🎬 National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2 (2025)
👉 Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Juliette Lewis
The holidays with the Griswolds are never simple, and certainly never peaceful. What should be a season of joy, love, and cozy family gatherings becomes a masterclass in comic disaster. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) cemented itself as one of the greatest holiday comedies ever made by showing that no matter how hard you try to plan the “perfect” Christmas, life — and especially family — has other ideas.
At the heart of it all is Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase), a well-meaning but hopelessly overzealous father determined to give his wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) and their kids the kind of Christmas they’ll never forget. Unfortunately for Clark, “unforgettable” quickly takes on an entirely different meaning. His attempts at holiday perfection spiral into an unrelenting series of catastrophes: a tree too large to fit inside the living room, Christmas lights that refuse to cooperate, relatives who turn the celebration into a circus, and neighbors who wish the Griswolds would just stop trying altogether.
Juliette Lewis, as the teenage Audrey, brings a dose of eye-rolling sarcasm to the chaos, perfectly capturing what it’s like to survive the holidays in a family that’s equal parts loving and exasperating. Every mishap piles higher than the snowdrifts outside, until Clark’s mounting frustration boils over into one of the most outrageous holiday meltdowns ever captured on film.
What makes Christmas Vacation timeless is not just the slapstick gags or over-the-top disasters, but the way it taps into something universally familiar: the hope that maybe, just maybe, this year will finally be perfect — only to watch it all come apart in the most spectacularly funny fashion.
Packed with nostalgia, belly laughs, and Chevy Chase at the peak of his comedic powers, the film transforms holiday dysfunction into an art form. From squirrel-chasing pandemonium to turkey mishaps and the legendary light display, it’s a snow-globe of everything that can go wrong — and why we love it all the more.
For anyone who has ever looked around their holiday gathering and thought, “This is madness,” the Griswolds prove that chaos is part of the season’s charm. Messy, outrageous, and endlessly entertaining, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is proof that sometimes the best holiday memories are born from disaster — as long as you can laugh about it afterward.
