Black Holiday Trivia
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48 free Black Holiday trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Black holiday trivia is its own canon: the films families rewatch every December (This Christmas, The Best Man Holiday, Almost Christmas, The Preacher's Wife, Friday After Next, Jingle Jangle), the songs that soundtrack them (Donny Hathaway's This Christmas, the Temptations' Silent Night, the Jackson 5 Christmas Album, Run-DMC's Christmas in Hollis, Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, Boyz II Men, Whitney Houston), and the holidays created by and for Black Americans, Kwanzaa and Juneteenth. This quiz covers all three, with questions on casts and directors, chart facts and songwriters, the seven principles and the kinara, and the history of June 19th. The 46 Black holiday trivia questions run from easy crowd-pleasers for a family gathering to genuinely hard ones about release dates and songwriting credits, so it works for a Christmas dinner, a Kwanzaa celebration or a Juneteenth cookout. Every answer has been checked against documented film, music and historical sources rather than another trivia list.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 2007 film This Christmas is named after a 1970 song by which soul singer?
Donny Hathaway
Donny Hathaway. He and his collaborators set out in 1970 to write a Christmas song that would become a standard, and it grew familiar enough to lend a family film its title.
Q 02In a 2007 holiday film, which singer plays 'Baby' Whitfield, the youngest sibling with a secret singing talent?
Chris Brown
Chris Brown plays Michael 'Baby' Whitfield, the youngest sibling, who has been hiding a singing ambition his mother discourages because their musician father abandoned the family.
Q 03Who wrote and directed The Best Man Holiday, the 2013 sequel to The Best Man?
Malcolm D. Lee
Malcolm D. Lee. His cousin Spike Lee produced the 1999 original, and the $17 million sequel took about $30 million in its first weekend, running Thor: The Dark World close for the top spot.
Q 04In The Best Man Holiday, the four friends lip-sync a dance routine to which New Edition ballad?
Can You Stand the Rain
Can You Stand the Rain. The men mime the 1988 hit at a pyjama party, and the fun goes some way to patching up the old quarrel between Lance and Harper.
Q 05Which actor plays widowed patriarch Walter Meyers in the 2016 family comedy Almost Christmas?
Danny Glover
Danny Glover. His widower gathers four grown children for their first Christmas since his wife died and asks only that they get through five days under one roof.
Q 06Which Grammy-winning singer was a producer of Netflix's 2020 musical Jingle Jangle?
John Legend
John Legend. He joined the film's writer-director as a producer, on a story first planned as a stage show before it became a screen musical.
Q 07The Preacher's Wife (1996) remakes a 1947 Cary Grant film about an angel helping which clergyman?
A bishop
A bishop. In The Bishop's Wife the churchman prays for help funding a new cathedral, and Cary Grant's angel Dudley sets about mending his neglected family life instead.
Q 08Who directed The Preacher's Wife?
Penny Marshall
Penny Marshall. The director of Big filmed through a winter of heavy East Coast snow, yet when she took her cast to Maine for the ice-skating scene the ice melted and the crew had to make fake snow.
Q 09Which Whitney Houston single from The Preacher's Wife soundtrack reached number four on the Hot 100?
I Believe in You and Me
I Believe in You and Me. The Four Tops' original had stalled at number 40 on the R&B chart, and Houston's cover for the film carried the song into the pop top five.
Q 10In Last Holiday (2006), Queen Latifah's Georgia Byrd works in which department of a New Orleans store?
Cookware
Cookware is Georgia Byrd's department at Kragen's; a mistaken terminal diagnosis sends her off to spend her savings in Europe, and she comes home to open a restaurant of her own.
Q 11Which TV chef's recipes does Georgia Byrd lovingly recreate in Last Holiday?
Emeril Lagasse
Emeril Lagasse. Georgia makes his gourmet dishes and serves them to a neighbour without allowing herself a bite, and the chef turns up in person at the restaurant she finally opens.
Q 12In Friday After Next, a robber dressed as whom breaks into Craig and Day-Day's apartment?
Santa Claus
Santa Claus is the disguise of the burglar who breaks into Craig and Day-Day's apartment, making off with the presents and the rent money owed to landlady Ms. Pearly.
Q 13What jobs do Craig and Day-Day take on Christmas Eve in Friday After Next?
Security guards
Q 21In which city was 'This Christmas' recorded in the autumn of 1970?
Chicago
Chicago. The singer was born there and had moved back after college, and he cut the track at the city's Audio Finishers Studio with local musicians in the autumn of 1970.
Q 22Run-DMC's 1987 holiday single first appeared on which charity compilation?
A Very Special Christmas
A Very Special Christmas. The benefit album for the Special Olympics launched 'Christmas in Hollis', and a year later a limousine driver was playing the track in the opening scenes of Die Hard.
Q 23'Christmas in Hollis' samples 'Back Door Santa', a 1968 holiday song by which soul singer?
Clarence Carter
Security guards are what Craig and Day-Day become, patrolling a local shopping centre to earn back the stolen rent money; Ice Cube plays Craig and also wrote the screenplay.
Q 14Netflix's 2020 musical Jingle Jangle stars Forest Whitaker as which toymaker?
Jeronicus
Jeronicus Jangle, played by Forest Whitaker, is the once-celebrated toymaker whose inventions are stolen by his apprentice Gustafson, played by Keegan-Michael Key.
Q 15Which network premiered A Diva's Christmas Carol (2000), with Vanessa Williams as Ebony Scrooge?
VH1
VH1. The music channel premiered its Dickens update in December 2000, and its Ghost of Christmas Future arrives as a tiny television playing a bleak episode of the channel's own Behind the Music.
Q 16Which comedian plays Buddy, the bride's father-in-law, in Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas?
Larry the Cable Guy
Larry the Cable Guy. His Buddy arrives in Bucktussle, Alabama, and agrees to keep quiet about a marriage that the bride is hiding from her mother, Eileen.
Q 17The 2013 film Black Nativity, with Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett, is based on a 1961 play by whom?
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes. Kasi Lemmons's film follows a Baltimore teenager, himself named Langston, who is sent to spend Christmas in New York with the grandparents he has never known.
Q 18Who plays the rapper J-Jizzy in The Perfect Holiday (2007), the comedy narrated by Queen Latifah?
Charlie Murphy
Charlie Murphy plays the rapper J-Jizzy, whose ex-wife Nancy (Gabrielle Union) falls for Morris Chestnut's Benjamin, a songwriter trying to pitch J-Jizzy a Christmas song.
Q 19Who plays the drag queen title role in Showtime's Holiday Heart (2000)?
Ving Rhames
Ving Rhames plays Holiday Heart, a drag performer who takes in Alfre Woodard's struggling mother Wanda and her daughter Niki, in a TV film directed by Robert Townsend.
Q 20In Last Holiday, which rapper-actor plays Sean, the co-worker Georgia Byrd secretly pictures as her dream husband?
LL Cool J
LL Cool J. His Sean Williams flies to Europe after learning of Georgia's diagnosis and ends up hiking through the snow to reach her hotel when an avalanche blocks the road.
Clarence Carter. His song gave Run-DMC their hook, though the group had at first refused to make a Christmas record at all and gave in only when their publicist, Bill Adler, pitched the idea.
Q 24Which blues singer and pianist wrote and recorded 'Please Come Home for Christmas' in 1960?
Charles Brown
Charles Brown. His single stalled at number 76 on the pop chart, yet it kept coming back at Christmas and topped Billboard's Christmas singles chart in 1972, twelve years after he recorded it.
Q 25Johnny Moore's Three Blazers recorded the 1947 original of which R&B holiday standard?
Merry Christmas Baby
Merry Christmas Baby. By his own account the trio's singer and pianist reworked it from a song by Lou Baxter, who needed the advance for a throat operation, yet the writing credit went to Baxter and Johnny Moore.
Q 26Which singer made the original 1953 recording of 'Santa Baby'?
Eartha Kitt
Eartha Kitt. Joan Javits and Philip Springer wrote the tongue-in-cheek wish list for her, and it became a holiday hit and the song most tied to her name.
Q 27Who first recorded 'The Christmas Song', in 1946?
Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole. His trio cut the song twice in 1946, and it was the second take, with a small string section added, that became the hit; he recorded it again in stereo in 1961.
Q 28'The Christmas Song' was written during a heatwave in July 1945 by Robert Wells and which singer?
Mel Tormé
Mel Tormé. He and lyricist Robert Wells finished the song in under an hour on a sweltering July day, after Wells jotted down wintry images to take his mind off the heat.
Q 29Which Motown team wrote the Jackson 5's "Give Love on Christmas Day", "I Want You Back" and "ABC"?
The Corporation
The Corporation. Berry Gordy formed the four-man team in 1969 and credited it under one name because he wanted no more 'back room superstars' like Holland-Dozier-Holland, who had quit the label.
Q 30Bass singer Melvin Franklin signs off a 1980 'Silent Night' with a 'Merry Christmas' from which Motown group?
The Temptations
The Temptations. Their recording became a fixture of R&B radio every December: sixteen years later Billboard named it the most popular holiday title on those stations.