When did Santa movies become so steamy?

Hot Frosty is a Christmas movie like they don’t make any more. Snow. Magic. A voiceover. A small town. A girl who doesn’t believe in Christmas. A snowman who comes to life, with just a scarf to cover a six-pack you could bounce a penny off and…

Will somebody please think of the children!? What on earth is Netflix thinking, taking the Christmas movie – the most family-friendly of family-friendly genres – and making it smutty? Well, it’s thinking you’ll watch it. And you probably have.

Ask most men about Hot Frosty and you’ll be met with a blank face. Ask many women, and settle in for a long conversation. After its 13 November launch, the film almost immediately hit number one on both the US and the UK Netflix film charts, where it sat until it was replaced by The Merry Gentlemen – a cross between Magic Mike and The Full Monty, but at Christmas.

In this one, Britt Robertson stars as big city dancer Ashley, returning to her small-town roots to run her parents’ failing bar. When she spots handyman Chad Michael Murray’s impressively maintained abs, she has an idea to draw the punters back…

The Merry Gentlemen

Over in America, you can find the equally shirtless A Carpenter Christmas Romance on the Lifetime channel. It’s not exactly arthouse. It won’t be winning Oscars. So what’s the magic behind the formula? Well, if you hadn’t realised that this was the Christmas content you wanted or needed, then Netflix knows you better.

This new and bizarre breed of Christmas movie might be christened Hot Hallmark. The Hallmark Christmas Movie, for the uninitiated, is a specific genre all of its own that’s just about to cuddle its way into British hearts, having already flattened the irony of literally millions of Americans.

Since 2009, the old-school cable channel has churned out an average of 30 new seasonal films every year, all following a well-worn formula. Cynical city girl goes home to her small town after a break-up with a Wall Street-type. There, she meets a goofy, Christmas-loving boy with a simple outdoors life, falls in love and decides to stay.

Sounds familiar, but Hallmark is family-friendly to an almost 1950s extent. Not much kissing, lots of clothes. Frosty and Gentlemen dispense with male shirts as often as possible. Baby, it’s cold outside, but they don’t seem to care. To be clear, this is not 50 Shades of Christmas. There’s no actual pornography. It’s more like Santa Baby made flesh, and this year Santa does show an awful lot of flesh. You start off watching ironically and then…

But why on earth are they so weirdly addictive? Hot Frosty is pitched hard at fans of the cult 2004 film Mean Girls – there’s even a brief appearance by Lindsay Lohan that prompts Lacey to say, “That looks like a girl I went to school with.” It merges nostalgia for that era with the Diet Coke Break hunk and pre-credit-crunch days, draping it all in romantasy – the TikTok-born subgenre of fiction that blends fantasy plots with what fans refer to as ‘spice’ (they don’t mean nutmeg).

It’s catnip for the consumer kids of the early aughts, who are now all grown-up and either already have everything they need or have given up trying. So what do they want for Christmas? Feed it all into the algorithm, and this is what’s spat out. It’s so wrong. And yet it’s so right.