Every year, romantic Christmas movies invade television programs and streaming platforms.
With the break-up of the traditional family, the couple also has more room during the holiday season, the imagination of which goes hand in hand with that of love.
How Christmas finally became a romantic holiday?
Three experts contacted by
20 Minutes
help us answer the question by pointing out different converging factors.
Every year, the same genres of television programs invade the channels and streaming platforms at the end of the year.
The famous Christmas TV movies are everywhere and often tell the same story.
A love story, even great love.
As if you had to be a couple at all costs to have a good holiday.
If in France Christmas remains a family moment above all, this injunction to happiness which would necessarily pass by the fact of having found love interferes in society and particularly during this period.
Has Christmas really become a romantic holiday?
If yes, how ?
20 Minutes
tries to answer these questions with the help of historians and a media semiologist.
A romanticism in the symbols
Christmas is not just a family reunion around a table with foie gras, salmon, oysters and champagne.
It's also a whole decorum, "indestructible symbols like the stars" and all the glittering decorations that surround the holidays, "there is a very strong sentimentality that revolves around these symbols", notes to
20 Minutes
François Walter, historian and professor at the University of Geneva.
"There's a sentimental setting that lends itself to this idea of a romantic relationship," he adds.
We find in Christmas an "ideal of intimacy, of living together in a preserved environment free from tension", he emphasizes again.
And it's a time when we celebrate values that showcase the couple, such as love, friendship, generosity.
In Christmas films, there is also this aspect of modern fairy tales to make the public dream.
It is also, in certain films, the perfect opportunity to say "I love you", to confess one's love to another.
By taking a broader sense of romanticism, that of Baudelaire and Lamartine, Christmas is also a celebration that responds to the nostalgia of childhood, to mysticism with all its fantastic creatures that surround it like elves, flying reindeer.
"In its secular version, it's a world of dreams, of the imagination", recalls in turn Laurent Fournier, professor of anthropology at the University of the Côte d'Azur and specialist in traditional festivals.
Moreover, this celebration is based today on emotion, sensitivity, "which are characteristics of romanticism" with this famous "Christmas magic", he argues.
Moreover, Christmas falls a few days after the winter solstice and "the cycle of the seasons has this romantic touch, it is the promise of a new year", continues Laurent Fournier.
A growing family
Returning to one's roots in one's family, more or less extended, nevertheless remains a very present tradition in our society.
It's always an opportunity to see grandparents, aunts and uncles or cousins.
We are still far from the Japanese tradition which celebrates Christmas as a love festival.
However, if today we find that Christmas can have this new romantic character, as it is described in all the TV movies of the time, it is perhaps also because the family is no longer what it was. .
Often broken up and recomposed, these families of separated parents can find themselves without their children on the evening of December 24 or the day of December 25.
"It's an opportunity for these parents, if they have got back together with one or a new companion, to spend some time together, as a couple, to go to a restaurant, to go away for the weekend, it's a perspective important because in fact, in our society, the values of the family are transformed”, analyzes Laurent Fournier.
"If Christmas is more and more romantic, it's because it's less and less family-friendly," he sums up.
François Walter makes the same observation, explaining that “in a time when the family tends to break up and faced with the fragility of this family and of the couple, we want to recreate with nostalgia this ideal of the couple which continues”.
Moreover, in films, series or Christmas songs, "the cardinal value will be love more than family", also underlines Virginie Spies,
media semiologist who just posted two videos about Christmas movies on TikTok.
There is also this idea, at the time of the holidays, of having to meet love to found this new family.
love sells
A final factor is added to the first two: the traditionally religious feast of the birth of Christ for Christians has become the feast of children.
A transformation that dates from the 1950s, according to Laurent Fournier, to evolve again towards a strong commercial aspect in the 1970s and 1980s. And finally, love sells.
Film productions have understood this, with Christmas films and TV films.
Inexpensive to produce, inexpensive to buy by the channels, they were a guaranteed success during this period and brought in a lot in terms of the advertising market.
"These are romantic series as we see all year round, but we just add Christmas to it", notes Virginie Spies.
You can't escape it every year, Mariah Carey's Christmas hit also shows this romantic aspect very present in the lyrics:
"All I want for Christmas is you."
It is the promise of the most beautiful gift in the end: love.
And this idea that to be happy, you have to have found love.
our file on Christmas
For Laurent Fournier, these cultural works “translate this desire to have romance in a world that lacks it, so we created romance through musical hits, films, which in themselves reinforce the romanticism of Christmas”.
Thus several factors have contributed to giving Christmas this romantic touch.
It is a convergence of commercial, family and social interests, to the point of provoking this romantic character of the party.
Company
Christmas: “Today we are married”… They tell their most beautiful carpooling stories
Culture
And if we celebrated Christmas in the family… of the Hufflepuffs of “Harry Potter”
Family
Party
Religion
Christmas
Movie