Every year, the same gif appears on my social-media feeds like clockwork: Rachel McAdams as pissed-off, suburbs-resenting, concert-tee-wearing misfit Amy Stone in my favorite dysfunctional-family Christmas movie of all time, The Family Stone. Granted, calling her a “misfit” in a family where everyone is slightly weird is a little unfair, but Amy is messy-haired, grouchy, mean to her brother’s new girlfriend, and embarrassingly still hung up on the long-ago ex who took her virginity. In other words, she’s deeply relatable, or at least a lot more so than the immaculately groomed protagonists we’re used to seeing cavort in small-town America in Hallmark Christmas movies.
I’m sure my entire extended family would appreciate it if my holiday vibe weren’t influenced by Amy, but unfortunately for them, she’s kind of home-for-the-holidays goals. She can’t seem to dress worth a damn—or, in today’s parlance, she’s addicted to not slaying—and yet she’s insanely beautiful, even with lank, unwashed hair and a wardrobe that seems to consist entirely of skirts over jeans. (It was a time, for sure, but that time hath officially passed.) And what is Christmas, anyway, if not an excuse to take a break from serving up hard ’fits, and just loll about in stained sweatpants until the dawn of the new year?
I’ve tried to make a rule of being less toxic and horrible to my family at Christmas ever since I started coming home with my partner in tow; they weirdly don’t find it sexy to hear me and my mom get into a sixth-grade-style screaming match over whether or not I stole her blue scarf and got queso on it. (Okay, mea culpa: I did.) Still, there’s something ineffably appealing about how, well, shitty Amy is to her family, especially Sarah Jessica Parker’s character; I mean, if some boring, homophobic girlboss with a throat-clearing tic appeared at your family home for the holiday season, wouldn’t you want to tell her off, or at least subtly undermine her until she cracked?
But perhaps Amy’s most endearing trait in The Family Stone is her propensity to enter her parents’ house with a mountain of laundry—which my closest aunt and I literally still do to this day, despite being in our 30s and 50s, respectively. She also uses an NPR tote, which…I know her love interest in the movie is a man and all, and it’s not up to me to interrogate fictional characters’ sexualities, but that’s a pretty lesbian bag to have! (And I say that as a card-carrying queer who’s currently using a LAMBDA Legal tote bag to haul my own ephemera!)