Every Friends Christmas Episode, Ranked

Festive cheer abounds in sitcoms, and "Friends" of course got in on the holiday action every season. Though it was well-known for its Thanksgiving episodes, "Friends" has also celebrated Halloween, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's Day over the show's 10-season run. The Christmas episodes, though, are almost as iconic as the Thanksgiving ones, as once a year the amiable New Yorkers got to deck the halls with skulls, Girl Scout cookies, dancing, and costumes.

The show gave us 10 Christmas episodes altogether — though one is technically more about New Year's Eve, it premiered in mid-December and is still set in the wintertime, so we'll take it. Surprisingly, the show doesn't revel in the classic New York City imagery of the Rockettes, Rockefeller Center, and a giant Christmas tree, and "Friends" instead usually just takes a straightforward story and dresses it up with sweaters, snow, and lights to remind us what time of year it's supposed to be. This way, the show resists many holiday-centric sitcom tropes, instead inventing many of its own trademark holiday antics like candy-making, everyone's favorite monkey, and, of course, the Holiday Armadillo. Often, these holiday episodes are bonafide classics on their own terms — not just good Christmas specials, but great "Friends" episodes.

"Friends" is titanic enough as a show that it's second nature by this point to know which episodes are iconic and which ones are duds. We've ranked the "Friends" Christmas episodes by not only how well-made and funny they are, but also by how much they capture the holiday spirit. And if you want to revisit any of the episodes for yourself — and enjoy the late Matthew Perry's great performance as Chandler Bing — the entire series is streaming on Max.

It's impossible to watch the latter years of "Friends" and not wonder: Did David Schwimmer offend the writers somehow? Granted, there's a degree to which all of the main characters got a little cartoony and neurotic as the show wore on, but Ross got by far the most consistently manic and ridiculous plots. Season 8's "The One with Ross's Step Forward" finds him, by now a grown man in his mid-30s, deathly terrified to have an honest conversation with his girlfriend of two months, Mona (Bonnie Somerville). When they take a good photo and she proposes sending out holiday cards together, he spirals to his friends about it for a week, panics when she wants to talk about how weird he's acting, and in desperation to avoid the topic gives her a key to his apartment. Again, this is a grown adult man with a child of his own.

Further knocking this episode down the ranks is the fact that the holiday card is the only Christmas element to the story, other than the lavish decorations on the set of Monica's apartment and Central Perk. Monica doesn't want to go to dinner with Chandler's newly divorced, boorish boss (Sam McMurray), so Chandler lies and pretends that they broke up and gets dragged to a strip club. Meanwhile, Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) is worked up sexually because of pregnancy-related hormones, so Phoebe brings home a random guy named Roger (Ashley Clark) for her to have sex with. Taken all together it's a bizarre episode where none of the main characters seem particularly like functioning human beings with recognizable emotions.

Season 4's "The One with the Girl From Poughkeepsie" takes place during the holidays but doesn't seem to mention Christmas at all. Ross is playing the field and trying to decide between a woman who lives just uptown or one who lives two and a half hours away in Poughkeepsie (he met her on the train). Exhausted from all the travel, he falls asleep on the train — and meets a third beautiful woman in Montreal who lives in Nova Scotia. Poor guy. Feeling lonely around the holidays, Rachel has Chandler play matchmaker for her with predictably bad results, and Joey helps Monica get some respect at her new job.

Where's Phoebe during all of this, you ask? Just busy writing her second most memorable song behind "Smelly Cat," a holiday tune that incorporates all of her friends' names. It's also apparently her gift to all of them, as per the lyrics "Went to the store, sat on Santa's lap/ Asked him to bring my friends all kind of crap/ He said all you need is to write them a song." In just one minute in the tag scene at the very end, Phoebe escalates this episode from forgettable to near the middle of the countdown with a classic jingle.

The holidays are often a time of transition, and Season 3's "The One Where Rachel Quits" sees a relatively momentous change when Chandler and Joey convince Rachel to finally move on from her job at Central Perk. Her story doesn't really have much to do with Christmas, although it does cause Phoebe to quote Tiny Tim's famous line "God bless us, every one" when Rachel gets a new job right away at the end of the episode. Ross accidentally injures a member of the Girl Scout-like "Brown Birds," Sarah Tuttle (Mae Whitman), who then needs his help to sell specialty holiday cookies. It's a decently heartwarming plot, but it's mostly an excuse to give the cookies names like "Cream-Filled Jesuses" and "Hanukkah Men-Oreos."

It's once again Phoebe's earnest and innocent nature that gives the episode the most Christmas spirit, as she goes with Joey to his job on a Christmas tree lot and is horrified when the older trees are put in a wood chipper. In a gesture worthy of a "Charlie Brown" special, her friends rescue the rest of the old trees and set them up in Monica's apartment, helping the trees fulfill their "Christmas destiny" after all.

"The One with the Holiday Armadillo" is a delightfully broad episode of "Friends." It starts with a bang as Phoebe walks into Monica and Chandler's apartment and puts a human skull on the kitchen table, which apparently her mother used to remind people that "even though it's Christmas, people still die," and it gets weirder from there. Ross has his son Ben (Cole Sprouse) for the holidays and can't find a Santa suit on short notice to recreate the Christmas traditions Ben is used to. So instead, since he's been meaning to teach his son more about his Jewish heritage, he invents the patently absurd "Holiday Armadillo," Santa's friend, to teach Ben about Hanukkah with a ridiculous "Barney"-like deep voice.

It's one of the sillier visual gags "Friends" has ever pulled off, and it builds to a strange crescendo as first Chandler arrives in an actual Santa suit, then Joey shows up in a Superman costume, both somehow believing it will help. By the time Rachel and Phoebe show up, having settled a non-Christmas subplot about potentially living together again, the tableau is perfectly set for Rachel to deliver the immortal line "Wow, it looks like the Easter Bunny's funeral in here."

The best "Friends" holiday episode is one of the all-time best episodes of "Friends": Season 6's "The One with the Routine." It has a quintessential Christmas subplot wherein Rachel and Phoebe convince Chandler to join them in snooping to find Monica's presents for each of them in advance. It's rooted in our knowledge of Monica as an exhaustively type-A people pleaser who must get super thoughtful presents, and Chandler has a whole speech about the meaning of Christmas that's wonderfully undercut by what his present from Monica turns out to be.

With the Christmas material covered, it's Ross and Monica's undying love for "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve" that makes this a classic. Their shared passion for a New Year's tradition that was already cheesy and dated when they were kids is hilarious, as Joey's roommate scores them an invite to be part of the pre-taped footage of people partying during the annual televised countdown to the new year. Their trademark Gellar intensity, hilariously wrought dance moves, and of course the titular "routine" they made up in middle school are total showstoppers, and they make for some of the most enduring images of the whole series.