2022’s Most-Watched Christmas Movies Include ‘Home Alone,’ ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’

What’s most fascinating about the Christmas movie season – which now officially begins even before Halloween – is that there is a race to create the modern classic. Networks like Hallmark and Lifetime pump out romantic Christmas content, featuring an increasingly diverse array of characters and story settings, all in the pursuit of the new holiday classic and the viewers that come with such a designation.

Some come close to achieving modern classic status. Personally I think Jingle Jangle on NetflixNFLX
is just about there. But then you have this latest report by Statista, which details the most-watched Christmas movies of December 2022 according to a sample of 2,o00. None of the films selected are recent releases.

The top 10 films are as follows:

1. Home Alone
2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
3. A Charlie Brown Christmas
4. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
5. Frosty the Snowman
6. The Grinch
7. Elf
8. It’s a Wonderful Life
9. Scrooge
10. Miracle on 34th Street

This entire list makes a lot of sense to me. My two children regularly stream or play DVDs of each film on this list with the exception of Elf. (Given the tendency for bad Chicago weather to wreak havoc on wifi connections, my household stocks up on hard copies of the “classics” so we always have something to watch if the wires go down – or are chewed through by raccoons.)

Disney+ scores an annual win by offering Home Alone in its lineup. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is on HBO Max, Hulu and Amazon Prime – a plethora of choices that help keep it in second place. The 1965 classic A Charlie Brown Christmas never seems to go out of style, and it’s on Amazon Prime. All in all this is a top 10 Christmas movie roundup that includes mostly classic film. Will something new eventually bubble up and replace something on this list? Only time will tell.