NJ’s Favorite Christmas Movie Is This Comedy, Study Says

NEW JERSEY - There are plenty of Christmas movies to pick from during any given holiday rotation -- from “It’s A Wonderful Life” to “Love Actually” to “Die Hard” -- but which one is at the top of New Jersey residents’ lists?

According to lifestyle publication Wishlisted, the top prize in the Garden State for favorite Christmas movie goes to “National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.” It’s actually the most popular Christmas movie in the U.S., according to the survey, with 40 states (including New York and Pennsylvania) searching for that film the most out of any Christmas film.

In fact, the only regions that didn’t have the movie in their top five rankings were Georgia, North Dakota, South Dakota and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

To conduct the analysis, the website used the top 25 flicks on IMDb’s Top 100 Christmas movies of all-time list and compared those movies against search popularity data in Google Trends by state.

Out of 25 contenders, only eight movies ranked on the list. They were: “Die Hard,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Gremlins,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Love Actually,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “The Shop Around the Corner.”

Four states picked “It’s A Wonderful Life” as its top Christmas film (Hawaii, Alaska, Idaho and Wyoming), while two other regions each picked “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (Washington D.C. and South Dakota) and “Gremlins” (Puerto Rico and Vermont).

Separate studies in years past found "Last Christmas" and "Home Alone" to be New Jersey's top picks.

Click here to read the complete study.