Before diving into that, let’s revisit the core of the series. The show’s focus is on the dynamic duo of young mother Lorelai Gilmore (played by Lauren Graham) and her witty teenage daughter Rory (played by Alexis Bledel). Some might consider Kelly Bishop’s delightful portrayal of the formidable Emily Gilmore as warranting the title of the third Gilmore girl. With its colorful ensemble cast and Sherman-Palladino’s trademark rapid-fire dialogue, even the most mundane activities, like a grocery run, become captivating tales. While “Gilmore Girls” doesn’t feature a dedicated Christmas episode each season, the holiday spirit often finds its way into their stories—especially since Lorelai has an affection for snow, making some winter episodes particularly memorable.

So, which of “Gilmore Girls'” Christmas episodes are worth watching, and which ones can be skipped during a rewatch? We’ve compiled a list of all eight Christmas episodes, ranked from least to most captivating.

The series’ seventh and final season is generally seen as tumultuous, largely due to the absence of creators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino. The main Christmas-centric episode of this season, “Santa’s Secret Stuff,” coincides with the troubled marriage between Lorelai and Rory’s father, Christopher Hayden (David Sutcliffe), making it less than stellar. Although the previous episode, “Merry Fisticuffs,” touches on Christmas themes, “Santa’s Secret Stuff” delves into the holiday more directly.

The custody battle involving Luke in season seven has its roots in developments from the sixth season. Just when Luke and Lorelai are about to finalize their wedding plans, having found the perfect dress, another obstacle emerges. Enter April Nardini, played by Vanessa Marano, Luke’s previously unknown daughter. Just as his engagement to Lorelai progresses, Luke is blindsided by the revelation that April’s mother, Anna Nardini (played by “Twin Peaks” alum Sherilyn Fenn), kept her pregnancy a secret after their breakup 12 years ago. Consequently, Luke has missed out on being part of April’s life. In an attempt to rectify this, he begins spending time with April while initially keeping this from Lorelai.

Basically, the plot of the episode goes like this: because Rory missed Christmas while visiting her boyfriend Logan Huntzberger (Matt Czuchry) in London, Lorelai and Christopher decide to re-do the holiday when she’s home and celebrate as a family, which is something they never did before Christopher and Lorelai’s bizarre marital union. Even with Christopher’s presence, “Santa’s Secret Stuff” puts a lot of focus on Lorelai’s ongoing friendship with her ex-fiancé, Stars Hollow coffee shop owner Luke Danes (Scott Patterson), and this is the episode where she writes an important letter vouching for him in a custody case (more on that shortly), which is eventually what drives a permanent and immovable wedge between Lorelai and Christopher. (Unfortunately for Christopher, he’s just another obstacle the show provides to stop Luke and Lorelai from simply finding happiness together, and it’s infuriating as it is exhausting.) Overall, “Santa’s Secret Stuff” isn’t just the worst Christmas episode of “Gilmore Girls,” but one of the show’s worst installments overall.

The custody case Luke ends up dealing with in Season 7 of “Gilmore Girls” is actually related to a development in the show’s sixth season, where, just as Luke and Lorelai are about to settle on a wedding date and she’s found the perfect dress … but the show has to put something in their way. (Notice a pattern here!?) That something is April Nardini, Luke’s long-lost daughter played by Vanessa Marano. Just as his romance with Lorelai moves to the next level with their engagement, Luke is shocked to discover that April’s mother Anna Nardini (“Twin Peaks” veteran Sherilyn Fenn) kept her surprise pregnancy a secret from him after their breakup 12 years prior, and as a result, he hasn’t been a part of April’s life in any significant way. In an attempt to fix that, Luke starts spending time with April, but he doesn’t tell Lorelai.

In the Season 6 episode “Just Like Gwen and Gavin,” which is the penultimate season’s closest approximation to a traditional Christmas episode, Lorelai swings by Luke’s Diner only to find April marrying the salt shakers, at which point April reveals her dad “owns the place.” Shocked that Luke kept this a secret from her, Lorelai grapples with this information; elsewhere in the episode, the Winter Carnival in Stars Hollow happens without the leadership of the irritating town busybody and grocery store proprietor Taylor Doose (Michael Winters), and Rory gets a massive delivery of holiday presents from Logan as he tries to apologize for a fight. The episode just isn’t great generally, but unfortunately, April’s presence — and her big reveal — keeps this installment low on this particular list. (With that said, the non-Christmas episode that immediately follows, “Friday Night’s All Right for Fighting,” is an all-timer.)

Another “Gilmore Girls” hour that could generously be called a “Christmas episode” is the Season 4 installment “In the Clamor and the Clangor,” which is a bit scattershot and doesn’t really provide the holiday togetherness you might hope for from a more traditional holiday-themed episode of the series. Rory’s best friend and aspiring rock ‘n roll drummer Lane Kim (Keiko Agena) gets a pretty big focus in this episode, which is nice considering how badly the show treats her in later seasons, and it’s actually a fun moment of rebellion when, going against her mother’s strict rules, Lane goes with her band Hep Alien to play a gig at the now-shuttered club CBGB in New York City. Even though Hep Alien gets bumped to the point that they don’t even play, this is a huge step for Lane, who usually follows all of Mrs. Kim’s (Emily Kuroda) intense rules, and it leads to Mrs. Kim telling her daughter that if she wants to pursue her dreams as a rock drummer, she has to leave the Kim house.

Lane aside, the biggest thing that happens in “In the Clamor and the Clangor” is Luke and Lorelai — who are not romantically linked at this point due to Luke’s doomed marriage to lawyer Nicole Leahy, played by Tricia O’Kelley — get so irritated by the recently repaired Stars Hollow church bells that they break them again … and over at Yale University, Rory’s roommate and best friend Paris Geller (Liza Weil) is driving her staffers at the school newspaper insane. A perfectly servicable episode of the show in general, but “In the Clamor and the Clangor” doesn’t really have that Christmasy “Gilmore Girls” magic.

Fans of “Gilmore Girls” have a lot of opinions about the 2016 Netflix revival series “A Year in the Life,” and anecdotally, most of them are negative … but frankly, the reboot series is perfectly pleasant, and its opening episode “Winter” is the closest thing to a Christmas episode that we get in the four-episode revival. (Each episode, which you probably gleaned from the overall title, focuses on one season in Rory and Lorelai’s life.) The saddest part of “Winter” by far is that Edward Herrmann, who played Lorelai’s father, Rory’s grandfather, and Emily’s husband Richard Gilmore throughout the original series, passed away in 2014; as a result, Richard dies in-universe, and watching the three main Gilmore girls mourn a man they loved — both within the show universe and in real life, considering how close the actors were — is pretty tough.

So what happens in “Winter” beyond that? Rory returns ever-so-briefly to Stars Hollow — living as a sort of nomad in this episode, she spends most of her time in London crashing with Logan, who’s now engaged to an unseen French heiress named Odette — while Lorelai shuffles through guest chefs at her inn, the Dragonfly, in the absence of her best friend and master chef Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy, who only appears in one episode of the reboot thanks to her presumably packed schedule). “Winter” basically exists to reintroduce audiences back to Stars Hollow and bring back as many characters as possible, so it’s not the strongest episode of the reboot, nor is it the strongest Christmas episode of “Gilmore Girls” — placing it firmly in the middle of the pack here.

Rejoice, Luke and Lorelai fans — this is the episode where a lovestruck Luke builds a homemade ice rink for Lorelai in front of her house! Earlier in Season 5 of “Gilmore Girls,” just to provide some important context here, a frantic Christopher calls Lorelai for help with his young daughter after his girlfriend and the baby’s mom, Sherry Tinsdale (another “Twin Peaks” alum, Mädchen Amick), left him to move to Paris for work. Furious at her father meddling in her mother’s life once again — particularly because Lorelai and Luke are so happy together at this point — Rory takes her father to task in the Christmasy episode “Women of Questionable Morals” when he shows up at Yale to try and hang out with her, driving a wedge between father and daughter. (Unfortunately, Rory is proven right about Christopher’s intentions in the very next episode; truly, this guy stinks!)

Elsewhere in the episode, a separated Emily and Richard find a stray dog in their yard, which ends up bringing them back together — Richard, who was living in the pool house, moves back into the main mansion — and yes, let’s talk about the ice rink. Even though Lorelai does something undeniably shady in this episode (upon finding out that Christopher’s father died suddenly, she spends an evening drinking tequila with him and hides it from Luke even though nothing inappropriate even happened between them), watching Luke surprise her with her own personal ice rink is a total highlight for the couple.

Despite the presence of both Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki) — Rory’s first canonical boyfriend who’s a total drag — and his wholly irritating younger sister Clara (Scout Taylor Compton), the post-Christmas episode of “Gilmore Girls” snappily titled “That’ll Do, Pig” features a lot of things that make this series truly great. (This is the only “Christmas episode” in Season 3, as the previous one is the beloved Thanksgiving installment “A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving,” where Rory and Lorelai attend a whopping four Thanksgiving dinners.) In the aftermath of the holiday, Rory tells her boyfriend Jess Mariano (Milo Ventimiglia) that she wants to go to the annual Stars Hollow Winter Carnival, and Jess has absolutely zero interest in the quaint small-town tradition … until he catches wind of the fact that Rory is considering attending the carnival with Dean and his sister. When all four of them go together, Dean and Jess to their best to antagonize each other — with Clara driving Jess absolutely insane in the process — and Rory has to watch her ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend duke it out in front of her for really no reason whatsoever.

The real highlight of “That’ll Do, Pig,” though, is the presence of Lorelai’s terrifying grandmother Lorelai “Trix” Gilmore (Marion Ross). Why? Trix absolutely hates Emily, so whenever she’s in town, the normally composed matriarch of the Gilmore household is thrown into utter disarray, deeply amusing the younger Lorelai in the process. Yes, this episode takes place shortly after Christmas — Paris confirms this by telling Rory she spent the holiday with her boyfriend’s family — but thanks to the hijinks at the carnival and the way Emily reacts to Trix, it’s still a great Christmas-adjacent installment.

Throughout “Gilmore Girls,” Richard Gilmore has two serious health scares, and the first happens pretty early in the Season 1 episode “Forgiveness and Stuff.” When the hour begins, the bonds between Gilmores are fractured. Lorelai, who was separated from her parents for years before asking them for help paying for Rory’s expensive preparatory high school in the show’s pilot, is having one of her many feuds with Emily and is subsequently uninvited from the annual Gilmore Christmas party at Emily and Richard’s house. Rory goes to the party without her mom and Lorelai resigns herself to an evening in Stars Hollow, heading to Luke’s Diner for a cheeseburger and endless cups of coffee, only to get a call from Rory saying that Richard had a heart attack during the party and is in now in the hospital.

This, understandably, brings all of the Gilmores together — and when Lorelai, who let Rory drive her car to the Gilmore house, needs a ride to the hospital, Luke drops everything to give her one himself, making it quite clear right from the beginning of the series that there’s something between Luke and Lorelai. It’s eventually revealed that Richard was just suffering from angina and is clear to return home safely, but “Forgiveness and Stuff” is our first look at how the Gilmore girls handle a crisis … and it provides some nice togetherness for them during the holidays, even under initially frightening circumstances. (There’s also an incredibly funny scene where, upon arriving at the hospital, Lorelai locates her mother simply by the sound of Emily yelling at someone.)

Any episode of “Gilmore Girls” that brings the whole cast of wild characters together is a good one, and because the Season 2 standout “The Bracebridge Dinner” is also a wintry, Christmasy hour of the series, it sits easily at the very top of this ranking. After a blizzard prevents a group that booked a massive, history-themed dinner at the Independence Inn (the inn where Lorelai and Sookie work together before opening the Dragonfly together) from flying into the nearest airport, Lorelai and Sookie, realizing they have enough food to feed a town, invite everyone in Stars Hollow to join them at the inn for a historically accurate and extremely elaborate meal (and a cozy overnight stay). Dean and his sister Clara come, as does newcomer Jess — who clearly has a crush on Rory, driving Dean completely insane — and even Richard and Emily come and stay at the inn, although a fight between them ends up driving Emily into Rory and Lorelai’s hotel room at the very last minute. 

From sparks flying between Rory and Jess — especially when he hijacks her horse-drawn carriage while all the guests enjoy rides in the snow — to all of the delightfully strange denizens of Stars Hollow participating in a wonderfully weird themed gathering, “The Bracebridge Dinner” is a great episode of “Gilmore Girls,” and it’s also the show’s best Christmas installment. You can watch these episodes, as well as the entire series, on both Netflix and Hulu; “A Year in the Life” streams exclusively on Netflix.