13 Strange, Creepy Things You Never Knew About Your Favorite Holiday Movies

In National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Clark Griswold gets frustrated with his holiday lights display and begins punching the outdoor decorations so hard that actor Chevy Chase broke his pinky finger when filming the scene. Cameras kept rolling--and the take made it into the final film.

In Love Actually, actress Emma Thompson had to wear a fat suit to make her character appear more matronly.

Jim Carrey’s suffocating makeup in How the Grinch Stole Christmas took hours to put on. The process was so painful--yet so crucial to the movie--that producers hired a CIA specialist to train him in torture survival in order to get through the filming.

John Candy could only offer a day's work for his cameo in Home Alone--so the entire crew worked for 21 hours straight to film all his scenes. Thus many of his lines were improvised, including the bit where he talks about having once left his son at a funeral home.

Though Disney has a policy against hiring ex-criminals, they broke the rule to sign on Tim Allen, a convicted drug dealer, to star in The Santa Clause in 1994.

Elf star Will Ferrell actually had to eat all of the sugary, carb-laden foods his character devours in the movie--and doing so caused him to suffer from severe headaches throughout the filming.

Joe Pesci steered clear of Macaulay Culkin during filming of Home Alone because he wanted the young actor to truly believe he was a scary person. Pesci was also expecting the movie to be a box office flop, so he intentionally over-acted his part.

A Christmas Story’s most iconic scene is probably the one in which Flick gets his tongue stuck to the frozen pole. Though (sssh!) his tongue was really touching a tiny suction cup barrier, that didn't stop plenty of others from trying the prank at home, including one middle-schooler who had to be rescued by firefighters.

It’s a Wonderful Life may be a beloved film these days, but it was a massive flop when it was first released in 1946. Two of the writers who worked on it even called the finished film "horrid" and refused to see it.

None of the actors in Home Alone wanted to go near the giant tarantula that famously climbs over actor Daniel Stern’s face. Stern would only agree to do the scene if they did it in one take; he also faked the scream to avoid scaring the spider. (Filmmakers dubbed it in later.)

During the filming of Miracle on 34th Street, 8-year-old actress Natalie Wood was convinced that her co-star Edmund Gwenn was truly Santa Claus. (The jig was up at the film’s wrap party, when she finally saw him out of costume!)

To film the lake scene in Love Actually, actors Lúcia Moniz and Colin Firth had to kneel in shallow water and pretend to swim--and Firth got so badly bitten by mosquitoes that he required medical attention.

In the department store scene in A Christmas Story, a strange kid wearing goggles is seen. The boy was not an actor, but simply a regular (but oddly-dressed) kid who happened to be at the store and caught the eye of the director.