THESE are the BEST and WORST Christmas movies – you'll never guess what's number ONE

Christmas is a time for coming together – for joy, family, and Christmas pudding. It is also a time for magical movies, and curling up on your sofa with a cup of hot chocolate. But when it comes to the moment of choosing a film to watch, things can get tricky. With a plethora of films to choose from, how do you know which one to watch?

These are the best and worst Christmas movies.

Flowercard recently took the task of finding the best and worst Christmas movies to a whole other level.

They used three list compilations of the ‘best Christmas movies’ from Good Housekeeping, Country Living, and Esquire magazines, as well as Wikipedia and IMDB.

Then they looked at the average critic and audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

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These scores were combined with the inflation-adjusted domestic box office takings as recorded by Box Office Mojo.

The world-wide profits were also taken into account, though not adjusted for inflation and compared it to the film’s budget.

Finally, the movies were ranked based on each category, as well as overall winners.

So if you’re stuck for what to watch, this may be a good place to start. 

Here are the top five Christmas movies, according to the categories listed above:

Die Hard – 1988

Gremlins – 1984

Elf – 2003

The Nightmare Before Christmas – 1993

Home Alone – 1990

The bottom five Christmas movies according to the same set of facts were:

Surviving Christmas – 2004

Saving Christmas – 2014

Mixed Nuts – 1994

Bad Santa 2 – 2016

Deck The Halls – 2006

According to these statistics, classic Christmas movies like It’s A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street are notably absent.

The debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie at all continues to rage, which calls the list into question, too.

New films which are released just in time for Christmas – like the new Mary Poppins Returns sequel and the second Fantastic Beasts movie – are also not included.

How the list will change with this year’s additions, like The Princess Switch and the new Grinch movie, remains to be seen.

Once the top 10 are taken into account, popular films like Love Actually make the cut (at number 9).

Likewise, Christmas plonkers like Netflix‘s Love, The Coopers and Silent Night, Deadly Night, come in on the bottom 10 list (at seventh and tenth respectively).