‘Tis the season to sift through the neglected corner of your DVD collection containing Christmas movies. Whether they tell the story of a man among elves searching for his biological father in New York City or a little boy who sadistically fends off burglars that want to murder him, Christmas movies are a staple of the holidays.
There have been plenty of great ones (and a lot more not-so-great ones, thanks to Hallmark and Netflix), but arguably, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is still the gold standard for this curious, commercially-driven genre. So, here are 10 Reasons Why National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Is Still The Best Holiday Movie.
It’s about an average Christmas
A lot of Christmas movies revolve around an encounter with Santa Claus or the journey of one of his elves. But that’s not really the Christmas experience; that’s just Christmas-related iconography. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is the story of a normal, relatable family in suburban America, trying to celebrate the holidays.
The Griswolds can be identified as every family across America, suffering through another Christmas with visiting in-laws, endless problems with the lights, and a delayed bonus check. Every other Christmas movie that’s attempted a similar thing has fallen into the conventions of Hollywood falseness and failed to be relatable.
The whole family can enjoy it
The problem with a lot of Christmas movies is that they skew one audience quadrant more than others. Christmas movies should be enjoyable for the whole family. Home Alone manages this as a kids’ movie with a healthy does of adult humor.
As the tale of a regular family, Christmas Vacation appeals to all=. A running gag throughout the Vacation franchise is that, while Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo always play Clark and Ellen, the actors playing the kids change in every movie. Christmas Vacation happens to have the best Rusty/Audrey pairing of the bunch (except for maybe Ed Helms and Leslie Mann in the 2015 reboot): a young Johnny Galecki, a.k.a. The Big Bang Theory's Leonard Hofstadter, and Natural Born Killers’ Juliette Lewis.
It has the perfect blend of Hollywood schmaltz and cynical wit
It can be easy for Christmas movies to fall into the trappings of Hollywood sappiness. Similarly, filmmakers can go too far the other way and make a movie that’s so cynical and anti-Christmas that it’s no fun. Christmas Vacation has the right balance between Hollywood schmaltz and cynical wit.
This is mainly through the prism of Clark Griswold, who just wants to give his family a great Christmas in the face of endless setbacks. The message at the end of the movie is that it’s worth putting up with all the disasters in pursuit of the perfect Christmas celebrations.
Its gags have been copied by countless subsequent movies
Just like the original Vacation set a lot of the tropes of the road movie, such as the driver falling asleep at the wheel and an elderly relative dying along the way, Christmas Vacation established a lot of the gags that have been recycled by countless subsequent holiday movies. Every Christmas movie with a sledding accident or a destroyed Christmas tree or problems with the lights owes a debt to Christmas Vacation.
It’s the quintessential holiday movie, because every holiday movie since — at least the ones about a regular family celebrating Christmas, as opposed the ones about Santa — has been trying to live up to it.
There’s a healthy dose of slapstick
For all the relatable humor in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, it’s far from a realistic movie. You still get all the escapism you get from movies like Elf and The Santa Clause, despite the fact that it’s magic-free and set in the suburbs of Chicago, because there’s plenty of slapstick comedy.
Most of the visual gags in the movie play like a live-action cartoon, from Clark rocketing off on his sled at the speed of sound to a bunch of animals running wild around the house. The movie is set in a delightfully heightened reality with an absurdist comic sensibility.
It’s the Christmas special of an already-beloved franchise
It can be tough for a Christmas movie to stand out because they mostly follow the same conventions and they’re built around a commercialized holiday, which is hardly the ideal groundwork for a piece of art. But Christmas Vacation doesn’t have to stand on its own. It’s the Christmas-themed installment of the already-beloved Vacation franchise.
Going into it, we’re already familiar with the Griswolds. We’ve seen these characters drive across America to visit a theme park and go to Europe after winning a game show. Now we get to watch them celebrate Christmas, but unlike Kevin McCallister, that’s not their whole existence.
It has one of John Hughes’ most underrated scripts
The first Vacation movie was based on a semi-autobiographical short story that John Hughes wrote for the National Lampoon magazine. He was recruited to script the first film, and was later brought back to write Christmas Vacation. Hughes is one of the greatest writers of comedies who ever lived — from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to The Breakfast Club, Hughes defined the ‘80s comedy — and his script for Christmas Vacation is one of his most underrated.
His best-known Christmas-themed screenplay might be Home Alone, but the way that Christmas Vacation plays around with traditional story structure while cramming as many jokes onto each page as possible is simply brilliant.
It has a brilliant cast
Most popular Christmas movies have at last a couple of noteworthy actors, but the cast of Christmas Vacation has a wealth of comic talent. Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angelo continue to nail the roles of Clark and Ellen, and still share terrific on-screen chemistry. John Randolph and Diane Ladd are brilliant as Clark’s parents, while Everybody Loves Raymond’s Doris Roberts is hilarious as Ellen’s judgmental mother.
Randy Quaid is as hysterical as ever in the role of Cousin Eddie, while Seinfeld’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus never fails to get a laugh as the Griswolds’ embattled, pretentious neighbor and National Lampoon regular Brian Doyle-Murray leaves an impression as Clark’s penny-pinching boss.
Everything goes wrong for the Griswolds
Christmas celebrations never go as planned. There’s always a problem with the tree or the turkey doesn’t cook all the way through or the lights malfunction or someone makes a faux pas. In National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the Griswolds’ holiday festivities adhere to “Murphy’s law” — everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
The tree burns down, the second tree has a squirrel hiding in it, the turkey comes out dry and bony — no matter how badly your Christmas is going, the Griswolds’ is going a lot worse. Unplanned disasters at Christmastime are something that we can all relate to.
It has a huge heart
If there’s one thing that a great Christmas movie needs above all, it’s a huge, beating heart. And in its own peculiar way, Christmas Vacation has just that. Cousin Eddie kidnaps Clark’s boss as a Christmas present to him, and while such a scene wouldn’t feel out of place in a Coen brothers movie, we know that Eddie means well — he just didn’t think it through, that’s all.
The whole movie is about Clark’s quest to give his family a great Christmas. When he finds out Eddie can’t afford gifts for his kids, he steps in to buy them some. It’s a sweet, well-intentioned movie.