Christopher Calloway is one of the main characters in Lizzie Huxley-Jones’s festive rom-com Make You Mine This Christmas. He comes from a close but deeply controlling family, where love and pressure are tangled together so tightly that he can barely tell the difference anymore.
On the outside, Christopher looks like the perfect posh straight man with a stable job in finance and a polished, calm persona. On the inside, he is someone who has spent years trying to be the perfect son to parents who constantly remind him how much they have “sacrificed” for him. Their reminders sound like affection, but often feel like emotional manipulation. Christopher tries to protect his sister Kit, who is disabled, lesbian, and more adept at learning how to stand up for herself in a family where boundaries are rarely respected. To make her life easier, Christopher steps even deeper into the role of the obedient child. Between them, he takes on the weight of keeping the peace with parents.
In the process, Christopher has pushed down large parts of himself. He gave up his dream of becoming a baker. He stayed in a job he hates because it pleased his parents. And he hid the fact that he is bi. His bisexuality is something he has carried quietly, privately, almost fearfully. He has dated only women on the page, which makes it easy for everyone around him to assume he is straight. But being bi is important to him, even if he never says it aloud. It sits under his skin, part of the reason he feels so disconnected from the life he is living.
We learn he is bi only at the end of the book, during a quiet conversation with Haf Hughes — another bi character who has been pretending to date him so she can escape facing her parents alone on Christmas. Telling her the truth is a turning point. It’s small, gentle, and not dramatic, but it matters. It shows Christopher taking the first step toward living honestly. It shows him trusting another bi person with a part of himself he has kept hidden for years. And it makes his relationship with Haf shift from a fake arrangement into a real connection built on shared understanding.
In the sequel, Christopher finally allows himself to live the life he wants. He leaves finance. He opens his own bakery. He makes choices as an independent adult instead of as a frightened son. And he starts dating a trans man, fully embracing his bisexuality instead of burying it. His arc shows what it looks like when a bi man, raised under respectability politics, begins to unlearn shame and choose joy. Christopher is not a bold or fearless bi character — but that is exactly why his representation is powerful. He shows another side of bi life: a quiet man who grows into his identity, step by step, until he can finally live openly as himself.There is even a whole novel, Under the Mistletoe, another festive rom-com by Lizzie Huxley-Jones dedicated to his new life.