Christmas Movies for Tweens and Teens
Somewhere around ten, kids decide Rudolph is for babies, and by fifteen they want what adults watch. This list covers those years: Christmas movies a 10-to-15-year-old will actually choose, from monster comedies and action films to romances and real horror, with each note saying exactly what's in it.
Every pick comes from our parents' guide and has a guide age between 9 and 15. Ratings are an unreliable map here. Gremlins is a 1984 PG with killings and a blender scene, and its violence helped prompt the creation of PG-13; It's a Wonderful Life carries a PG for a story built around a suicide attempt. PG-13, meanwhile, covers both Red One, whose issue is mostly language, and Batman Returns, grim enough to save for fourteen. For ten and eleven, start with Candy Cane Lane, the 2009 A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life. The romances and Krampus are better from thirteen, and Anna and the Apocalypse and The Holdovers are R-rated picks for fifteen.
Love Actually, which plenty of fifteen-year-olds ask for, is on Christmas Movies for Grown-Ups because of its nude scenes, along with Die Hard. For younger siblings, see Family Christmas Movies. For the rest of the year, try Shows to Watch With Your Teen or R-Rated Movies That Are OK for Older Teens.
Gremlins
Movie · 1984Cute pet, three rules, a town overrun by Christmas Eve: tweens love it. It's a real monster movie, though, and helped bring about PG-13. A mom dispatches gremlins in a blender and a microwave, two townspeople die, there's some swearing (no s- or f-words), and Kate's story of her father dying in the chimney spells out that Santa isn't real.
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Movie · 1989The comedy families most often share with teenagers, and it holds up: the lights, the squirrel, Cousin Eddie. It's PG-13 for good reason, though. Expect one f-word and about a dozen s-words, a daydream in which a lingerie clerk strips, with a brief glimpse of a breast, steady drinking, and a cat electrocuted as a gag. Thirteen is about right.
Dash & Lily
Series · 2020Eight half-hour episodes, so it's an easy December binge for a bookish thirteen-year-old. Two New York teenagers who've never met trade dares through a notebook left around the city. Parents should know the teens drink, with a hangover to show for it, and a subplot about Lily's older brother has one scene that implies oral sex. Swearing is light.
Red One
Movie · 2024Loud, bloodless and built for twelve-year-olds who'd rather watch an action film than a Christmas one: Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans rescuing a kidnapped Santa. Language is the main catch, with eight s-words by one count and a cut-off f-word. Krampus and toothy snowmen may rattle younger siblings, and Evans's character is found passed out beside a bourbon bottle.
A Christmas Carol (2009)
Movie · 2009For a nine- or ten-year-old ready for real scares, this is Dickens done straight and done frightening. It opens on Marley's corpse and barely lets up: wailing spirits in chains, two feral children hidden under a ghost's robe, a shadow for a final ghost. Beyond the ghosts and a vision of the Cratchits grieving Tiny Tim, there's little to flag.
Edward Scissorhands
Movie · 1990Tim Burton's sad suburban fairy tale, set at Christmas, for twelve and up. Teens who've felt like outsiders love Johnny Depp's gentle Edward. Know that a neighbor strips to her bra to seduce him and falsely accuses him of sexual assault, a teen drives drunk, and the climax turns deadly, with a knife wound and a fall from a window.
Happiest Season
Movie · 2020A warm romantic comedy with a same-sex couple at its center, and a good one for a teen to watch with a parent. Harper is still closeted with her family, and the painful scene where her sister outs her is worth talking about afterward. Expect an implied night together, several s-words and perhaps an f-word, and plenty of drinking.
Candy Cane Lane
Movie · 2023An Eddie Murphy comedy for the younger end, nine to eleven, where Twelve Days of Christmas decorations come alive and chase the family. The PG is stretched: about two dozen uses of God's name, an f-word drowned out by carolers, s-words that nearly slip out and a joke about blow-up dolls. The elf villain is properly menacing.
Krampus
Movie · 2015The Christmas horror film for teens who want an actual scare. A family's Christmas Eve collapses when Krampus and his toys come for them, and the jack-in-the-box that swallows a child is the image that sticks. Expect a couple of f-words, a teen's bong, children dragged away and an unsettled ending. Not for anyone who still believes in Santa.
It's a Wonderful Life
Movie · 1946Worth showing a tween before they decide black-and-white films are boring: it's funny, romantic and hugely moving at the end. Know going in that George Bailey wants to die. He drinks hard, wrecks his car and heads to a bridge meaning to jump before the angel arrives: a natural opening for a talk about who to turn to.
Spirited
Movie · 2022A splashy Christmas Carol musical told by the ghosts, starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, and heavier than its songs suggest. The plot turns on a girl coached to post a humiliating video of a classmate, and a glimpse of the future suggests the boy takes his own life. Expect cut-off f-words, steady innuendo and just over two hours.
Batman Returns
Movie · 1992Only for teens of fourteen and up who like their superheroes dark. It's Christmas in Gotham, but the opening has a couple throwing their deformed infant into the sewer, and it gets darker: a man set ablaze, a blackened body, a severed hand. Catwoman's scenes are thick with innuendo, and she rescues a woman from an attempted sexual assault.
Last Christmas
Movie · 2019A London romance set to George Michael songs, for teens who like a good cry. Emilia Clarke's Kate is drinking heavily and sleeping around after a serious illness; it's talked about more than shown, and the film treats the drinking as a problem. Expect about ten s-words, an anti-immigrant confrontation on a bus and a twist involving a death.
Anna and the Apocalypse
Movie · 2017Zombies crash a Scottish school musical: catchy, genuinely funny, and for fifteen and up. The kills are gory slapstick (one zombie loses its head to a seesaw), the f-words are frequent and one song is all innuendo. What hits harder than the gore is the friends who don't make it, and Anna leaving her bitten father behind.
The Holdovers
Movie · 2023The pick for a fifteen-year-old who's outgrown comedies: Angus, a smart, angry student stranded at school over Christmas 1970, is easy for teens to see themselves in. Expect constant swearing, a teacher who drinks all day, students smoking a joint, a porn magazine opened to bare breasts, and real sadness: a mother grieving her son, killed in Vietnam.
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Picks are editorial recommendations. Streaming availability changes by region and over time — the “where to stream” links check current availability on JustWatch.