Why do we love Christmas films so much?

Analysis: love them, hate them (or love to hate them), there are plenty of reasons why we seek out formulaic and cheesy Christmas films

Love them or hate them, Christmas films are unavoidable. Like the Toy Show or Santa in his sleigh, they come around every year — as do arguments about which ones are actually worth watching. Some are downright bad, while others are comfortably cliché and predictable. Even fewer fall into classics category. So why do we bother?

There are plenty of reasons why we seek out these little formulaic parcels of sentimentality and laughs: Escapism, nostalgia, hope, positivity. The predictability of these films tends to serve a function for us and might explain why more of them are getting made (we can agree it's not the acting, though Lindsay Lohan did make her comeback in one).

But one of the main reasons we tune into Christmas films year after year — whether we'd like to admit it or not — is that they make us happy. We distinguish between two routes to a positive mood or to feeling good: hedonic and eudaemonic pleasure, says Dr Brendan Rooney, Assistant Professor in the UCD School of Psychology and Director of the Media and Entertainment Psychology Lab.

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"The first is that in-the-moment pleasure, referred to as hedonic pleasure. It might be stuffing your face full of sweets or giving someone a hug. Those real, in-the-moment, feel-good type of activities. The second is eudaemonic pleasure or satisfaction. That's about feeling like you did something good and it might not necessarily be in-the-moment nice for you. You could help someone out, contribute to society, put in the work to have a of meaningful life."

One is about the more fleeting and brief sources of happiness, while the other is about searching for meaning and purpose: Christmas films offer us both. "They're often full of the joy and pleasure, bright colours and fun, but at the same time they often have themes of doing good, helping others and the satisfaction of a meaningful life," he adds. "There's lots of research that shows that regularly experiencing positive mood makes a significant contribution to your broader wellbeing."

Christmas films also tap into the feeling of togetherness and community we sometimes associate with that time of year. Christmas is a shared time and often a time we spend with family. "Holidays often bring us together through stories and shared values and stories are at the centre of all our culture."

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The films come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. The classics, the children's films, the romantic comedies, A lot of them draw on nostalgia because we like to think back to "simpler times" or our childhoods. "There's a interesting element to nostalgia. It has these sometimes melancholic undertones. In that nostalgic can sometimes be coupled with days gone by — but the particular type of nostalgia around Christmas films is often about holding on to those positive memories from the past and then passing them on to our children."

"When the future is so uncertain — we can construct our past and our memories. They may not be 100% true, but we have those memories from the past that we can hold on to, that we can share and that gives certainty. That ties in with the second type of wellbeing, the feeling that we have a meaningful life or that we’re doing something worthwhile. That is often connected to our identity, who we are, and what we value," Rooney says.

"Sometimes the fact that they are predictable or overly positive, if they're not particularly sophisticated or challenging, they can be a little bit more in the background. They can serve more as an abstract token for memories or positive vibes. In those cases I think it's less about what's in the story and more about the activities in the sitting room or in the cinema. It’s about spending time with the people you’re watching it with."

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Do you have a film Christmas film you watch every year? It can become a bit of a ritual, something you sit down to do with your friends or family, and Rooney adds that the act in itself is a way for us to connect, something for us to gather around. "Watching those films with people, it's really great for our mental health to connect and have shared experiences. That might be that your brother slagging the film because he thinks it's cheesy and it's a way for you to connect as well."

In general, stories and films allow us to self-regulate our emotions, he says. "If there is a little bit of scary stuff or tension and challenges along the way in the Christmas movie, young people might be temporarily afraid or upset and then the stories help them, they give them the skills to be able to regulate their own emotions or deal with those sorts of emotions."

"The same way our heart beats and we don't control it, our brain is always making sense of things. You might think about films as a way to escape or to turn off your mind but that's never the case, it would be like turning off your heart or your lungs. When you're processing these films, you're still making sense of the world, you're still making sense of interactions, of other people's emotions, of events and how to deal with them, they're just not yours and they're not in your life."

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In that way, watching a predictable and warm Christmas film is like a little emotional reward. "It’s escapism, but it's not turning off the mind, it's helping keeping it going as well." The people who make these films "want things to be generic and representative. Grandad has to be able to watch it as well as the five-year-old grandchild," says Rooney.

"An interesting thing about Christmas films is that they tend to be, with some exceptions, family films. Perhaps the filmmakers recognise that it's not about them, that the films are here to give us time together. It tends to be quite positive and the values that are shared are very generic, very universal and that’s probably why it's such a big holiday. It gets right at the heart of humanity."