The Saunders family is not looking forward to Christmas. Having just moved to Edmonton, Canada, from Los Angeles, they don’t know anyone and they’re broke. Plus, their mother is stranded in L.A. due to airline overbookings. So, Dad (Patrick Swayze) takes the kids to the local mall, where the Saunders kids— Brian (Matthew Knight), Danny (Cameron Bright) and Mary (played by twins Zoe and Amy Schlagel) find a satchel of money and begin a shopping spree—until the crooks who counterfeited the money chase them through the mall packed with holiday shoppers. Inadvertently, the Saunders family helps catch the crooks, and makes a surprising discovery about Santa Claus.

During the Christmas shopping season, department store clerk Steve Mason (Robert Mitchum) meets widow Connie Ennis (Janet Leigh), who is actually an undercover comparison shopper. Although Connie buys an expensive toy train set and returns it, Steve figures out her real identity and decides to give her a break by letting her go without reporting her—and ends up getting fired for it. Steve and Connie wind up going on a date, which doesn’t go down well with her longtime boyfriend Carl—from whom she is waiting fruitlessly for a marriage proposal—but thrills her son Timmy, who takes an instant liking to Steve and wants anybody but Carl for a stepdad. What follows is a sweetly complicated rom com, and Connie taking a big leap of faith.

In this musical remake of "Bachelor Mother," Polly Parish (Debbie Reynolds) is an overly-ambitious clerk at Merlin’s Department Store. After being fired from her job, she notices a beautiful baby that’s been left on the steps of the local orphanage, and the orphanage staff mistakes her for the mother. The boss’s son Dan Merlin (Eddie Fisher), who means well but is clueless, decides to help her out with the baby, and of course they begin to fall in love… Meanwhile, the store’s owner, old J.B. Merlin (Adolphe Menjou), thinks he just might be a grandfather.

When Merlin’s Department Store clerk Polly Parrish (Ginger Rogers), who’s single, finds a baby left on her doorstep, all hell breaks loose at the store, which is in the midst of the Christmas shopping season. Outraged at Polly's unmotherly conduct, David Merlin (David Niven) becomes determined to keep the single woman and the baby together no matter what.

When Miss Vicki (Edith Evans)'s father dies, she vows to become a world-class philanthropist, not realizing that her father left her penniless. In an attempt to keep Miss Vicki’s standard of living, her loyal butler, Claude Fitzwilliam (Dick Van Dyke), directs the household staff to charge goods from various stores to wealthy people and misdirect the shipments to Miss Vicki's home. Miss Vicki is a mother figure for Fitzwilly, whom she raised after his own mother died, so he will stop at nothing for her. To help Miss Vicki establish a legitimate income, Fitzwilly suggests that she write a "Dictionary for Dopes" which contains all possible phonetic spellings of words, and gives the reader the correct ones. To do that, Miss Vicki hires Juliet Nowell (Barbara Feldon) to be her secretary. Soon Juliet has fallen in love with Fitzwilly and agrees to carry out just one last store swindle before their married, to keep Miss Vicki comfortable for the rest of her days.

In Budapest, Hungary, the Matuschek and Co. store, Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) is the best salesman, and he’s not happy with his boss, Hugo Matuschek (Frank Morgan), for hiring Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan) as a saleswoman. In fact, the two take an immediate dislike to each other. Unknown to Klara, Alfred is a lonely bachelor with an anonymous pen pal to whom he intends to propose, but on the day he plans to finally go meet his secret lover, he is fired without explanation by Hugo. Alfred goes to the bar where for the meeting anyway, taking another salesman. He’s surprised to find Klara waiting for him at the bar. Ashamed of being fired, Alfred lets Klara believe that he’s only at the bar to drown his and doesn’t disclose his identity to her. Soon Hugo realizes he had misjudged Alfred and hires him again as manager. But Klara is still fascinated with her secret lover and doesn’t pay much attention to him.

Lee Leander (Barbara Stanwyck) gets caught shoplifting just before Christmas—for the third time. Prosecutor John Sargent (Fred MacMurray) postpones the trial because it is hard to get a conviction at Christmastime, but he also takes pity on Lee, so he arranges for her bail, and then, through comical circumstances, ends up taking her home to his mother for Christmas, where the two fall in love. So how will they handle the upcoming trial?

This film, resurrected from obscurity, is rapidly becoming a cult alternative to It's A Wonderful Life, which came out a year earlier. Here, a homeless New Yorker moves into an empty Fifth Ave. mansion and invites many of the friends he makes along the way to live in the house with him. Before he knows it, it's Christmastime, and the store windows are sparkling and the sidewalks overflowing with shoppers, and he is living with the actual home owners. This film contains the famous line, “A man without friends is the most serious form of poverty.” Starring some then-new actors (Victor Moore, Charles Ruggles and Ann Harding), the film was made by the struggling former Monogram Studios on a shoestring budget by Roy Del Ruth, a director from the silent screen days.

An orphaned boy, Patrick Dennis (Jan Handzlik and Roger Smith), goes to live with his free-spirited Auntie Mame (Rosalind Russell) in New York City in the Roaring Twenties. Conflict ensues when the executor of Patrick’s father’s estate (Forrest Tucker), who objects to Mame’s lifestyle. It seems that Patrick's father designated an executor in order to protect Patrick from becoming as unconventional as Mame. Yet despite the restrictions, Patrick and Mame bond with each other and undergo some crazy adventures as they make their way through the Great Depression—and some zany shopping sprees.

Three Devil Island convicts—Joseph (Humphrey Bogart), Jules (Peter Ustinov) and Albert (Aldo Ray)—escape to a small French coastal town in time for Christmas. Along the way they rob a store and shoplift some clothes in order to travel by ship to another place. They wind up at the home of the Ducotel family, pretending to be there to fix the roof, but planning to swindle them, until they realize that the family is in dire financial straits because they are being exploited by Andre Tochard, the establishment’s mean-spirited owner. When the three convicts spend Christmas night with the Ducotels, they’re treated so well by the family that they decide to help them instead, with many amusing antics to follow.