The best Christmas romances to make you happy sigh

This book has everything I love in a Christmas romance—a delightfully competent heroine, a deliciously grumpy hero, a cast of eccentric characters, and themes of found family and healing.

Holly, a widow, takes a housesitting job during the holidays at a remote house on the Lancashire moors. But then people keep arriving, and Holly finds herself being guilt tripped into hosting Christmas. When Jude, the owner, is forced to return home, blizzards hit, and they’re all snowed in.

I felt for Holly and Jude who both had good reasons to avoid Christmas, but beneath their prickly exteriors they’re kind, big-hearted characters. It was a joy to see them rediscover the joy of the season. In turn hilarious and emotional, this is a big warm hug of a book.

Two things had me loving this book.

The first is the empathy I felt with Bea’s reluctance to return home when she knows her family are going to tell her I-told-you-so about the breakup of her long-term relationship with her high school sweetheart. The second is her slow realization that maybe she’s been wrong about Henry, the man her family have always wanted her to marry and whom she loathes.

But when Henry comes to the rescue and drives Bea to Scotland for an interview for her dream job, she’s forced to rethink all she’d thought she knew about him. This story is a rollercoaster of a ride—funny, quirky, and sweet. Bea’s emotional arc is a thing of beauty. The perfect snowy, slow-burn romance for Christmas.

To my mind, category romances (those short romances written by publishers like Mills & Boon) provide the most glorious shot of emotion, highlighting all that is most fabulous about the festive season.

In this story Meg, PA extraordinaire, has accidentally stranded her intimidating and aloof boss, William, in Melbourne for Christmas. Convinced she’s going to lose her job, but unable to stand the thought of him being alone for the holiday, she invites him home to the chaotic family farm.

Here William is forced to see his PA in a new light, and finds the walls surrounding his heart starting to crack. For such a short book, this one is rich and emotional. Just a lovely read.

I first picked this book up because of the setting—New York during a blizzard—but also because I love impossible situations.

Here we have Christmas-loving, hopeless-romantic Eva who has agreed to housesit an amazing penthouse on Fifth Avenue, and to have it decorated in time for the owner’s return for Christmas. There’s just one problem, the owner never left. Unaware of his grandmother’s meddling machinations in hiring Eva, Christmas Grinch and crime writer Lucas has isolated himself in his penthouse due to a looming deadline, and the impending anniversary of his wife’s death.

However, when the blizzard of the century leaves Eva stranded in Lucas’s apartment these two opposites discover they have more in common than they first thought. This is a beautiful fairy tale of a book. 

Ashley who is heading home for Christmas, meets a mysterious woman on a train, and wakes up wearing an antique charm bracelet.

Once home, Ashley keeps running into her former high school boyfriend, hot firefighter Aidan. If you love small town romances (and I do) then you’ll love Ashley’s hometown which is full of community spirit, family and friends and hot chocolate, and holiday traditions. Ashley soon realizes that each charm indicates an event that happens in real life.

It all adds up to the feeling that Ashley and Aidan are meant to be. Sweetly adorable and utterly charming.