[citation needed] After Riverside, Illinois couple Luther and Nora Krank see their daughter Blair depart for a Peace Corps assignment in Peru on the Sunday following Thanksgiving, empty nest syndrome sets in.
Children, led by Vic's son Spike, constantly push them to put up a Frosty the Snowman decoration, and Christmas carolers try to revive the Kranks' holiday spirit by singing on their lawn, which Luther stops by icing it.
The newspaper prints a front-page story complete with a photograph of the unlit Krank house, and Luther's office colleagues, scout tree salesmen, and police fund collectors are also annoyed.
The couple are packing for the cruise on Christmas Eve morning when they receive a call from Blair, who announces that she is at Miami International Airport, en route home with her Peruvian fiancé Enrique as a surprise for her parents.
With his holiday spirit renewed, Luther finally admits to Nora that skipping Christmas was not a good idea until she suggests they should do it next year.
With the rights of the book received and the May 2000 founding of Revolution Studios, he stated that "as a start-up company, there was a great deal of work to do in order to get up and running.
"[5] Later, filmmaker Chris Columbus, who also bought the rights to Skipping Christmas and had written a screenplay, called Roth about directing the adaptation.
Producer Michael Barnathan said, "Joe read the script on a Sunday, bought it on Monday, decided he wanted to direct it on Tuesday and by Friday had cast Tim [Allen] and Jamie Lee [Curtis].
[5] Production designer Garreth Stover originally looked for locations with the right weather conditions and suburban ambiance for Hemlock Street, as described specifically in Columbus's script of the film.
[5] He was scouting from the metropolitan area of Chicago to Minnesota, but due to the extreme conditions of this part of the United States at the time, the filmmakers felt it was better to set up the neighborhood in an empty location instead of finding one.
In the next 12 weeks, hundreds of carpenters, plasterers, and painters had built what would become the largest exterior set ever for a movie, being more than 700 feet (210 m) long and including 16 houses.
[5] What Stover called "the core five" were the houses of the Kranks, the Frohmeyers, the Scheels, the Beckers, and the Trogdons, which he claimed had "full ground floors that are dressed and you can see into.
[6] The scenes involving Nora Krank's excursion to the supermarket to procure a "Mel's Hickory Honey Ham" were filmed at Cordons Ranch Market, located at 2931 Honolulu Ave, Glendale, California.
Nora dresses for the seasons and I found out by speaking to people at Marshall Field's in Chicago that the Christmas sweater is a big deal.
The website's consensus reads: "A mirthless movie as fresh as last year's fruit cake, Christmas with the Kranks is a coarse, garish comedy that promotes conformity.
[13] Roger Ebert gave the film one out of four stars, calling it "a holiday movie of stunning awfulness that gets even worse when it turns gooey at the end.
"[14] Nell Minow of Common Sense Media gave the film 1/5 stars, writing: "The characters are unpleasant, the jokes are unfunny, and the sentiment is hypocritical -- so this movie is about as unappetizing as last year's figgy pudding.
"[15] Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post wrote: "Christmas With the Kranks is a leaden whimsy so heavy it threatens to crash through the multiplex floor.
"[17] Scott Foundas of Variety was more positive, calling it "an agreeable, if snowflake-thin stocking stuffer faithfully adapted from John Grisham's 2001 bestseller Skipping Christmas.
"[19] Alex Maidy, writing for JoBlo.com in 2018, conceded that the film has a "thin" plot, but praised it for its strong elements of slapstick humor and performances, summarizing it as "over-the-top, silly, bizarre, cheesy, goofy, and sentimental.