In a Holidaze

The romance genre’s key elements focus on building a core relationship and nearly always conform to the expectation that the story ends happily, with all major conflicts and tensions resolved. Romances focused on holiday events often bring out themes of identity, family, and self-discovery, with the requisite happy ending occurring amid the wider context of a joyful celebration with family and friends. Some recent holiday romances are clearly inspired by the plots of holiday films, such as the 2021 anthology Amor Actually, which features plots loosely inspired by the 2003 movie Love Actually and is set in an interconnected Latinx community as everyone celebrates Christmas Eve, or Nochebuena. Throughout the holiday romance genre, the primary characters take new risks, embracing their genuine feelings and navigating family dynamics. 

The structure of this particular novel deliberately echoes (and explicitly references) the film Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, becomes trapped in a time loop and repeats February 2 over and over, making different choices and mistakes each time. Like Mae, Phil’s experience culminates when he grows more emotionally authentic and finds a genuine romantic connection. The convention of time travel and the invocation of alternate futures in holiday-themed literature also has its roots in Charles Dickens’s