‘Tis the season for gathering around the TV with family and friends to watch heartwarming holiday movies. If you are looking for some inspiration on what to watch this Christmas, Megyn and the fellas from Ruthless – John Ashbrook, Michael Duncan, John Holmes, and Comfortably Smug – have some ideas.
From black and white classics to rom-coms to even genre-defying action flicks, they made their case for their favorite holiday movies. Keep scrolling to see what made the cut:
Christmas in Connecticut
This 1945 classic starring Barbara Stanwyck tops Megyn’s must-see list: “The fun thing about this movie is she is basically a Martha Stewart-type who writes a column called ‘Diary of a Housewife’ for this popular magazine, but it turns out she is a fraud. She can’t cook, she isn’t a homemaker, and she doesn’t know what she is doing. She is a city girl living in Manhattan and wearing furs. The whole thing is fake.
She is using this friend of hers who is a cook to write all this stuff for her, and that is working out fine until the owner of the magazine, Alexander Yardley (fun fact: I named my daughter Yardley after him), gets the idea to honor this World War II hero who has just gotten back from war and really just wants a home-cooked meal. He wants his main writer to celebrate this guy at her Vermont farm by hosting him.
But she is not married, she does not have a baby, and she does not have a farm in [Connecticut]. Her editor and this guy who does want to be her husband and happens to own a [Connecticut] farm talk her into a ruse where she pretends it is all happening. And what I love about it is that it is black and white, and there are all these scenes in the snowy outdoors with a horse-drawn sleigh. It is all the old-timey stuff. I love the way it makes me feel.”
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Holmes picked the 1989 comedy starring Chevy Chase as his favorite: “I love the old black and white movies, and we do watch a lot of that around my house. But I also just like to laugh, and there is nothing funnier than when everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. It is just like life as a dad, as I’ve found it. When you are hosting Christmas, something is going wrong and it is a calamity of errors. So, Christmas Vacation is my pick. I love that movie.”
A Christmas Story
Ashbrook chose a family comedy from the same era with this 1983 hit: “I have been watching it basically every year since it came out. Everybody thinks that movie is about Ralphie, who wants a Red Ryder BB gun and he ultimately gets it at the end of the movie. But I think the movie is really about the dad. And if you listen to Ralphie narrate as an older person, some of his best memories of being a kid are when his dad loses his mind on a broken furnace, or he is mad at the Chicago Bears, or he is mad at his neighbor’s stupid dogs who come in and ruin everything in his house. I find that guy so hilarious.”
Four Christmases
Duncan picked this 2008 rom-com starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as his go-to: “It is hilarious. They are sort of living like the childless millennial fantasy, where every Christmas they tell their families they can’t come over for the holidays because they are doing, like, humanitarian relief in Africa. They show up to the airport and there is a huge storm. The local news is there to cover it because of all the flight cancellations and everything. And here they are on camera on live news, and so all their families are watching them not be able to get on their flight.
With no excuse, now they finally have to travel to their families for Christmas. Both of their parents are divorced, and they are sort of dysfunctional. Vince Vaughn’s mother is now dating one of his buddies from high school. It has some of the most awkward family exchanges you could imagine. But the lesson in all of this is families could be totally dysfunctional and you may not like each other all the time, but, at the end of the day, it’s worth it. It has a really good message at the end, and it is hilarious.”
Die Hard
Unsurprisingly, Comfortably Smug offered a controversial pick that weighed in one of the most divisive holiday questions: Is Bruce Willis’ 1988 thriller a Christmas movie or not? Megyn said no, but Smug offered this take: “It is a Christmas movie. Michael Corleone is Christmas shopping with Kay when he realizes his father has been shot. It is a Christmas movie!”
The Family Man
While Megyn ranked Christmas in Connecticut number one, she said she would be remiss not to mention this 2000 rom-com with Nicolas Cage and Tea Leoni: “This is the movie I really need you to watch if you haven’t seen it. The message is so good. The acting is so good. It is hilarious. It is a heart-tugger. It is so wonderful.
There is one scene where he says to her, ‘I want us to have a life that people will envy.’ They live in this small home in New Jersey. Neither one is making any money, and she says that they have this amazing marriage and they already do envy us. That right there – that’s it. We get sucked into money, or fame, or some version of success that doesn’t involve the real people you surround yourself with who you really love and who you are building a life with. You forget that it is the genuine love between you and your partner, and the feeling you have when you pick up your baby and smell his hair. That is the stuff of envy.
It is a perspective-setter, and it is the perfect time of year – when we get so materialistic – to be reminded of what matters.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ruthless by tuning in to episode 965 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.