10 Holiday Parties in TV and Movies We’d Love to Attend
We wish we'd scored invites to these holiday celebrations!
Sometimes a movie 🎬 or TV 📺 holiday party 🎉 looks like so much fun, we wish we could have been there. Can you relate? Whether it’s watching Jim Halpert stress over Pam passing off his thoughtful teapot gift at the office Yankee swap, or sampling the period-specific menu at the Bracebridge Dinner, experiencing these parties IRL would no doubt he a blast. We put together a list of ten jubilant 🤗, awkward 🥴, and adrenaline-rush-worthy 😬 parties we would attend given the chance!
1. When Harry Met Sally
One of the things that we love about When Harry Met Sally is that it can kind of be a holiday movie, since the events of the film take place over many years and several holidays. If you’ve never seen the movie, consider this your *spoiler alert*: the last scene takes place at a New Year’s Eve party, where Sally, fresh off of getting her heart broken 💔, is in attendance with her married friends. She’s about to leave when Harry shows up for a surprise swoonworthy monologue at the stroke of midnight.
2. Bridget Jones’s Diary
Bridget Jones’s Diary, based on the beloved novel of the same name by Helen Fielding, begins and ends with New Year parties. At the start of the movie, Bridget meets Mark, a handsome barrister and son of her parents’ friends at their annual shindig. It’s one of the most awkward parties ever, made even more awkward by Bridget overhearing Mark say what he really thinks of her (“a verbally incontinent spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother”...yikes). If you love drama that doesn’t directly involve yourself, you might relish being a wallflower 🌼 at this party.
3. The Office
In Season 2, Episode 10 of The Office, the Dunder Mifflin office holiday party becomes a Yankee Swap party. Initially a Secret Santa 🎅 gift exchange, Michael is disappointed in the gift he receives. So he turns the party into a Yankee Swap, where everyone can insist on a trade. Of course cringey chaos ensues, especially since Jim Halpert has put a lot of thought into the teapot gift he’s put together for Pam Beasley.
4. The Holiday
A modern classic, The Holiday is a fan favorite Christmastime movie. Two women—an American, Amanda and Brit, Iris—swap lives for two weeks. They switch countries, homes, and friends/family, and get a taste of a brand new reality to escape the ones they’re currently living (i.e. bad boyfriends). Iris ends up befriending the legendary elderly film 📽 director who lives down the street. One night she invites him and his friends over for a “Hanukkah party,” 🕎 where the older gentlemen laugh and swap stories about the good old days of their youth. And when Miles, Amanda’s colleague, shows up, the party becomes that much sweeter as we see a hint of sparks flying between Miles and Iris. We’d have loved to be there too, listening to old stories about celebrities and movie-making, with a hint of the possibility of love in the air.
5. Home Alone
Technically, the party in Home Alone isn’t a real party. It still looks like a ton of fun, though. You know the plot of this flick: Kevin McCallister is mistakenly left home when his family jets ✈️ off to Paris for Christmas. And when Kevin astutely realizes his home might be the target of two local burglars, he knows the worst thing he can do is let them know he’s a kid and he’s home…alone. So he sets up a diversion: a fake holiday party with Brenda Lee’s “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree” (recently Number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the first time!) playing at full volume while he makes cardboard cutouts and marionettes of people dance around his living room.
6. Dash & Lily
A notebook 📕, a set of dares, and two teens who are having a crappy Christmas: Dash & Lily is a heartwarming series based on the book, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn. Shy Lily must break out of her shell, and to that end, in Episode 3 entitled “Hanukkah,” Dash dares her to go to an event that is far outside of her comfort zone: an after hours underground Hanukkah show on the Lower East Side of NYC. It’s there where Lily dons her riskiest outfit, and becomes the dance queen of the party before running into an old classmate who used to bully her, and runs away from the club in the early morning. But before all that, it looks like the most outrageously fun party in the city.
7. Gilmore Girls
Ask every Gilmore Girls fan you know what their favorite episode is, and there’s a good chance they might say “The Bracebridge Dinner.” This Season 2, Episode 10 event is based on a real tradition: the annual Yosemite National Park Bracebridge Dinner that has taken place every Christmas season since 1927. In the episode, the dinner’s original patrons are snowed in ❄️ and can’t travel to Stars Hollow, so Lorelai and Sookie put the dinner on for the town. The food is hearty, the entertainment is funny, and the wintry horse-drawn sleigh rides are downright cozy. This episode is chock-full of holiday vibes and we’d do anything to dress up in Elizabethan costume and sample the authentic food and drink of the era.
8. Friends
Season 6, Episode 10 of Friends is known for one thing: Ross and Monica’s “routine.” Ross and Monica are jazzed (see what we did there?) to score an invite to be part of the studio dance floor audience at the taping of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and they use their choreographed dance routine 🕺 from their childhood to get themselves on the platform–a coveted spot for all the dancers. Not only is this a fun party with the added bonus of getting to be on TV, but watching Monica and Ross earnestly perform their stellar choreo with no hint of irony in front of a cameraman? Count us in.
9. Office Christmas Party
Speaking of Friends…this film stars Jennifer Aniston as an uptight CEO who threatens to shut down her brother’s branch of the company. But as the office manager, he needs to impress a potential client and save all of their jobs. The way to do it? Impress the client with an epic office holiday party 🎉. Just one glimpse at the trailer, and we wish all of our office holiday parties could be this completely crazy fun.
10. Die Hard
Ok, you got us: we probably wouldn’t actually want to be at this Christmas Eve party, what with the radical takeover and decidedly un-merry hostage situation that ensues 😳. But, we’ll just say this: a chance to be at the scene of a legendary film like this one (which has become a lot of folks’ favorite Christmas movie), we’d definitely have opted to be an extra. And just in time for the holidays, the film has been rereleased in theaters for a limited time! Yippee-ki-yay….you know the rest.
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