen, phd

are the three women whose work on reading and reflecting has most shaped my own. Is there anyone else I should follow for help with deep reading and reflecting?

What are you reading? Have you read any good holiday romcoms?