Can we read festive books outside the festive period?

I love reading, no matter what the time of the year or the season. I am also someone who reads a book no matter what time of year it is. I recently finished The Holiday Swap by Maggie Knox and it was amazing. I am what you would call an avid reader. I’ve already read thirty-one books this year, so you can imagine what I am like for reading a book. Before anyone judges me, I am a ‘judge a book by its cover’ kind of gal; I think this is part of the reason I think we can read festive books outside of the festive period.

This leads on to the other reasons why I think we can read books outside of the festive period. Well, I have a few reasons:

Christmas is the best time of the year! I’m not talking about spending time with friends and family; for me, I love Christmas because it means lots of pretty lights and being able to go on late-night drives and look at all the amazing decorations. Therefore, I love reading a festive book, because I can imagine what the decorations and locations within the book look like and even in the summer (which is about three days in the UK) I can enjoy reminiscing about my favourite time of year!
Christmas stories are just lovely. I find most of the books I read which are set around Christmas are lovely, and yes, they might be a bit stereotypical, and you know everyone will fall in love and probably end up together, but what’s so bad about that? Christmas is about bringing people together, so I love a book that does that as well.
Christmas is warm and snuggly. I love reading festive books at any time of year because it reminds me of being able to snuggle down in the winter evenings with a blanket, a lovely candle on and a hot chocolate with all the cream and marshmallows you can imagine. It also helps me to get through summer (which is my least favourite season of the year and reminds me that winter will be back soon and so will big thick jumpers and oversized hoodies!)
The characters. I find you can’t help but fall in love with at least one of the characters in a festive book. I find when I am reading a festive book, I will either fall in love with the love interest (yes, another fictional boyfriend to add to the list), or I will want to be best friends with the main character. This is what happened in The Holiday Swap; I wanted to be best friends with the protagonists we were following through the book. It also helped that they owned a bakery, so I wanted to be friends with them even more so for that!

I spoke to a couple of my Bookstagram friends about their opinions on whether or not we can read festive books outside the festive period. Gee from @gee.booksandlife said she doesn’t tend to read festive books outside of that period unless it is a book that she has really looked forward to and is a high priority book which can’t wait until the festive season. I get that and I totally understand why people don’t do it. One of my family members changes her reading habits based on the seasons in the year, and won’t read anything that mentions Christmas or the festive period between the 5th January and the start of November.

Rea from @reaslibrary said she does personally read festive books outside of the festive period because she feels like there is never a right time to read them, (great point, I’m the same! I don’t have a right time to read any type of book)! Rea goes on to say she finds it quite rewarding to read a Christmas book, and it gets her all excited all over again. Again, I agree, I get all excited for the Christmas period when I read a festive book at any time in the year.

The thing I have found great about writing this article is that I will read festive books whenever, but I won’t watch certain films outside of certain periods. For example, I won’t watch Hocus Pocus unless it is Halloween or Love Actually unless it is Christmas. Does that make me a hypocrite?

To conclude, I think you can read festive books outside the festive period because there is never a specific time that you should read certain books. If you want to read a certain book, just read it, (no one judged you when you were reading 50 Shades of Grey on the tube, so no one is judging you for reading a Christmassy book on a 50,000-degree Central Line in the middle of July)!

Written by Jess Hutchby

I’m Jess, a Hufflepuff from the East Midlands and I spend most of my life with my head in another world falling in love with fictional characters. If I’m not reading, I will no doubt be playing Animal Crossing on Switch. I love writing book reviews and open and honest pieces to do with hidden illnesses.

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