The next day, Drew forces the family to go out and buy a tree together, requiring Tom to wear a Santa cap in public.

As they recover at home from their colds, Alicia shares a childhood memory with Drew about an old tree that was coated in ice during a storm.

Disgusted by his lack of restraint, Alicia demands that he leave, which he decides to do, and he ends their agreement and is set to write them a check.

The visit between the two families steadily descends into chaos, culminating with everyone seeing Christine's glamour shots manipulated into pornography on Brian's computer.

Drew tells Alicia the truth about his family: his father left them when he was just four, and his mother, a waitress, who would give him an adult stack of pancakes on Christmas until he was 18, died when he was in college.

Tom visits him to collect his money, and the two decide to go watch Saul perform in the local production of A Christmas Carol as he'd given the whole family tickets.

The website's consensus reads: "Surviving Christmas is unpleasant characters attacking each other for 90 minutes before delivering a typical, hollow anti-consumerist message"[6] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 19 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike".

[8] Writing in Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum said, "Really, critics and audiences ought to turn thoughts and wallets discreetly away from Surviving Christmas, ignoring the sight as if Santa had just stepped in droppings from Donner and Blitzen.

"[9] In The New York Times, Stephen Holden concluded, "This is a film that perversely refuses to trust its own comic instincts.