Ariana Grande Hosts ‘SNL’ for the Third Time: All 9 Sketches Ranked

Ariana Grande hosted SNL for a third time, starring in seven sketches that made it to air, plus two bonus sketches cut for time — but fortunately uploaded to YouTube — Saturday night (Dec. 20). The 2025 Christmas episode of Saturday Night Live featured Cher as musical guest, and it also wound up being Bowen Yang’s last day as a cast member at Studio 8H.

Grande’s latest appearance on the late-night comedy series had her supporting her friend Yang through an emotional exit from the show. Throughout a total of nine sketches, she also played an abused Elf on the Shelf, Kevin McCallister in an R-rated Home Alone, an eccentric dance teacher, Katy Perry and Celine Dion, a judge who believes her case’s defendant is actually Santa, and a contestant in a Love Is Blind reunion special. She was the star of both a PSA on the dangers of espresso martinis and a commercial hawking the saddest last-minute Christmas trees that you ever did see.

Live from New York, Grande kicked her night off with a musical monologue set to the familiar melody of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

Her version of the holiday classic had her singing her way through shopping stress as Christmas Day with distant companions of distance relatives nears: “I don’t know what to get for Christmas/ For my cousin’s boyfriend Steve/ I don’t know a thing about him/ Only see him on Christmas Eve/ My cousin says that he’s her rock/ But I’ve never heard him talk/ Is a gift card rude?/ What do I get for Christmas for this dude?”

Besides being a three-time SNL host — on the episodes airing March 12, 2016; Oct. 12, 2024 (see Billboard‘s sketch rankings from that episode here), and now Dec. 20, 2025 — Grande’s twice been booked as musical guest only. Though not all musical guests are written into sketches, she rightly was both of those times (Sept. 27, 2014; March 9, 2024).

Here’s a ranking of every scene Grande was in on Saturday night, when she hosted SNL‘s Dec. 20 episode. Watch all nine sketches below.