The Best Worst Christmas Movies Ranked

Originally published Dec 9, 2022

This year, as a distraction from my surgery recovery, I set out on a journey into the Yuletide sea of Christmas movies with titles that I have to assume are generated with some sort of AI mad-lib program.

A good-bad Christmas movie has to tread a fine line. I haven’t reconstructed the exact formula that pushes a movie from entertainingly bad to unwatchable, but I think it comes down to needing to have some elements of plot, or anticipation, or character compelling enough to suspend logic and ignore bland performances or chaotic non-plots.

I have spent many hours of my life I will never get back scouring streaming services to empirically assemble a list for you of the best worst Christmas movies you should watch this season.

I have done no research and written this article entirely from memory except to look up movie titles where I needed to. This was a creative choice as an homage to the writers’ rooms that produced these films.

As a bonus I have also included some titles you should just skip, as well as the genuinely greatest holiday films ever made to bring you joy.

Best Worst Christmas Movies

Ranked in descending order of unhinged greatness.

With terrible Christmas movies, it’s hard to decide what’s a “pro” and what’s a “con,” depending on your taste, so I have listed them together for you to decide.

6. Christmas with You

Unhinged rating 3/10

A middle-aged pop star (let’s say… Joy) needs to write a Christmas hit to stay relevant, but Christmas brings fresh grief for her beloved dead mother. Needing to connect with her fans, she drives upstate to surprise-visit a fan whose video she sees online expressing her wish to meet Joy. She gets stuck there due to a completely normal amount of snow, so she has to stay and enjoy a home-cooked meal from the girl’s father, Freddie Prinze Jr. Joy also has a dead mother, and they bond over this. Turns out Freddie is a songwriter and music teacher, so Joy and Freddie write a hit song together, and fall in love over the span of about three days.

There are a lot of small things that don’t quite make sense, a lot of coincidences, and there’s an annoying B story with Joy having a fake boyfriend for Insta cred, which all add up to make this a somewhat charming and somewhat unhinged Christmas movie.

Pros & Cons

• Diverse cast
• Dead moms everywhere
• As a 90s kid, it’s nice to see Freddie Prinze Jr again
• Confusing wardrobe and hair choices
• Middle-aged romantic leads are almost the same age, rather than the woman being 10-20 years younger
• Teenager’s storyline is not about getting a boyfriend

5. A California Christmas

Unhinged rating: 4/10

An unreasonably handsome city-slicker man who is in mommy’s pocket and set to inherit a top position at his dead father’s company comes to rural California (near where the fabulous Karen Kilgariff is from in real life) to kick hardworking Americans off their land and build a highway or something. He gets mistaken for a ranch hand, Manny, who was expected to start work and just rolls with it.

Twist! The hard working rancher with the dead Dad and dying mom trying to protect her family’s land falls in love with “Manny.”

She figures out who he is and then feels betrayed. Gasp!

The farm is obviously mismanaged and unsustainable, but Mr. Handsome gets the genius idea from the real Manny to turn the farm into a vineyard by expanding the few grapes her dead father had planted. There is no way they would be able to make this financially viable before the farm went under, but fine, let’s just assume Mr. Handsome spent some trust money on it, and they live happily ever after. Or do they? There’s a sequel so you can find out!

Pros & Cons

• The two leads have good chemistry.
• There is a wonderfully developed bromance between Mr. Handsome’s driver and the ranch hand, Manny, whose identity Mr. Handsome has stolen.
• Both leads look VERY good doing farm work in tight jeans.
• Solid mistaken/hidden identity trope execution
• refreshing gender reversal of the city-slicker doesn’t know how to be a real human/man/woman trope
• I forgot this was a Christmas movie halfway through. There is very little Christmas, and the sun is high in the sky already at 7am.
• There is a dead fiancé, a dead dad, and a dying mom.
• The lead woman has a violent stalker whose behavior keeps getting excused.

4. The Noel Diaries

Unhinged rating: 5/10

The unreasonably handsome man from This is Us plays an alcoholic dealing with Daddy issues sorting through his dead mom’s estate when the lost adoptive daughter of his parents’ former housekeeper shows up looking for help to find her birth mother. Spoiler alert: they fall in love.

Through shenanigans, they find her adoptive mother and This is Us guy repairs his relationship with his father. I would not have forgiven the father so quickly, personally, because it turns out he abandoned his mentally ill wife and only remaining child after the death of their other son. He makes no attempt to reconnect after This is Us guy is an adult, even after his mom dies. What an ass.

Pros & Cons

• The guy from This is Us is exceptionally attractive
• Dead child
• Latinx representation
• Teen pregnancy & socioeconomic class issues that aren’t delved into
• Elderly neighbor gets a satisfying romantic story arc
• It’s also possible to forget this is a Christmas movie

3. Falling for Christmas

Unhinged rating 6/10

Lindsay Lohan, a fancy hotel heiress, falls off a mountain in a skiing accident after her vapid social media-influencer boyfriend proposes to her. She wakes up in the hospital with no memory of who she is.

Instead of calling the huge luxury ski resort up the road, the local sheriff just shrugs and says someone will come looking for her eventually for sure, and the local bearded innkeeper agrees to take her in.

Twist! The bearded innkeeper had approached her father just a few days ago to ask him to invest in his rustic ski cabin for the people who can’t afford to stay in McSkiMansion Resort, but even he doesn’t think to call said resort.

In the meantime, Lindsay tries doing chores around the inn because the Dr. said doing “normal” things might help jog her memory. She tries to make the bed, make breakfast, and do the laundry, but she fails fantastically at all of them because she has never done any of these things before. Despite doing her best, the Bearded Innkeeper is super mean to her and makes fun of her for seemingly having no one looking for her when she’s lost her memory. He sort of apologizes later, but I certainly didn’t forgive him.

Mr. Beard’s mother (in law?) teaches Lindsay how to do domestic things, and so she becomes a viable romantic partner for Mr. Beard, having become an acceptable version of a woman. There is one last hurdle, however.

There is a Christmas tree topper that his dead wife loved, and he cannot fuck any other woman until he is able to put the Angel on top of the tree again. But thank goodness Lindsay has proven her worth as a woman, and after only four days together, the curse is lifted! They can live happily ever after.

Pros & Cons

• She doesn’t really fall for Christmas so much as fall for a bearded innkeeper, around Christmas time, once again stretching the genre of Christmas movie.
• Dead mom used as a trope instead of actual character development
• Absolutely zero chemistry
• Zero-dimensional supporting characters with bonkers B story lines
• Lindsay Lohan briefly sings Jingle Bell Rock but gets cut off by her mean boyfriend

2. The Spirit of Christmas

Unhinged rating: 9/10

A woman buys an inn that turns out to be haunted by the ghost of a Civil War solider and his compatriots. Instead of selling the inn and calling the ghostbusters, she falls in love with the ghost and solves his murder. Seriously.

His ghost only appears around Christmas, so the caretakers normally GTFOs for the weeks around the holidays. I believe this is a true testament to the lengths people will go through to ignore problems rather than fix them.

She is a city-slicker, career-driven lawyer incapable of emotion, so I guess a ghost was her only option romantic option left. You would think that the ghost soldier would cross over into the afterlife at the resolution of the film, but SPOILER, it seems that he becomes permanently corporeal? So he gets to live the rest of his mortal life and die again? What if he gets murdered again?

Also in what kind of fucked up universe do murder victims get trapped in the mortal plane because they were unlucky enough to get murdered and nobody figured out who did it? What kind of God is this???

My Pexel’s Free Image search failed to turn up anything satisfying for “ghost of murdered civil war soldier,” so I have assembled a gallery of images to represent the key elements of the film.

Pros & Cons

• Ghost romance
• No pottery scene
• Murder mystery
• Woman isn’t fully human until she has a romantic partner trope
• Time travel? Resurrection?
• Prohibition-era storyline
• TW: Suicide

1. A New York Christmas Wedding

Unhinged rating: 10/10

I can’t say too much about this film without giving away some absolutely wild plot twists, but here’s what I can say. This movie is as uninhibited and chaotic as the title is bland and uninformative. From the title and blurb, I expected a cheesy movie where a woman on the eve of her wedding gets visited by Christmas ghosts in a modern take on the classic Dickens trope. The Christmas ghost would make her re-think whether her fiancé is right for her, or if she should revisit her friend-zoned childhood BFF.

What I got was….not that. I was completely sober while watching this film, but I started to wonder if I had taken a weird mix of post-op pain meds and then forgotten. Fortunately I was watching with an also-sober friend who assured me this was a real thing that was happening. I was fully engaged, yelling and screaming at the television in my amusement and horror. We looked up reviews after watching and found this excellent Slate review which very closely matched my live narration of the film. If you only watch one outrageous Christmas movie this year, make it this one.

I had fun making a gallery of free images for the previous entry, so I did it again. A plot summary via Pexels free images.

Pros and Cons

• Inclusive casting, very Queer
• Time Travel
• Dead Dad, Dead Mom, Dead Friend, Dead Baby
• Lots of Catholicism in a story that was obviously written by people who definitely aren’t Catholic
• I can’t tell if this movie has a forced-birth or pro-choice message
• I was thoroughly confused most of the time and had to re-wind constantly to keep up. This is not necessarily a complaint.
• Actors absolutely do their best with what they’re given, making the movie watchable despite the chaos.
• If you think about the ending for more than a minute, it’s weirdly dark and raises more questions than answers.

The Actual Best Christmas Movies

Ranked in descending order of greatness.

5. The Nutcracker (1993)

If you have the opportunity to see the Nutcracker Ballet at your local theater, please do it. It’s a magical experience, and I go back again and again when I have the opportunity. However, nothing will fully substitute for the childhood memories I have of falling in love with the 1993 Nutracker movie starring Macaulay Culkin, which we had on VHS.

My parents’ idea of sharing cultural experiences with their children mostly comprised of going to the movies and sporting events, so my sister and I weren’t exposed to theater or dance or symphonies until later in life. This Nutcracker movie, simple and silly as it is, definitely lit a fire in us, a desire to venture more into the arts.

After youth careers in competitive sports, we both pursued music and later dance in college as hobby. To our parents’ credit, they were very supportive. It just literally never occurred to them that dancing would be something any reasonable person would enjoy.

We watched with joy and awe and envy at the magical grace of the Sugar Plum Fairy, the exotic elegance of Chocolate and Coffee, the mystery of Godfather Drosselmeyer, and the bravery of our dear hero the Nutcracker Prince, the perfect 90s childhood crush, Macaulay Culkin.

4. Elf

Not all of Will Ferrell’s movies are hits, but I absolutely love Elf. It’s the perfect mix of comedy that can be enjoyed by adults and children, generating genuine belly laughs. The homage to the stop-motion animation specials of the 60s is beautifully interwoven into the costuming and set pieces of the live action characters. Most importantly, Love and the Christmas Spirit reign supreme throughout.

I haven’t watched Spirited yet, the new film with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, but I have high hopes it’ll become a new favorite alongside Elf. I may be setting myself up for disappointment, but isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

3. Last Holiday

Queen Latifah. LL Cool J. Gérard Depardieu.

I should not need to say any more, but I will. This is my new favorite Christmas “rom-com.” I can’t believe I had never watched it before, and I am very grateful for my friend who introduced me to it this year.

Queen Latifah plays a retail worker suffering under the weight of capitalism and diet culture who does everything “right” all the time, sacrificing and hustling with the belief that her perseverance will pay off eventually, that her dreams of starting her own restaurant are achievable if she works hard enough.

At the beginning of December, she is diagnosed with a rare terminal illness and given a prognosis of only a few weeks to live. She withdraws all the hard-earned money from her 401k and heads off to a luxury resort in Europe to live life to the fullest and become besties with the world-renowned chef she admires, Gérard Depardieu. I love that the romantic storyline with LL Cool J is almost an afterthought, because this movie is really about a woman deciding to live life for herself, allowing herself to experience real joy for the first time.

2. The Year Without A Santa Claus

This is the one with the Heat Miser and the Snow Miser. This is another childhood favorite of mine and my sisters’. To ensure we can still watch it in the era of streaming uncertainty, a few years ago we both purchased a DVD copy for each other as gifts, unplanned.

The Heat Miser and Snow Miser songs are irrefutable jams. The rest of the movie is cute too, even though Santa is a whiny baby with the worst case of a man cold I’ve ever seen portrayed on film.

The movie also presents a mystery that to my knowledge has never been solved. It’s relevealed in the film that Mother Nature is the Miser bros’ mother. So– who is their father? God? Santa?? Father time??? Are they full brothers or half brothers? Maybe the Snow Yeti from Rudolph is Snow Miser’s dad and Satan is Heat Miser’s dad? Or does Mother Nature reproduce asexually? I believe we’ll never know for sure.

If you don’t like the Snow Miser and Heat Miser, I am sorry your heart is dead and cold, and I recommend you watch A Muppet Christmas Carol to breathe some life back into it.

1. A Muppet Christmas Carol

Michael Cain plus the Muppets is the best-casting choice ever made in the history of theater or cinema. This movie brings pure joy to my heart every year. The soundtrack is enough to bring Christmas cheer, and the Muppet humor is spot-on. It’s the perfect Christmas movie in every way, and I will not be accepting criticism or notes at this time, thank you. Watch it, and be merry!

Bonus: Love Actually

Lindy West famously skewered Love Actually in her essay on Jezebel back in 2013, which she then later spun into a hilarious book and then newsletter of movie reviews which I highly recommend. Everything Ms. West says about Love Actually is 100% true, but I actually love it anyway.

Skip These Duds

Ranked in descending order of unwatchableness.

4. Christmas Perfection

Oof this movie. As a result of childhood trauma stemming from her parents’ divorce, the main character (who I’ll call Lisa because I cannot remember her name and can’t think of a good moniker) is obsessed with perfection. There is one correct way that everything is Supposed to be and if it’s not exactly like that she will take it out on everyone around her, including her childhood best friend (Jake?) who has been there for her for her entire life. In short, she is the Absolute Worst.

As a child Jake hugs Lisa when she is sad and takes her frolicking out and about to distract her from the sadness at home. As an adult he codependently enables her destructive perfectionism until he finally gets fed up and leaves. It still takes Lisa a while to realize that the man she thought she was Supposed to be with is not who she wants to be with, and she works to get Jake back (and into bed, presumably).

I failed to mention that most of this takes place while they have been sucked into her “Perfect Irish” Christmas Village by a magical elf witch lady to teach Lisa to right her wicked ways, though the film does not really explain this so I am filling in the gaps with some assumptions.

3. The Christmas Inheritance

I watched this movie last year, and it was so completely unmemorable I couldn’t remember the title so I searched from what I knew– the lead male love interest was played by “Plop” from the Office, and the lead woman was a blonde “city-slicker” who was bad at baking, which we all know is code for being bad at being a woman. The only other thing I remember is they had absolutely no chemistry.

2. A California Christmas: City Lights

This movie fails to capture the unhinged magic of the first. They tried to walk the tightrope between good-bad and unwatchable, and plummeted right off the cliff. It’s full of boring drama about Mr. Handsome trying to run his mother’s company in “the city” (San Francisco) and his life there not meshing with Mrs. Handsome’s country roots on the farm and vineyard they run together, as well as boring drama with evil meddlers and exes, I think? I have forgotten most of it to be honest.

This movie could have been redeemed if they had built more upon the bromance in the first movie between Manny (the only character whose name I remember) and the driver, but instead they have Manny fall in love with some boring woman, and it’s boring.

1. Holiday in the Wild

I was excited to see Rob Lowe, Kristin Davis, and elephants in a Christmas movie. Unfortunately, Rob Lowe’s character is a kind of a jerk for most of the movie, and he and Kristin somehow have negative chemistry. There’s other uninteresting stuff about Kristin’s relationship with her ex-husband and son, and some Danish woman Rob Lowe is sleeping with, which I didn’t really follow because I started fast forwarding through scenes without elephants. If you decide to watch it anyway, this is what I recommend.

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Whatever and however you choose to celebrate, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. I am wishing you warmth, joy, healing, and love.