It's that time of year again when Hallmark and Lifetime and a great many other outlets put

on their holiday best.

That's right, it's Christmas movie season and we're diving in.

From a splashy musical to a big comeback for Lindsay Lawen, we're dipping a toe in some

of the highest profile movies of this season.

I'm Linda Holmes and today we're offering up a guide to some of this year's holiday

movies on pop culture happy hour from NPR.

Here with me is writer Kat Chao, hey Kat, hello and also with us is NPR senior editor

Barry Hardiman, hi Barry, hello, I'm so excited to have you both here for this.

I do want to mention a couple things about the movies that we are talking about this year.

These are all Christmas movies.

There are always a handful of movies that focus on other holidays.

Hallmark alone has a Hanukkah movie this year and a Kwanza movie, neither of which are

arriving until much closer to Christmas.

So some of this is about what we have access to right now.

There are more LGBT movies every year.

There are more leads of color.

It's a bigger and wider world out there than we used to get.

We're just looking at some of the headliners.

So consider this just a taste of what is going on in holiday movie world.

Let's get right to it.

The first one we're going to talk about is falling for Christmas.

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