While I agree with the takes about the McAllister family being horrible rich bastards with nary a decent person among them (arguably the closest would be the mother? And even then she has raised her kids allowing a bullying piece of shit like Buzz to grow up like that) and Kevin going a little bit too far into psychopathy during HA2, I'd like to offer a very personal counterpoint. It doesn't really contradict anything you've said in your OP, or what other people have said in this very thread.
It's just a post about why Home Alone 2 (both movies actually, but HA2 especially) has a particular place in my heart despite all the very valid criticism levied at it. I think I said more or less the same last year, around the same date, but it's applicable anyway.
It's all about context, really. I was a kid born during the latter part of the 80s who not only had lived his short life in a Southern Hemisphere country (which meant xmas happened right after the official start of the summer), but also lived in a small town right in the middle of the
driest desert in the world, a place that gets basically a couple of days with soft precipitation *a year*, and in which the main difference between summer and winter is mostly that winter gets far colder during the early morning and twilight hours, and there's like a bunch of cloudy days in winter and that's it.
So considering that, considering that the bunch of christmases I had known so far consisted in heat, dry land and definitely no reindeer (except for plush toys) and that the only time in *decades* that my hometown had received snowfall had coincided with me being 2 years old and being incredibly sick (which meant I could only watch the snow from *inside* the house), the idea of a "white christmas" was something you could never get at all. Literally impossible in that part of the world.
Enter Home Alone 2. I dunno why it resonated with me so much at first but I think I've started to understand why with the passage of time - what HA2 showed me was what "Christmas" was "supposed" to be like. Not the ridiculously cartoonish slapstick violence, obviously (which I enjoyed in the same way I enjoyed Looney Tunes stuff as a kid) or the fact that Kevin's family was incredibly shitty (something I realized even as a kid), but the way it all... looked. The atmosphere. The snow, the coldness, the way the houses were all decked full with decorations and lights, and the way it all seemed to radiate a *warmth* inside the cold that it wasn't even possible where I lived. It was a different kind of cold and a different kind of warmth.
And then... New York. It was as far removed from my shitty little hometown as Pluto is from Earth. It was immense, sprawling, impossibly tall, with buildings that blot out the sun and streets filled with snow and christmas lights and everything I didn't know I wanted but I knew it felt "right". It's everything I couldn't have. And, oh boy, that toy store... imagine my heartbreak knowing it wasn't a real place after all. But my kid mind loved that place, and wanted so much to be there and get lost there for an entire afternoon.
Still, those images meant so much to me. It was the vision of how it "should" be. In my hometown I'd never see something like this.
And, you know, the music...
this piece by the Maestro John Williams always transports me, mentally and emotionally, back to "that place", a mythical/ideal christmastime NYC, where I'm a kid again, watching everything in awe.
So, yeah, despite all the very valid criticism (it's a rehash of the first movie, it's too violent, everybody's a PoS, and so on), there's something about HA2 that tugs at my heartstrings and makes me feel longing - for an ideal and a concept that probably doesn't really exist (or, at least, it does in a very different way), but also for something I felt and loved and wanted as a kid.