Holiday Pop Culture Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Holiday Pop Culture trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Holiday pop culture is its own calendar. It starts when Mariah Carey posts her 'It's time' video at midnight on November 1, runs through Whamageddon, the Hallmark movie marathon, the Rockefeller tree and the 24-hour A Christmas Story loop, and ends when the ball drops in Times Square. This quiz covers that whole season, plus the pop culture attached to Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Groundhog Day and the Fourth of July. The movie questions run from It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street to Home Alone, Elf, Love Actually, Gremlins and the eternal Die Hard argument. Music covers White Christmas, Band Aid, Fairytale of New York, Brenda Lee's 65-year climb to number one, the Bowie and Crosby duet, Monster Mash and the Facebook campaign that put Rage Against the Machine at the top of the UK chart at Christmas. Television has Rudolph, Charlie Brown, the Grinch, the Star Wars Holiday Special, Festivus, the Holiday Armadillo, the WKRP turkey drop and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, and there is room for Coca-Cola's Santa, John Lewis adverts, Elf on the Shelf and ugly sweater parties. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and reference articles on the film, song, special or tradition, and each question shows its citation once you have answered. Easy ones ask what Charlie Brown gets in his trick-or-treat bag; hard ones want the songwriter who wrote Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and the network that first aired New Year's Rockin' Eve.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which singer's 1994 Christmas song took 25 years to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100, finally topping it in 2019?
Mariah Carey
Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' was not sold as a single in 1994, which kept it off the Hot 100 under the chart's rules of the day, so its climb could only begin years later.
Q 02Wham! gave the royalties from 1984's 'Last Christmas' to famine relief in which country?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia was also the cause behind Band Aid's charity single, the record that kept 'Last Christmas' at No. 2 in 1984; Wham! had to wait until January 2021 for it to reach UK No. 1.
Q 03In Whamageddon, what happens to a player who hears Wham!'s 'Last Christmas'?
They are out
They are out, but only the original Wham! recording counts: covers and remixes are safe, so survivors can still hear the tune and last to the end of 24 December.
Q 04In Home Alone (1990), the McCallisters leave Kevin behind while flying to which city?
Paris
Paris is where the family is bound when Kate realises, mid-flight, that Kevin is missing; with every flight home full she doubles back through Dallas and ends up stuck in Scranton on Christmas Eve.
Q 05In Elf (2003), Buddy travels to New York to find his birth father, Walter Hobbs, played by which actor?
James Caan
James Caan plays Walter Hobbs, a cynical publisher on Santa's naughty list, who finally tells his boss where to go and walks out on his job to look for Buddy.
Q 06Which actor's first feature film role was Hans Gruber, the villain of Die Hard (1988)?
Alan Rickman
Alan Rickman was in his early forties and known for stage work; producer Joel Silver cast him after seeing him on Broadway in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Q 07Thurl Ravenscroft, the uncredited singer of 'You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch', also voiced which cereal mascot?
Tony the Tiger
Tony the Tiger got his booming 'They're gr-r-reat!' from Ravenscroft; because the 1966 special left his name off the credits, many viewers assumed its narrator, Boris Karloff, had sung the song.
Q 08In the 1964 Rudolph special, misfit elf Hermey leaves Santa's workshop to become what?
A dentist
A dentist is all Hermey wants to be, so he quits toy-making and teams up with Rudolph, who agrees to overlook the dentistry if Hermey overlooks the red nose.
Q 09The unmistakable jazz score of A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) was written by which pianist?
Vince Guaraldi
Vince Guaraldi's jazz was one of several breaks with TV convention, along with real children's voices and no laugh track, yet the special was a huge hit for CBS.
Q 10The notorious 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special gave which character a first screen appearance?
Boba Fett
Boba Fett debuts in the special's cartoon segment as a mysterious stranger who saves Luke from a giant monster and offers to help the Rebels, well before he hunts them in The Empire Strikes Back.
Q 11In which 1942 film did Bing Crosby first sing 'White Christmas'?
Holiday Inn
Holiday Inn introduced the song, which won Irving Berlin the Oscar; a decade later a new American hotel chain borrowed the film's title for its name.
Q 12Which Ultravox singer co-wrote Band Aid's 'Do They Know It's Christmas?' with Bob Geldof in 1984?
Midge Ure
Midge Ure co-wrote the song and produced the record; with the studio theirs for only 24 hours, nearly all the vocals were recorded and the single mixed in one marathon session.
Q 13Which act's cover of 'Always on My Mind' kept 'Fairytale of New York' off the UK Christmas No. 1 in 1987?
Pet Shop Boys
Q 21In Hocus Pocus (1993), the Sanderson sisters return on Halloween in which Massachusetts town?
Salem
Salem is where Max, a teenager new to town who calls the legend 'hocus pocus', lights the Black Flame Candle and raises the three Sanderson sisters 300 years after they were hanged.
Q 22Which SNL cast member debuted 'The Chanukah Song' on Weekend Update in 1994?
Adam Sandler
Adam Sandler wrote it for Jewish kids who feel left out at Christmas, reeling off a list of famous people who celebrate Hanukkah too.
Q 23In a 2000 Friends episode, Ross teaches his son about Hanukkah dressed as which creature?
Holiday Armadillo
Holiday Armadillo was Ross's fallback when he could not get a Santa suit; Chandler then turns up dressed as Santa after all, and Joey as Superman.
Pet Shop Boys left the Pogues at No. 2; Kirsty MacColl was only on that record because its producer, her husband Steve Lillywhite, had her sing a guide vocal too good to replace.
Q 14Haddon Sundblom painted the red-suited Santa Claus for which brand's ads from 1931?
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola did not invent the red-suited Santa, despite the legend its ads inspired: the jolly figure in red and white was already standard before Sundblom painted him.
Q 15According to the rules in The Elf on the Shelf, what would make the elf lose its magic?
Being touched
Being touched is said to drain the elf's magic, the power that lets it fly to the North Pole each night and report to Santa on how the children have behaved.
Q 16Which band, fronted by Noddy Holder, had the 1973 UK Christmas No. 1 with 'Merry Xmas Everybody'?
Slade
Slade built the hit on a tune Noddy Holder had written back in 1967 for a discarded song about a rocking chair, reworked with festive lyrics.
Q 17The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in New York is usually which species?
Norway spruce
Norway spruce is the usual pick, and the tree gets a second life: since 2007 its trunk has been milled into lumber and donated to Habitat for Humanity to help build homes.
Q 18Before the balloons arrived in 1927, the Macy's parade featured live animals borrowed from where?
Central Park Zoo
Central Park Zoo lent the animals for the first parade in 1924, when it was still billed as a Christmas parade; in 1927 balloons took their place, led by Felix the Cat.
Q 19Times Square's first New Year's Eve ball drop followed a city ban on what?
Fireworks
Fireworks had welcomed each new year from the Times building since 1904, but they went off right over the crowd; once the city banned them, publisher Adolph Ochs had a lit ball lowered down the flagpole instead.
Q 20Which 1962 Halloween hit did the BBC ban as 'too morbid'?
Monster Mash
Monster Mash topped the US Hot 100 that October, but the ban kept it off BBC radio, and it only became a UK hit when it was reissued in 1973.
Q 24Festivus, from Seinfeld's 1997 episode 'The Strike', is celebrated around an unadorned pole made of what?
Aluminum
Aluminum it is, and the pole stays bare: Frank Costanza says it requires no decoration because he finds tinsel distracting.
Q 25In A Christmas Story (1983), the Old Man's prized 'major award' is a lamp shaped like what?
A woman's leg
A woman's leg in a fishnet stocking, the lamp delights the Old Man until his wife breaks it, supposedly while watering a plant, and he accuses her of being jealous of it.
Q 26In It's a Wonderful Life, which angel second class tries to earn his wings by saving George?
Clarence
Clarence shows George the town as it would be without him and wins his wings at the end: a bell rings on the Christmas tree, which Zuzu says means an angel has just got them.
Q 27In Love Actually (2003), Hugh Grant plays David, who holds which job?
Prime Minister
Prime Minister David falls for Natalie, one of his household staff, and after the visiting US president makes a pass at her he defies him in front of the press.
Q 28In Christmas Vacation (1989), Clark Griswold gets a membership in what instead of his bonus?
Jelly of the Month Club
Jelly of the Month Club membership is all Clark gets, so cousin Eddie kidnaps the boss and brings him to the house, where the shamed Mr. Shirley reinstates the bonuses.
Q 29Tim Burton conceived The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), but which stop-motion director, later of Coraline, made it?
Henry Selick
Henry Selick directed it, with Burton as producer; Disney still sold the film as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, to trade on the better-known name.
Q 30In John Lewis's 2014 Christmas advert, what is the boy Sam's companion Monty?
A penguin
A penguin, Monty pines for company, so Sam finds him a mate for Christmas, all to Tom Odell's cover of 'Real Love'.