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A reluctant royal whose title is contingent on getting married, a no-nonsense professor who’s given up on love... surely they’ll just stay friends. There’s no way they’ll fall in love and have to navigate each other’s complicated worlds, figuring out what's truly important as their connection grows stronger, slow-burning their friendship into a smoldering holiday season. (This pairs nicely with Love, Actually, and is in the same universe as last year’s extremely fun A Princess for Christmas).

This one gets a little meta. Rebecca hides her secret life as a Christmas romance novelist from her Jewish family, and gets tasked with writing a Hanukkah romance from her publisher. She’s stuck on what to write, and hopes the big (I’m guessing fancy and formal) Jewish music celebration will break her writer’s block — but it’s run by her old summer camp enemy! Her secret career is dependent on spending a bunch of time with her nemesis, and I bet they discover they have more in common than they think, just in time for the big event.

Darcy and Elle get set up on a bad blind date — Darcy is a staunch professional who had a devastating breakup and has decided to be alone, and Elle is an astrologer who believes in true love and taking chances. The holidays can be hard to face without a girlfriend, so they agree to fake date through New Year’s Eve. I’m excited to see how Elle’s top-tier rom-com job gets integrated into the book, and I know any romance with “fake dating so my overbearing family is less of a nuisance” promises madcap family member side characters.

I spoke too soon — the ultimate rom-com job is “picking up shifts at the family Christmas tree farm.” Nick returns from a tour overseas to find out his girlfriend was cheating on him. Somehow his childhood friend Noel is also fresh off a break-up, and they start seeing each other in a different (string) light. This promises friends falling in love to a lot of Christmas music references, and I’d be shocked if they don’t somehow slow dance to holiday music.

A schoolyard prank with a grown-up twist! Twins Charlie and Cass have to switch places when a bump on the head makes Charlie lose her sense of taste and smell, endangering her reality TV baking competition by depriving her of her ability to judge the desserts. (Bake-Off has left sugary traces of its nice bakes and soggy bottoms all over this year’s list.) Cass is dealing with the stress of running the family bakery and an ex who can’t let her go. What zany, kiss-y hijinks will they get up to while answering to the wrong name?

From what I can gather, this features a big city business woman going back to her small Alaskan hometown, taking on the quest of stopping a Christmas-decoration-ruining nuisance of a moose, and accidentally tranquilizing a handsome local from her past instead. The two of them team up to defeat the moose, save Christmas, and accidentally fall in love. There's absolutely no chance someone doesn't end up slipping and getting a face full of snow at a critical moment, hopefully right after they were talking up how experienced they are at setting up an elaborate moose trap.

I have a particular soft spot for wedding rom-coms (part of why Jasmine Guillory's Wedding Date series is so near and dear to my heart). Niki is laid off, and makes the first spontaneous move of her life when she flies from Seattle to Mumbai for her best friend’s wedding, which coincides with Diwali. She falls in love with Sam, a member of the wedding band, and they spend some magical weeks together — but with an expiration date. Niki has an impending flight back to Seattle, and Sam is headed back to London. Will their love go the distance? Will they kiss in three separate countries? I'm so excited to find out!

A modern, gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice sees the high-powered hedge fund manager Darcy Fitzwilliam returning to her hometown of Pemberley, Ohio, for her family’s big Christmas bash. She connects with handsome neighbor Luke Bennet, a carpenter who isn’t particularly impressed with Darcy’s glamorous life. Cue the bickering, the mistletoe, misunderstandings, small town gossip, and — almost certainly — the two of them getting over their differences in the name of true love.

Get ready for a steamy baking competition in Scotland! Kiskeya and Sully are paired together in Holiday Baking Challenge, a reality TV show. They have a lot on the line — Kiskeya wants to prove her family wrong and win the competition she’s been working for, and Sully wants to find her purpose after years of family caretaker work. Also, there’s only one bed somehow (budget cuts?), which is *pastry chef’s kiss.*

I had to put this young adult holiday romance on the top of my TBR pile. Lila Santos follows the rules and makes checklists. She’s already been accepted into her dream college, and the only real risk she takes is running a secret book blog. She gets saddled training Teddy at her job at the picturesque, featured-in-a-famous-holiday-film inn in her hometown (the name of the town is “Holly,” which is my kind of over-the-top holiday theming). These teens accidentally swap phones and learn each other’s secrets, but I’m most looking forward to scenes of angry flirting over tangled tinsel, brewing hospitality-sized batches of peppermint cocoa, and the rest of the extra big seasonal trappings that I'm guessing come with making a festive landmark hum.

This is a book about a singularly career-focused ad exec who gets sent to a camp focused entirely on Christmas activities, ostensibly as professional development. I am so excited for her to reluctantly learn to love the festivities, and neck the halls with the son of the small-town Christmas-y inn where the camp is run. Again, this is a camp where people have to do holiday activities for some reason, which might be the perfect outrageous concept on which to build a holiday rom-com. I'm predicting the camp comes under threat because there's no way this is a profitable venture, and our heroine saves the day with some pretty vague (but newly inspired) use of her business skills.