Indulge me with a little thought experiment. It's Christmas Eve, and you've just finished enjoying dinner with your family. It's snowing outside, the fire is crackling merrily, and everyone is too full for strenuous activity but too excited to go to sleep just yet. As someone passes out glasses of eggnog, you turn on the television to start a movie. Quick: What movie did you just pop in the DVD player? What, to you, is definitively the best Christmas movie? Or, at the very least, what's the most-searched Christmas movie?
Since that's a tad more quantifiable, that's the question Bustle set out to answer this year. Personal taste just varies too widely to get a true consensus from any traditional poll. Some people prefer their Christmas movies to be timeless classics: Miracle On 34th Street; A Charlie Brown Christmas. Some like a little "naughty" with their "nice": The Nightmare Before Christmas; Bad Santa. Some prefer laughs: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Others prefer love: The Holiday. And some people just want to watch the world burn: Die Hard.
So, in order to truly find the top 10 most-searched Christmas movies, Bustle had to resort to something a little more concrete: Data! Thanks to information pulled for Bustle by the data-driven marketing company iQuanti, you can learn what the whole country really wants to watch during the holidays. iQuanti created a database of over 100 Christmas movies and analyzed the search volumes of those movies over the entirety of 2013 and 2014. Then the company sorted that list based on the maximum search volume in December of each year. What results is a ranking of, if not objectively speaking the "best," then conclusively what Internet users all collectively consider to be the most search-worthy Christmas movies.
So, here are the winners (and their average December search numbers) according to iQuanti. Drumroll please, Little Drummer Boy...
And there you have it, folks! The most-searched Christmas movie is, appropriately enough, A Christmas Story . Does it deserve top honors? Did your own favorite make the Top 10? (Personally, I'm super sad that Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever was snubbed, but that's just me.) Now excuse me while I go find Santa and tell him that all I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle.
Images: RKO Radio Pictures; Mary Rabun/Bustle
