Holiday movies are hornier than ever

Hallmark has been the world’s most prolific supplier of Christmas movies, but there’s been a cold war brewing. For the last couple of years, Netflix has slowly been churning out holiday movies of its own and offering up some holiday rom-competition. They don’t have nearly as many movies, but the ones they’re offering are gathering as much attention and cheer as Hallmark’s seasonal productions.

Traditionally, Hallmark’s have leaned a bit toward sweet and chaste, and by offering up something just a little bit different, Netflix has found its own niche within the genre.

Between Hot Frosty, in which a ripped snowman comes to life, and The Merry Gentlemen, where Chad Michael Murray must put on a sexy all-male showcase to save a small town’s performance art venue, it appears that Netflix’s strategy this year is to make the holiday rom-com genre more shirtless, more hunky, and full of more visible abs. Maybe that’s because it’s a simple way to up the ante from your typical big-city-girl-goes-to-small-Christmassy-town-and-falls-in-love formula, or maybe it’s because everyone’s starved for sex, even if it comes only the form of a snowman’s abs.

Either way, something’s suspiciously steamy. In this month’s Group Chat, Alex and Rebecca attempt to get to the bottom of why Christmas is suddenly the horniest holiday.

Alex Abad-Santos: Rebecca, have you seen Hot Frosty? Tell me what you think.

Rebecca Jennings: What kind of question is this? I’m a red-blooded American woman. Of course I’ve seen Hot Frosty.

I thought it was a fairly serviceable Netflix Christmas rom-com with both romantic leads very well cast. Lacey Chabert is coming for Vanessa Hudgens’s neck as the Queen of Netflix Christmas.

Alex: Hot Frosty_, for the uninitiated, is a straight-to-streaming rom-com about a woman who puts a magical scarf on a snowman that brings him to life as a human. As the title suggests, the snowman becomes a very good-looking man (who takes the name Jack, as in Jack Frost) with a lot of muscles, and the two quickly fall in love. Among the many questions it raises is: Are there people out there making “hot” muscly snowmen? And why?

Rebecca: This is only a tiny bit of a spoiler, but I was absolutely furious upon realizing that the film never gives a satisfactory answer as to who actually made the hot snowman. They just have a snowman-making contest in the town square (Who organizes this? Who wins? We will never know.) and one of them is this weird naked Adonis. I personally like the idea of it being this very idyllic Christmas movie town but then there’s one pervert who’s making sexy snow sculptures.

Alex: Like sure, it’s an absolute sicko putting nipples and obliques on a snowman, but the entire town is down to clown! No one is objecting! That nippled snowman is proudly displayed alongside the more traditional snowmen!

The conceit of the movie is that because he’s a snowman, he is susceptible to heat. If you continue with that logic, he cannot wear clothes because they would make him too warm. So Jack is constantly in a battle of wearing as little clothing as possible.

Rebecca: Precisely. Very clever, Netflix! Except for the fact that they chose the veiniest man imaginable to play the snowman and it’s like, wait, how come you have blood?

Alex: The other thing about Hot Frosty is that it is part of a larger set of holiday movies on Netflix, Hulu, and the Hallmark Channel that are all rom-coms. Many times, those films involve handsome carpenters and single dads and down-on-their-luck heroines that are good at baking. Often, they take place in small towns, and almost all of them end with happily ever afters.

Rebecca: It’s always very ironic when the films are implicitly criticizing materialistic urban career women by plopping them in salt-of-the-earth small towns to discover the true meaning of Christmas when the movies themselves are basically advertisements for the holiday shit section of Target. But the fact that many materialistic urban career women like myself love them also maybe suggests we’re hungry for the specific kind of earnestness they provide.

Alex: The heart wants what the heart wants. Do you have a favorite?

Rebecca: My biggest criticism of Hot Frosty is that the plot is kind of a rip-off of a much better Netflix Christmas rom-com, a little film called The Knight Before Christmas starring, of course, Vanessa Hudgens. In that one, a medieval knight named Sir Cole gets magically transported to present-day Ohio, where he falls in love with Hudgens, hot chocolate, and the concept of television (which he refers to as “the magic box that makes merry.”) It is a perfect film.

That one’s my favorite, followed closely by all three of The Princess Switches. What’s yours?

Alex: I don’t know if I earnestly love The Princess Switch franchise — a universe in which three (and counting) identical-looking women who swap places are played by Hudgens — as much as I am in love with the question of how many different characters Hudgens will be playing by the time it all ends. Hopefully I will live long enough to see her play an entire galaxy of women who all happen to look like Vanessa Hudgens.

I haven’t yet seen but also am deeply fascinated by The Merry Gentlemen, a Netflix movie where Chad Michael Murray and a bunch of men strip to raise money and ostensibly save a town.

Rebecca: Alex, don’t waste your time. It’s a solid premise: Britt Robertson plays a Rockette — er, sorry, “Jingle Belle” — who gets fired for being too old, which is objectively funny. She ends up spending Christmas in her vaguely Rocky Mountain-esque hometown with her mother (Aunt Zelda from Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and sister (Gia from Full House), where she must save her family’s crappy performance art venue by recruiting Chad Michael Murray to dance and take his shirt off. Merry Gentlemen manages to do the impossible, which is make a movie about male strippers boring.

For a better version of “city girl goes to the country and falls in love and also it’s Christmas,” I’d recommend Christmas Inheritance, also on Netflix, where a “spoiled party heiress” from New York has to spend a few days in a town called Snow Falls and meets the guy from The White Lotus. It came out all the way back in 2017, and it’s interesting to see how much hornier (but possibly worse?) the films have become since then.

Alex: “The guy from White Lotus” has a name, Rebecca, and it is Jake Lacy. That said, we also have a couple Taylor-Swift-and-Travis-Kelce-inspired flicks on the way: Christmas in the Spotlight and Holiday Touchdown: A Chiefs Love Story, from Lifetime and Hallmark, respectively. Have you watched anything else with people from more famous TV shows?

Rebecca: My friends and I just did our annual watch of all the terrible Christmas movies coming out this year, and I’ve gotta say, there is absolutely a clear winner, and it’s not Hot Frosty. It’s Netflix’s Meet Me Next Christmas, in which Christina Milian must secure tickets to the sold-out Pentatonix Christmas concert to meet up with her true love.

But it actually does a clever little switcheroo that, I have to admit, I didn’t see coming! It’s always a crapshoot whether these movies will include the element of ~magic~, and I confess that when we’re first introduced to the man who, spoiler, will become the romantic lead, I pointed at the screen and said, “That’s Santa! Or maybe an elf!” But no, he’s just a guy. And a very hot one. I think by virtue of his bicep circumference, we can add this to the list of horny Christmas movies. I don’t want to spoil but there’s also a drag element, which is decidedly not-Hallmark.

Alex: Trying to read these words in this specific combination makes me feel like I suffered some sort of brain injury, like everything should make sense and have meaning but my mind feels foggy.

Do you think there are any other important themes that connect these movies, even if they include plot devices like “sold-out Pentatonix concert?”

Rebecca: By now, most made-for-streaming Christmas movies are in on the joke; they make meta references to each other (in Hot Frosty, Lacey Chabert catches a clip of the Lindsay Lohan film Falling for Christmas and muses, “That looks just like a girl I went to high school with,” referencing another Netflix film and also Mean Girls). They know the movies are silly, they know a lot of people are watching them with some degree of irony, and they’re leaning into that.

Alex: But, also they’re low-key horny! I wanted you to say, “Alex, these movies are low-key horny.” Like, they’re not explicitly horny. The main characters never have sex and live in platitudes about love and soulmates. But almost every one of these movies has a scene in which a lady in her 60s or 70s goes full “awooga” over a shirtless man and speaks in randy euphemisms.

In Hot Frosty, the hot snowman, shirtless, helps push an older woman’s car — played by Lauren Holly — and it’s peppered with dialogue like “Are you ready for me?” and “Here I come” and he thrusts and grunts to her extreme pleasure.

It raises the very important question: Who gets to be horny in a Christmas movie, and why?

Rebecca: Let’s be real, these movies exist for the female gaze. No man has ever been truly horny in a Christmas rom-com. Even when they’re making out with our protagonist, the only thing the male romantic lead ever seems to desire is monogamous romantic love. In that way, these films offer this very safe, cozy fantasy where men are not scary or predatory and therefore the women are allowed to be as horny as they please without fear of what might happen as a result of it.

Alex: Part of me wonders if turning Christmas into a romantic holiday is just another way that adults have really made things for kids — movies, video games, comic books, Halloween, etc. — more for them. I think the underlying question here is also, why has Christmas gotten so horny?

Rebecca: I suspect it’s the same reason romance novels are exploding in popularity. People are finding it really difficult to date and find partners, and the world is really scary and precarious, so we find comfort in familiar tropes and themes. And if you’re not having sex in real life, at least you can imagine what it’d be like to fuck Hot Frosty, I guess.

Alex: Is Valentine’s Day too on the nose for our romantic fantasies? Like, why aren’t there a ton of movies about the one day capitalism decided is romantic? Or what about summer?

Rebecca: Wow, way to disrespect Garry Marshall’s 2010 masterpiece Valentine’s Day. But honestly, I think in the future we’ll have horny rom-coms dedicated to literally every season or holiday imaginable. A cottagecore fantasy for springtime, a smutty lake house movie for summer. Hallmark makes a lot of them already. If you were to write a seasonal sexy rom-com with a Hallmark budget, what would it be?

Alex: Obviously, Easter. Think of this logline: God only knows that Mary Maggie (Anna Farris) needs to resurrect her love life … so He’s giving her one almighty romance. She’ll wait three days, but will her handsome carpenter call?