Here’s my short list of movies that will make you feel warm and romantic and have a little bit of holiday cheer thrown in.

White Christmas It isn’t Christmas until you have watched this 1954 classic musical. Starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, it has everything a holiday romance should. The costumes are lush and the music unsurpassable. The finale is completely satisfying with love in bloom while the snow falls and Bing croons the famous song from the movie’s title.

While You Were Sleeping Sandra Bullock and her disarming charm add personality plus to this sweet tale of finding true love in unexpected places. Sandra falls in love with the handsome traveler she sells train tokens to and rescues him from an oncoming train after he is mugged. Peter Gallagher is the handsome stranger who spends most of the movie in a coma while a misundertanding makes his family believe that Sandra is his fiancee. Complications arise when Sandra and Bill Pullham as Peter’s brother begin to see romantic sparks fly between them.

The Christmas List This 1997 film was made for TV but boasts Mimi Rogers as Melody Parris, a perfume saleswoman whose life and romance is going nowhere. At the urging of a friend she writes her Christmas wish list which the friend capriciously drops into the store Santa’s mailbox. Mysterious things begin to happen and a holiday romance is not far behind. Stella Stevens turns in a wonderful performance as Melody’s mother. Should become a Christmas classic. Watch for it on TV this season.

Rudolph Valentino is famous as the first male sex symbol of the silent movie era. He was almost invariably cast as the romantic lead in films set in exotic locations and, as a result, became the archetypical object of female desire, both in his lifetime and beyond. Yet the reality was somewhat different.

He was involved in several unhappy affairs and marriages and seemed fated never to find true happiness before his death at the age of 31. It was only later that rumors began to circulate about a mysterious lover who still mourned his passing.

It seems that there was a woman dressed in black who would appear at his graveside on every anniversary of his death; she would lay flowers on the grave and then disappear. Theories abounded as to her identity; she was Pola Negri, the Polish actress who was his last love - or perhaps Ditra Flamé, with whose family Valentino had boarded soon after his first arrival in the States.

The truth turned out to be less dramatic but more revealing of Valentino’s character. Many years after these rumors began, the mysterious woman revealed that she had been extremely ill as a little girl and Valentino had visited her. He told her that she would recover and live longer than himself. In gratitude, she had decided to keep his memory alive with her annual visits to his grave.

Rudolph Valentino made some unfortunate choices when choosing partners but, for one little girl, he was a benefactor and deserving of a lifetime’s devotion.