Pop Culture Happy Hour - The Worst Christmas Movies

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

‘Tis the season you’ll find plenty of good holiday movies – films that can be counted upon to deliver warmth and cheer. And bad holiday movies? They can be fun in their own way. So we’re debating: what’s the worst Christmas movie of all time? We’ll talk about Love Actually, Jingle All The Way, I Believe In Santa, and Scrooge & Marley.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopcultureSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

The holiday season means holiday movies, films that can be counted upon to deliver warmth and holiday cheer, also probably some snow, a little bit of magic, and grumpy slash greedy slash workaholic protagonists who need to be reminded of the true meaning of Christmas. Good holiday movies can be great, but bad holiday movies? They can be fun in their own way. Maybe they serve up tired cliches or schmaltzy sentiment. Or maybe, if it's love actually, they just do Emma Thompson really. dirty. I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Glenn Weldon, and today we're debating the worst Christmas movies on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining us today is our co-host Aisha Harris. Season's greetings, Ayesha.

Simply having a wonder. Oh, sorry. I thought we were doing worse holiday songs. Sorry, sorry. Hi, Glenn. You got to read the brief. Also, this is Waylon Wong. She's the co-host of NPR's Daily Economics podcast, the Indicator

from Planet Money, happy Christmas Wayland. Ho, ho, ho. Okay, before we get to our picks, parents, if you're listening with small children, be warned, we are going to be talking about Santa. So take that into consideration. But let's get right to it. We've each picked a film that we're nominating as the worst Christmas movie of all time. Stephen, kick us off.

Well, I considered a few different possibilities here. I thought, like, what would be the least appropriate Christmas movie to watch with your family? That would be Baby Girl. I thought about what is the Christmas movie to get a zero percent on rotten tomatoes? That would be the 2010 Nutcracker, but it is not streaming anywhere. So I just went with a movie I hate. And that movie, it is called Jingle OzVay. Here we go.

This is a candidate for me, too. So when you break down, like, what can make a Christmas movie bad? I don't think you can come up with a better metric than purporting. to satirize or comment upon commercialism while being 100% steeped in it and refusing really to undermine it in any way. The plot of this film can be summed up literally like five words. Man wants toy for signs. This film has enough material for a skit, maybe a 22-minute episode of a sitcom, but it is stretched out to 90 minutes full of digressions. Arnold Schwarzenegger is your star.

Sinbad is his kind of sort of rival. Poor Sinbad. Oh, brutal. Poor Sinbad. Sinbad is the person to whom Arnold Schwarzenegger says in all the trailers for this movie. Oh, but baby. Oh, baby. Which is a nice hint going into this film that this guy's a jerk.

The only thing this film is missing as far as the tropes of 90s comedies that it is falling back on over and over again, the only thing it is missing is. is he does not curl a cell phone into a body of water at the end of this film. Because that is all it is missing. This is part of the colossally large genre of 90s family comedies about terrible fathers. But does he learn the true meaning of Christmas? Is that the arc here? I've never seen this film. I never will.

Does he change? Honestly, very little lesson learning at the end of this film. The only person in this film who winds up having any kind of perspective on any of this is the little kid. played by Jake Lloyd, who would go on to play Anakin Skywalker and then leave acting. This is such a bad movie. What's wild about it is it does what I think some kind of darker Christmas movies are trying to do, which is it makes Christmas look like a total bummer. None of this looks fun for anybody.

It also totally wastes Phil Hartman. Phil Hartman has a ton of scenes, none of which are funny. That's a crime. His character is so weird and creepy in this movie. Yes. This is one of those movies that I blame for all the movies that came after it, which were usually about adults just getting too competitive about Christmas. And it's like, who has the best Christmas lights? Who does Christmas the best?

And there are a string of movies that came after that. And I feel like this is kind of ground zero for that. And I have not seen this since I was a child, but even as a child, I hated it so much. I'm glad you chose this, Stephen. Yeah. Did this film walk so that Christmas with a cranks could run? Is that what you're saying? Yes, exactly. Christmas with the Cranks with Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen and Dan Aykroyd.

It's like, oh, God, no, no, no. Also, did you all know that Jingle All the Way has a sequel from 2014? Does it have any of the same actors? It does not. It has Larry the Cable Guy. Oh, see. From the Sidbad era, it's going to Barry the Cable Guy era. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you did make a good.

case for this terrible movie, so I appreciate that. Aisha, what's your pick? Can you top that? Okay. So, like I said, Jingle All the Way was definitely a candidate for this exercise, but then I realized that I would have to actually rewatch that movie because it's been so long, and I was like, I don't want to. Since I'm something that I've seen more recently that is more stuck in my mind, I have talked about before on this show how I have a pretty high tolerance for like bad Christmas romantic comedies. Like that is my genre.

I can enjoy them no matter, almost no matter what. This is an exception. And this is something I have also talked about on the show. But I'm going to talk about this a little bit more deeply here. In that movie is the 2022 straight to Netflix rom-com. I believe in Santa. Now, I hate the title. The title I hate already.

Oh, Glenn. Glenn, you wouldn't even make it through the first 10 minutes of this movie. Yeah. Somehow I made to do the whole thing. This is like, what if elf or Miracle on 31st Street were like creepy a. F. Because that is what the premise of this movie is. Basically, you have these two people, Lisa, she is a writer for a local newspaper. Sorry, it's called Mile High E-Zine.

I like freeze frames on it. Yes, yes. And so she is a writer for a local newspaper. The only assignment she seems to get are holiday-related. She loves Fourth of July. That is her holiday. That is her jam. It opens with her writing a article about how Fourth of the July is like the best holiday.

Then she meets Tom. Tom is a lawyer who loves Christmas. And they have a fun, fun little courtship. She's a single mom. At the end of that like courtship, we hit Christmas season and she discovers that Tom is obsessed. He has a photo wall where you can pose in front of it in an elaborate Christmas setting with props in his house. Every day has at least one Christmas-related activity. He's a lawyer. I don't know when he's actually doing work. I don't know how he has time for this, but he does. Is there a

montage where the two carouse around town and show off a bunch of tacky Christmas sweaters hanging on an outdoor display rack? My parents? Never really had fun ever. Maybe it's because none of them was wearing a this. And is that montage set to a festive, instrumental version of the 2013 trash-tastic EDM hit, feel-this moment by Pitbull featuring Christina Aguilera? Yes? And yes. Is there a performance by a knock-off pentatonics,

a k.a. multi-ethnic mixed-gender acapella group? Yes. But here's the kicker, is that she eventually finds out that he's been hiding a secret, that he actually believes Santa is real. It's right there in the title. How much of his secret is it? She didn't see the title card.

Yeah. So basically this movie sets up this whole thing where it's like it's a crisis of faith, of faith in Santa Claus. And he gives all of these reasons why like, oh, you know, most of the world celebrates Christmas. She asks all the logical questions you would ask. Like there's a lot of people who don't. He's like, but most people do. And also like it brings everyone together.

He uses the universal we a lot to describe this. He also has a gay Muslim best friend. And he uses that friend as like a way to explain why it's okay that he believes in Santa. And I just want to take a listen to this friend, Asan, who's played by Suchin Bhatt, and here he is giving his rationalization for why they are friends and why it works. The only difference between religion and Santa is that as we get older, religious grownups tell us that our faith was right all along. But they don't have proof either.

They just tell us that the stories we believe are true. But with Santa, the grown-ups say that are tell you that the stories are not true. And Tom just chose not to believe the grown-ups. Wow. Now, if you've had enough eggnog, that might actually start to make sense. But then the more you think about it, you're like, is this movie trying to say that Tom is a persecuted minority because he believes in Santa Claus? My goodness.

It's a protected class. It's a protected class. So this movie is just ridiculous enough. On top of that, the rom-com of it all is just not at all believable. These two have no chemistry. They look like they would be the villains in a horror movie. Their eyes are very, very bright. It is a Netflix movie.

I get that. Like, we're not expecting Shakespeare here. And when I learned, after watching this is first time, that Lisa and Tom are actually a real-life couple in real life. I had the same reaction because I turned to my husband and I said, this couple has no chemistry. And then he went on Wikipedia and he goes, oh, my God. He said, they're married in real life. And I was like, oh. Yes.

Yes. Christina Moore and John Ducey play Lisa and Tom. I'm sure they're very lovely people and I do have to give this movie points for at least trying to be a little bit progressive, you know, gay Muslim best friend. Lisa has a black best friend. Like, you know, standard stuff.

The reason I say that this movie is probably one of the worst movies I've ever seen is just this idea of like tolerance being applied to something as silly as this but also giving, I think, unintentional cover to all the other things that we should not really be tolerating. Like, it's one thing to try and be friends with someone

and maybe it's agree with them. But if you're actually trying to date someone and introduce them to your child and all these other things, I need Lisa have higher standards than this. Just accept that that's not going to work. But of course, at the end, it does, and they accept each other.

Oh, my God, y'all, it's just really bad. Yeah, but I'm sorry, we have to go into spoiler territory here. Do we ever actually meet Santa in the world of this film? Does Santa actually exist? Or is it left to us to decide? That's a good question. Does this film believe in that?

The only inkling that Santa actually exists is one of the very last shots of the film where they leave cookies and milk out for Santa. But, like, you don't actually see a hand come out, like, you know, like a hand glove. Like, you just see like a little, like a very light rustling in the fireplace. And that's it. It leaves it open-ended. It's the top at the end of inception. Yes. Okay.

The kind of bonkers thing is there actually is proof for whether Santa exists. And it is, do presents show up under the tree that your parents today? can get you. So there actually is a pretty straightforward word to prove whether Santa is real or not. But they pitch it like this cosmic mystery that you can never get to the bottom of. And then the whole thing is like the child, who by the way, is played by the kid from Megan. Okay. Oh, right. I was wondering why she looked familiar. Yes. Violin McGrath is the kid from Megan. And she's been asking for an iPhone this whole movie.

And her mom is like, absolutely not. You're not getting an iPhone. And then at the end of the movie, she enwraps an iPhone. And I think the movie is supposed to be like, Santa brought her this iPhone. And it's honestly very bonkers. And I think that the only way to even stomach this film is to think of it as taking place in the Megan Universe where Tom and Lisa then die in a tragic accident.

And Violet McGraw's character has to go live with her aunt, played by Alison Williams, and then has like a misadventure with technology. I just want to back up even further to the very, very, very beginning of when Aisha just started talking about this. She's into July 4th. And that contradicts being into Christmas?

So weird. Yeah. And she also gets upset with her boss for assigning her to write about Christmas. She's like, you know I hate Christmas. And he's like, but that's a challenge. Like, I wanted you to like stretch your, and I'm like, oh, my God, this is reminding me. Also, you have literally nothing else to write about. Exactly.

I would say that if you love Mayford TV holiday rom-coms and you want to watch a pretty good July fourth one. I would recommend When Sparks Fly, starring Megan Markle, which is at my public library. You might be able to get it from your public library. It's pretty good. Oh, my goodness. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm not going to lie. I haven't seen

either of these films, and this one sounds worse than jingle all the way, Stephen, so I don't know. I don't know. I promise you, it just might be. So, yes, that is I believe in Santa on Netflix. Now, Waylon, I have seen this movie. I know. Most people have.

My pick is Love Actually, the much-beloved holiday rom-com from 2003, written and directed by Richard Curtis. It has this absolutely stacked cast of like every British actor and some award-winning American actors as well. You've got Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Kira Knightley, Laura Linney, Colin Forth. It's amazing. How many people, amazingly talented people are in this? I have resented for so long this movie getting canonized as the ultimate holiday rom-com or even a rom-com, because to me it fails as a rom-com. First of all, it opens with the monologue by Hugh Grant's character. He's playing the Prime Minister, where he mentions 9-11.

No, thank you. Why are we talking about 9-11 and the opening minutes of a rom-com? This script is also weirdly fat-phobic. It's so fat-phobic. I realized on a rewatch, I was like, who wrote this? It's terrible. There's too many storylines, and only a few of them are even a little bit romantic. Most of them are super sad or just kind of nothing burgers to me.

And I will say the one thing that I really, really don't like about this movie that grinds my gears is this storyline with Kirin Knightley, where she's married to Chitle-Ejafour. And then... This is a rough thing. And then his best friend is played by Andrew Lincoln, and he loves her. He has been secretly yearning for her. And then he shows up, you know, at the end of their storyline with these big cue cards that she's supposed to read, you know. Oh, hi. Who is it?

It's Carol Singers. And it says, like, to me, you are perfect, and it's Christmas. I just have to tell you, I love you or whatever. And I hate this. Yes. I just think that it's been sold to us. as the ultimate grand romantic gesture when to me it is the height of narcissism. It's so selfish.

Keep it to yourself. Keep it to yourself. Exactly. And then she runs after him and kisses him on the lips, which I also think is really inappropriate. And I guess she meant it as like, well, it's Christmas and you've just made this huge confession. So I'll give you this much. But I'm like, in real life, you owe him nothing. He would take this as being like, oh, she reciprocated.

and then he would be obsessed with you and he would probably stalk you in a creepy way. And I can't accept this packaged and sold to me as romance. I hate it. I can hear them some of our listeners furiously typing right now. I hear fingers on keyboards right now. I know. I know you're going to come from me.

I don't care. This movie is now 20 plus years old at this point, right? So I feel like it's gone through its ups and downs where it was beloved. And then at some point people turned on it. there are multiple articles about how like love actually is bad actually. It's bad actually. It's probably come pendulum has swung back. We have a direction where it's like, just let people enjoy things. But this movie, for every reason you just said, Waylon, it is just one of those movies that I think doesn't get the holiday spirit right and it doesn't get the rom-com right. It just does it all wrong. Yeah. It fundamentally misunderstands Christmas because on one of those cue cards you mentioned, Waylon, it's written, it's Christmas.

and on Christmas you tell the truth, which is not a thing. Santa. In fact, if you spent any time with your family over Christmas, you know you're all just pretending until you can leave. Christmas is about gentle lies. It's about lies. It's always been about lies.

If you have any affection for the actor Emma Thompson, you hate this movie. It's such a bummer. It's such a bummer what happens to her. Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman's storyline is super rough and comes with a nice dollop of slut shaming on top of it. Indeed. The, to me, you are perfect is so, the number of times I shout, what are you doing?

It's Ed Sheeran before Ed Sheeran existed. It's like, this is an Ed Shearin video. This is... This film's obsession with this one woman's weight is so weird. It is inexplicable on every level. Why do you care? What is wrong with you people? It's not weird in the context of, this was a...

also the era of Bridget Jones's diary. This was the era of like obsessing over how skinny Britney Spears and Paris Hilton were. Like if you think about when it came out, this was the norm. I guess it was explicable, but. But unnecessary. And everyone should have known better. You know, 2003. We knew better. We knew better. All right. That's another great pick. And it is a very hateful movie. I don't know if it's, I mean, hate actually. All right. We're going to go from a film that everyone's seen to a film that I guarantee. None of my fellow panelists have seen. This is the 2012 film Scrooge and Marley, a gay take on a Christmas Carol set in modern-day Chicago. It's streaming on Tooby as we tape this if you want to check it out yourselves.

When you all hear that there's a gay version of a Christmas carol, certain questions, you know, leap inevitably to mind. So let's knock them down. Number one. Is it narrated by Judith Light? We'll put that to bed right away. Yes. Yes, it is narrated by Judith Light. Who plays Fezziwig?

Is it Bruce Valanche? Again, yes. Yes, Bruce Valanche does play Fezziwig because Bruce Valanche is what happens when you can't meet Harvey Firesteen's quote. Speaking of not meeting quotes, like this film was done on the cheap and it looks it. It is filmed in cramped, underlit Chicago apartments and bars. There's one gay bathhouse man's country, which is since closed. In the credits, the producers thank two and only two organizations for their product placement. And they are exactly the ones you imagine. number one, absolute vodka, and number two, Grindr, because of course. Now, look, we're going to end on an upnote here because I don't legitimately believe this to be the worst holiday movie of all time. It's not this bloated Hollywood vehicle for Arnold.

It's not some horrible wrong-headed ensemble piece. It doesn't even have that kind of corporate Netflix patina, right? It is a tiny, scrappy little movie that features a lot of very hardworking Chicago actors and also features entirely randomly Tim Kesarinsky. A vanishingly small percentage of you will remember from S&L, the Dick Ebersole era in the 80s. He plays the Ghost of Marley in pancake makeup so bad and so thick that your high school theater teacher would take one look at it and go,

yeah, take another pass at that. That's too much, less. So in this clip, Marley is visiting Scrooge, who's played by David Pevesner. He's reminding him of all the awful things they did together in life. Things we did business. Doing business is not doing living. I want you to see that you still have time to save yourself from this.

I'm not concerned with any savings that don't accrue interest. Now, be gone. You have no power here. Why do they both sound like they're voiced by Tom Kenney? Okay. Couple things. Doing business is not doing living, is not. Not a good line.

The acting, I mean, we're going to talk like one notch above dinner theater. That's what to expect here. And at the end there, he says, you have no power here, which is a Wizard of Oz reference because gay. So Ben Scrooge owns a gay piano bar, or I should just say piano bar, save us all sometime. He hates Christmas, goes around to take him on a tour of Chicago in the past, present, future. You might remember that in the Dickens novel, Scrooge gets to fly. with a ghost of Christmas past by holding on to the hem of his robe. Yes.

The gay version of that is, I don't need to tell you, by sniffing poppers. Oh, my gosh. I thought we're going to be holding on to a jockstrap. So that's a little different. You meet young Scrooge's cartoonishly homophobic dad, the boyfriend he abandons. We meet his lesbian niece Frida, Bob Cratchett and his husband and Little Tiny Tim, and there's no swapping here. This is Little Tiny Tim and his little tiny oxygen tank.

We do meet a ghost of Christmas. Future, who's played by the drag queen Jojo Baby. She is giving Club Kid by way of Victorian Undertaker. It's actually a pretty interesting look. And it's all interspersed by wait for it, cabaret numbers. Some of them achingly sincere and some of them with bawdy parody lyrics. Like sleep in heavenly peace with the heavenly piece. See what they're doing there?

And look, I'm not going to lie, it's not good. But what it exudes is exactly what you expect it to exude, which is raw sincerity and sentimentality. And those are two things I'm allergic to personally, but it's doing its job, right? It's endemic to the story of a Christmas carol. A Christmas carol always ends nipple deep and schmaltz, right? Even when Bill Murray or Mr. Magoo doing the take on it, it's always sentimental slop. It's just doing it in this, you know, expressly by and for a very niche audience. He's been pretty critical up to now.

I'm going to end on an upnote, and I think it's entirely possible that someone who does not have a desiccated husk where a heart should be could even enjoy this film. I don't think it's likely, but I think it's entirely possible. Well, then, Glenn, it sounds like you have failed at this assignment. I think I did, you know? I kind of saw that it existed, and I checked it out, and it's nothing I would watch voluntarily, but I would never watch any version of a Christmas carol voluntarily. Not even the Muppets ones? Not even the Muppets won. I'm sorry, folks.

I'm sorry, folks. Oh, no. No, can't do it, can't do it. No, Jesus for Esmesis? I gotta be me. I do think that of these four jingle all the way is the one Glenn would hate the most. I don't know. Aisha made a pretty good case.

I believe that I think is competing there. But maybe you won, Stephen. Maybe you won for actual worse, worse, worse. You might have. I don't think we're going to be able to determine it here. I think we're going to have to send it to the listeners to determine which of these four do they think is the worst holiday movie? And then also we want to know what you think is the worst holiday movie of all time. Your own picks. Find us at Facebook.com slash PCHH. That

brings us to the end of our show. Stephen Thompson, Aisha Harris, Waylon Wong. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger, Carly Rubin, and Mike Katzv and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Ridi. And hello, come in, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon and we'll see you all next time.