The Symbolism of Holidays on TV: Santa Lucia (examples: “Young Royals”, “Dash & Lily”)

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Have you ever wondered why so many romantic comedies are set during Christmas time?

Now, if you’re like most viewers, you might say that the reason for this is pretty simple: Christmas is the holiday of love and family, and that’s why it’s only fitting that a movie showing two people in love should end with them getting together on Christmas Eve.

Of course, if you’re a bit of a cynic, you might argue that this is all just done for purely pragmatic reasons to achieve greater commercial success since more people are going to watch a Christmas-themed movie during that particular time of year.

And both those reasons might very well be true, but there is a third, artistic reason for this choice, and that one has to do with symbolism.

You see, the first, instinctive reaction (i.e. ‘It’s the holiday of love and family,’) isn’t exactly wrong; it just doesn’t go deep enough. Not for someone seriously watching a film through the prism of film analysis and certainly not for any of the filmmakers themselves.

The deeper reason that infuses even a simple romantic comedy with meaning is that Christmas is symbolically associated with birth – the birth of something good, to be precise. And this deep association is subconsciously playing on all our minds (whether we’re Christian ourselves or not) when we’re watching a movie set during this particular season. As long as we’ve grown up in a cultural context where the story of Christ being born is told and retold in myriad different ways (think Bing Crosby songs in every supermarket), this subconscious association exists: Christmas is the holiday associated with birth, with a new beginning, with the start of something good, which is, after all, what a romantic comedy is usually all about: Two people are getting together, i.e. their love, their relationship is being ‘born’, so to speak. It’s a new beginning for a couple, and their joy at starting their journey in life together is mirrored by the holiday season the film is set in.

This is not a metaphor, by the way. What we’re talking about now is called a theme, and what I’ve just described above is essentially what you would call a thematic link: In other words, you can see how the holiday has a deeper thematic meaning, and the film in question also has a deeper thematic meaning. And those deeper themes are congruent.

The theme of ‘birth’ being associated with Christmas is, by the way, one of the (undoubtedly many) reasons why ‘Young Royals’ skips over this particular holiday entirely, showing just one end-of-term Christmas service at the church at Hillerska, but leaving the entirety of the Christmas celebrations themselves to happen off-screen (in the gap between season one and two).

It just wouldn’t have fit thematically – quite the opposite, as a matter of fact: Wilhelm and Simon aren’t getting together at the end of season one; they’ve just broken up. And storytelling conventions thus dictate that the narrative can’t draw too much attention to the fact that it’s the Christmas season. No relationship is being ‘born’ (for lack of a better word) at this particular point in the story.

The script does find a clever way to circumvent this problem by giving us a church service that accentuates a different aspect of the Christmas season – not so much the joy at the birth of something new and good, but the long journey you still have to undertake to finally reach the destination you desire to arrive at.

Because that’s essentially what a Christmas song like Ivar Widéen’s ‘Gläns över sjö och strand’ (about the star of Bethlehem) is about at its very core. After all, you can see the star up in the sky, but you cannot touch it. You know what direction you will have to follow, but the destination is still far, far away, potentially in a foreign land. And the journey you have to undertake as you follow the star up in the sky might be long, arduous and exhausting.

All of this is, of course, thematically projected onto the relationship of Wilhelm and Simon so that we, as viewers, find the mood (and deeper meaning) of Ivar Widéen’s Christmas song thematically fitting for the situation the two lovers have found themselves in at that particular point in the story.

Otherwise the show slyly skips over Christmas altogether, seeing as it just wouldn’t have fit the narrative thematically at all.

What you should take away from this is that a holiday setting on screen is never just there as a backdrop. The three big questions of storytelling are, “Who?”, “Where?”, and “When?”, and we’re talking about the ‘when’ part here.

Holidays give you a symbolic framework for the ‘when’ question, and even when it seems as though the holiday in question were peripheral, it never is! It’s never just part of the scenery; it’s never just about the outward trappings of it: the twigs, the candles, the fruit (or whatever it may be). When a writer makes a decision about the ‘when’ question for their story, they always carefully consider the deeper thematic meaning of the holiday and the deeper thematic meaning of their story, and then they pick a fitting time setting for the plot.

So, the next time a friend tells you that they saw a movie which was set on a particular holiday and then proceeds to explain to you that the holiday wasn’t important and didn’t really feature all that much in the movie, that the holiday was probably just shown to set the mood, but that the plot was actually far more interesting, just know this: Chances are your friend didn’t really understand the movie – or the plot, as a matter of fact.

The time setting always matters.

A Christmas setting is one of the most obvious examples for symbolic meaning to be derived from a religious holiday, but there are obviously other religious holidays that are used like this, as well.

Let me give you one other example: