It takes a lot for sweet-tempered 28-year-old Nick Darnell to transform himself into Christmas’ most sought-after sourpuss.

There’s colored contacts and facial prosthetics, a protruding belly and at least an hour of makeup. But for the devout Christian and preternaturally cheerful young actor, the real metamorphosis is psychological.

“People today love to connect with the villain,” said the viral Grinch impersonator. “The world is just a darker world now.”

Darnell called the chartreuse baddie he portrays “the modern-day Santa.”

Dr. Seuss’ holiday parable “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” has been a seasonal favorite since it was published in 1957, ranking among the most popular and profitable of the author’s iconic rhyming picture books.

The story’s sassy, brassy antihero has likewise adorned Christmas trees and school library shelves for generations. His hornlike fur forelocks and pathological refusal to assimilate have led some critics to call the Grinch ambiguously antisemitic, but those concerns have largely been glossed over by years of nostalgia.

Experts say 2025 heralds the Grinch’s ascent from Yuletide bit player to Christmas A-lister. He now crowds out Kris Kringle in store displays, social media feeds and holiday meet-and-greets.

Unlike Santa, who ho-ho-hos his way through the holiday season, Grinches twerk and pout and scream in kids’ faces. Compilations of their antics on YouTube and TikTok routinely rack up millions of views.

“I do the things that people think,” Darnell said of the role. “I’m not restrained.”

Despite the Grinch’s anti-consumerist zeal, the market for his visage has exploded in recent years.

Target touts its “Grinchmas,” while Walmart has “WhoKnewVille.” McDonald’s sells Grinch fries, Starbucks features a “secret menu” frappuccino. Hanna Andersson, a popular purveyor of holiday pajamas, boasts roughly a dozen different Grinch patterns, compared to three Hanukkah options and just one Santa design in two colorways.

Ownership of the Grinch’s likeness is guarded as jealously as the villain protects his lair: Dr. Seuss Enterprises holds the rights to the children’s book, Warner Bros. Discovery the 1966 animated TV special, and Universal Studios the 2000 live-action Jim Carrey film, which ranks among the highest-grossing Christmas movies of all time.

But impersonators, academics and even working Santas agree: Americans’ embrace of the Grinch in 2025 goes far beyond consumerism.

“It’s definitely more popular,” said ‘Santa’ Ed Taylor, the famed Los Angeles Santa behind the Worldwide Santa Claus Network, a training camp for the art of Christmas cheer. “It’s a little yin and yang. Maybe we need a little bit of both.”

Costume companies across Los Angeles say they’ve seen a deluge of demand for the Grinch this year. At Etoile Costume & Party Center in Tarzana, nearly half of Christmas costume rentals are now furry green villains.

“It’s about equal to Santa,” one employee said. “Maybe 40% Grinch and the rest Santa.”

Ryan Ortiz, dressed in a Grinch costume, stands next to his 1969 Volkswagen Bus in San Diego on Dec. 21.

(K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)

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Fans of the hirsute sourpuss seek him out for his in-your-face edge — the opposite of Santa’s remote joviality. Santa enforces his regime of goodness through lists and surveillance. The Grinch will get in your face and yell at you to shut up.

“[Santa]’s supposed to be mysterious and unknown,” said Darnell’s fiancee JadaPaige. “He’s supposed to just come in the night and you’re never supposed to see him.”

“I grew up obsessed with Santa Claus — I did not grow up obsessed with the Grinch,” Darnell said. “I was the kid waiting up in the middle of the night, peeking, wondering if Santa’s down there. A lot of modern day kids aren’t having that journey.”

Instead, many Gen Alpha youths look to the Grinch for his views on “corruption or poverty or the oversaturation of commercialism,” Darnell said.

“Santa is looked at more like a godly figure, while the Grinch is a more everyday man,” the actor explained. “The world is so sinister and negative. [The Grinch] tells you how it is, rather than telling you everything is going to be fine.”

TikTok turbocharged that trend, with the infamous green meanie matching or beating his red rival in holiday clout.

“He has aura,” Darnell said.

Grinch impersonator Nick Darnell said the character he plays has become popular because, “He has aura.”

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

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Today’s professional Santas are often retirees with a bit of a belly and some time on their hands. Grinches, by contrast, are more likely to be working actors like Darnell, who look reverently to Carrey’s performance as a blueprint for the character’s slapstick antics and snarky reads.

Still, experts say the Grinch’s 2025 glow-up likely owes as much to holiday exhaustion and broad consumer pessimism as it does vertical video virility.

“The Grinch is the opposite side of Christmas,” said Oscar Tellez, who owns Magic Dream Costumes and Party Rentals in East Los Angeles and says he’s seen a spike in Grinch requests even as overall holiday rentals have sagged.

“Especially with the Latino community, I don’t think they feel the enthusiasm to celebrate,” Tellez said. “They are more worried about what’s gonna happen next.”

Pop culture experts agreed.

“The economy is in big trouble, our political situation is chaotic, there’s a lot of hate — it’s no wonder that we would seek to express that through the embodiment of a monster like the Grinch,” said Michael M. Chemers, director of the Center for Monster Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

“You’ve seen these nativity displays popping up all over the country that have the Jesus figures removed and it says ‘ICE was here,’ ” he added. “I think there’s just a lot of Grinchy feeling right now in the world.”

Chemers and other scholars say the emergence of the Grinch as a foil to Santa is less a departure than a return to form: the Grinch is a “PG version” of the mythical Krampus, a shaggy, fork-tongued Germanic goat man who beats and even abducts naughty children, working as an enforcer for Father Christmas.

An “organillero,” or traditional street musician, dressed as the anti-Christmas character known as the Grinch plays on a central street in Mexico City on Dec. 9.

(Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images)

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“He’s been called the Christmas devil,” said Jeff Belanger, author of “The Fright Before Christmas,” a compendium of so-called “Yuletide monsters.”

“[Krampus] represented the consequence of bad behavior, while St. Nick rewards good behavior,” he said.

Krampus likely evolved from older, pre-Christian deities, just as Christmas absorbed solstice and midwinter customs, the author explained. The Christmas most Americans grew up with only emerged as a national holiday in the wake of the Civil War, he said, about a decade after the formal introduction of Thanksgiving in 1863. It was around this time that Christmas trees became popular in the United States.

“In 1867, Charles Dickens came over to Boston and that’s when he read his ‘Christmas Carol’ for the first time in America,” spurring President Ulysses S. Grant to declare Christmas a federal holiday, Belanger said. “It was truly on the back of that story.”

The holiday’s corpulent, white-bearded dandy arrived even later, his schmaltzy persona skimmed from bony St. Nicholas between Reconstruction and 1931, when Coca-Cola debuted its iconic, brandy-flushed Santa Claus.

“That’s when Christmas turned purely commercial, and there was no room for consequences anymore,” Belanger said.

Seuss’ Grinch sits somewhere in the middle — cuddlier than Krampus and pricklier than Santa — making him the perfect avatar for a moody, uncertain age.

Workers check Grinch inflatables ready for export at a factory in Suixi County in central China’s Anhui Province on March 19.

(Wan SC/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Grinch boosters point out that the villain repents and reforms at the end of the story, shedding his pathological hatred of Christmas.

“I always tell people, ‘Don’t you just love how his heart grew three sizes?’ ” Taylor, the famous Santa, said of his increasingly popular crossover events.

Others note that it’s never the repentant Grinch who marauds through schools and holiday parades or blows up on social media.

“Once he’s rehabilitated, he’s no fun anymore,” Chemers said.

That makes it hard for the holiday villain to visit sick kids in the hospital, as legions of Santas do every year, or comfort children who confide in him about bullying.

“The message is one of encouragement and positivity and acknowledgment of accomplishments and encouragement to strive harder,” Taylor said. “It’s these beautiful personal development messages that Santa gets to be the conduit for.”

The Grinch, by contrast, can affirm where you are, without ever asking you to be better.

“He can hear you and know what you’re thinking, because he has the same thoughts,” Darnell said of his beloved version of the character. “People want to know his heart and his mind, and that’s something they wouldn’t be able to ask Santa.”

Jack Black, left, and Paul Rudd in a scene from “Anaconda.”
| Photo Credit: Matt Grace

The holiday season is Hallmark’s Super Bowl.

This year alone, Hallmark has 80 hours of original holiday-themed programming, including two unscripted series, two scripted series, a holiday special and 24 movies with titles such as “The Snow Must Go On” and “Christmas at the Catnip Cafe” that run from mid-October to Christmas.

The company also has branched out into the experiences business with a Hallmark Christmas Cruise and the Hallmark Christmas Experience festival in Kansas City, Mo., where the company is based.

“I think that’s one of the most brilliant business decisions they’ve made, and they’re expanding there because they have to,” Anjali Bal, associate professor of marketing at Babson College, said of Hallmark’s experiences business. “It allows a connection between the consumer and the brand on a direct level in a way a movie can’t provide.”

It may seem like a far cry from Hallmark’s roots as a greeting card purveyor, but company executives say the holiday feelings evoked by its cards, ornaments and gift wrap translate into the type of content they produce.

And that plethora of content has turned Hallmark into a Christmas juggernaut, fueling competitors such as Lifetime and Netflix, which also produce holiday romantic comedies in the vein of Hallmark movies.

But Darren Abbott, Hallmark’s chief brand officer, doesn’t seem overly concerned.

“There’s a reason everyone else is trying to do this, and it’s because consumers are looking for this,” he said.

Hallmark’s legacy is rooted in celebrating holidays and Christmas, he said, “and no other business or brand has that.”

Countdown to Christmas

Founded in 1910 by an 18-year-old entrepreneur hawking postcards, Hallmark built its brand over the years through cards, holiday ornaments and retail stores.

The family-owned business ventured into entertainment in 1951 with the television presentation Hallmark Hall of Fame. Today, Studio City-based Hallmark Media operates three cable networks, including the Hallmark Channel, which debuted in 2001, as well as a subscription streaming service.

Though Hallmark had aired holiday movies practically since the inception of its cable channel, the company doubled down on the season in 2009, rolling out “Countdown to Christmas,” a 24-hour-a-day programming block focused solely on holiday content, a tradition that has lasted for 16 years.

Hallmark produces about 100 movies a year, both holiday and non-holiday films.

As a privately-held company, Hallmark did not disclose its finances, though executives acknowledge the holiday season is a key driver of entertainment revenue.

The expansion into entertainment is a way for Hallmark to stay in the zeitgeist over multiple generations and to diversify its business beyond just cards and retail products, analysts said.

“Their television stations and experiences business allows them to stay culturally relevant while staying true to their origin,” said Bal, the marketing professor.

Holiday programming — and the breezy, romantic fare Hallmark has become known for — has become increasingly popular with audiences.

Holiday features, both old movies and new, typically make up more than a third of total movie viewing time in December, according to U.S. television data from Nielsen. That percentage has remained fairly consistent for the last three years, though it reached 42% in December 2021.

Hallmark’s television viewership also edges up in the months leading into the holidays. In October, Hallmark commanded 1% of total viewership across linear TV and streaming, ticking up to 1.2% in November, according to Nielsen data. During that same time, competitor A&E, which owns Lifetime, remained constant at 0.9%.

Hallmark’s feel-good movies typically resonate with audiences across the country. They invariably conclude with happy endings (and at least one kiss), where romantic misunderstandings, financial difficulties and family drama all get resolved. After years of criticism, the movies’ casts and plot lines are diversifying, though experts say there is still room for improvement.

“These films are designed to be highly appealing to broad audiences,” said Kit Hughes, associate professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University, who watched every single Hallmark film released in 2022 for research on the portrayal of small business owners. “They’re good consensus movies.”

To grow its audience and the types of stories it tells, Hallmark has increasingly turned to brand partnerships, including with the NFL.

Last year, the company released a movie centered around a Kansas City Chiefs romance; this year, it released one about Buffalo Bills fans. Hallmark also has a partnership with Walt Disney Co. to release a holiday movie next year set at Walt Disney World. The film stars Lacey Chabert, who Abbott describes as Hallmark’s “Queen of Christmas.”

Meeting Hallmark stars on cruise ships

Hallmark’s foray into the cruise business might seem odd, but it follows a long tradition of entertainment companies
creating real-world experiences with their fans, whether that’s on a ship, in a theme park or on a stage. As part of its massive tourism business, Disney operates its own line of cruise ships that promote the company’s classic characters.

Hallmark launched its first “Hallmark Christmas Cruise” last year on Norwegian Cruise Lines. The inaugural cruise from Miami to the Bahamas sold out even before a planned TV marketing campaign. After racking up a wait list of 70,000 people, Hallmark had to add a second cruise, Abbott said.

For this year’s cruise, from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico, Hallmark had to book a bigger ship to accommodate demand. During the November cruise, attendees participated in various Christmas festivities, such as ornament-making workshops and cookie-decorating, and mingled with Hallmark stars in various on-stage games.

The cruises even spawned an unscripted Hallmark show focused on the experiences of several attendees and their interactions with Hallmark actors.

Many are not exactly household names, but they’ve starred in dozens of Hallmark holiday movies over the years and have loyal fan bases.

Abbott joined the cruise last year, and while he’s not a “cruise person,” he said he was fascinated to see how guests interacted with the stars.

“We’re a bit of a respite from what’s going on in the world right now,” he said, “and these experiences sort of hit on that at the right time and the right place.”