After stripping off my blazer and picking up the same sweats and oversized T-shirt I’d slept in the night before, I crawled back into bed and queued up Netflix. A COVID exposure scare had kept me home from work, so I propped my laptop on my spare pillow and pressed play on the Chicago-based Holidate. Less than 20 minutes into Netflix’s holiday rom-com original, our female lead, Sloane (Emma Roberts), bares her trope:
I never saw Finley again. But rom-coms only work if there’s a hint of hope, even in the moments we dramatize to be our darkest. Because I was sad, and because I could, I wrote a window into a scene of my life on which the door was closed.
Set in Chicago, Holidate is not the first movie to capitalize on how the progression and distinctiveness of the city’s seasons can perfectly backdrop the arc of a relationship fit for the big screen (or your laptop). It’s not even the only Netflix original to do so this year—Midnight at the Magnolia is set in what I think is meant to be the West Loop.
While watching Sloane and Jackson’s love story unfold, I opened my bedroom window, pressed my nose to the screen, and breathed in scents—my neighbor’s Christmas tree, dryer sheets, car exhaust—that define the holidays in this city I love. And as the wind from Lake Michigan wafted through and ruffled my sheets, rather than pulling it closed against the chill, I grabbed a second blanket, and kept the window cracked instead. v
