It’s that season again, when the streamers bring us hot snowmen and heroes who still believe in Santa. Why are they competing to make the most ludicrous movie possible – and why do we keep watching them?

I could summarise the plot of Hot Frosty – the surprise Netflix hit that has a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score – but it’s probably better put by 32-year-old Christmas film obsessive Claire Birrell. “It’s about a snowman that comes to life and it’s Ted from Schitt’s Creek and then this woman falls in love with him even though he’s only been alive for 24 hours and has the IQ of a three-year-old.” Did she enjoy it? “I couldn’t look away,” the Edinburgh-based estate agent tells me. “It was a wild ride.”

Currently cresting the Netflix Top 10, Hot Frosty is on track to become an outsized festive hit for the streamer, alongside 2022’s Falling for Christmas (Lindsay Lohan as an amnesiac heiress) and 2020’s Holidate (cynical Emma Roberts brings a fake boyfriend home for the holidays). If you’ve managed to miss Hot Frosty, it stars Lacey Chabert – a longtime Hallmark hall-of-famer – as a widow who falls in love with a snowman who has recently transmogrified into a man with a six-pack and a chin-length bob.