Here's How All Your Favorite Netflix Christmas Movies Are Connected

A bunch of your favorite Netflix Christmas movies take place in the same universe. Here’s how they (and their characters) are all connected

Ah, Christmas. The time of the year when carols ring through the air, snow softly falls, joy abounds, and we all heat up our hot cocoa, put on our coziest slippers, and sink into the couch to spend an entire month bingeing Christmas movies. There’s no shame in that, especially if any of your holiday favorites come from streaming giant Netflix, which has leaned hard into the holiday movie game in the last few years. But if you’ve been paying close attention during your annual screenings of titles like The Princess Switch, The Knight Before Christmas, and A Christmas Prince, you might have noticed some delightful Easter eggs. Netflix, in all its holiday genius, has created a Christmas movie universe that spans multiple franchises, and we’re here to tell you how it all fits together.

First, there are the on-screen movie cameos. These started in 2018, when a scene in The Holiday Calendar showed a TV screen playing a movie within the movie.

“It felt like a natural fit to show one of our other films available on Netflix,” said Amanda Phillips Atkins, EVP at production company MPCA. And thus, a scene from 2017’s The Christmas Inheritance made it into that movie. Netflix has since pulled this trick a few other times: The Christmas Inheritance is also shown in The Princess Switch, and Holiday in the Wild gets watched by characters in The Knight Before Christmas.

But that’s only scratching the surface of how all of Netflix’s Christmas movies connect to one another.

You have to watch carefully to catch these, but here are all the references that prove all Netflix Christmas movies happen within the same universe (including one from our favorite new movie to come out this year):

• In The Knight Before Christmas, a character shows off an acorn tree ornament and says, “Your grandma and grandpa picked this up on their trip to Aldovia.” Aldovia is the fictional country where A Christmas Prince takes place.
• In A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby, you can see a map that shows one of Aldovia’s neighboring countries is Belgravia, the fictional country where The Princess Switch takes place.
• In The Christmas Switch: Switched Again, the coronation scene features a brief cameo by Prince Richard and Amber (from A Christmas Prince), who apparently traveled to neighboring Belgravia to attend the event.
• In this year’s The Princess Switch: Romancing the Star, the evil Count Simon (from A Christmas Prince) has a run-in with Fiona.
• And finally, in this year’s A Castle for Christmas, Mrs. Donatelli and Frank from The Princess Switch make a cameo appearance.

So this proves two things: All these Netflix Christmas movies happen within the same universe, and that universe also has a Netflix that contains Christmas movies. Is your mind blown? Because ours most definitely are.