Favorite Christmas Specials

Christmas specials are a part of the holiday season for most people.  Those with cable or satellite often catch them on regular broadcast.  Some have extensive collections of holiday specials.  In our home, we don't have any of that.  My ex really wasn't a fan of Christmas in any way, shape, or form and didn't even want me decorating.  As time went on, things changed.  I've become more and more in tune with Christmas with each passing year.  That means picking out my favorite Christmas specials, even if I can't get my hands on all of them right away.

When I was growing up there were a lot of diverse specials.  Some were religious, others weren't.  Some were live action.  There were animated ones and ones with puppets.  Many of them you won't see today.  There are a million Christmas specials out there for every channel imaginable, and a huge number of "made for TV" movies.  A lot of the older classics with their poorer production quality have become forgotten or replaced with something a little more modernized.

For me, the most memorable Christmas special of all time was a recording off the television that my mom had made years ago.  For the longest time no one I knew had ever seemed to have seen it.  I remember watching it several times a year because we thought it was so funny.  The move I'm talking about is A Muppet Family Christmas.  There's nothing like combining the many directions of Jim Henson's work.  The Muppets show up, of course, and they Fozzy's mom's house, which Doc and Sprocket from Fraggle Rock are renting out for the holidays.  Then the monsters and animals of Sesame Street drop by as carolers.  Even the Fraggles make an appearance.  It's been my all-time favorite story for years.

Of course, I'll never forget the year my uncle and aunts took my sister and me to see The Muppet Christmas Carol.  I didn't expect it to be much.  I'd seen a whole bunch of other versions and as much as I was excited to see this one, I already knew the story.  How much new and different could you do with it?  However, this quickly became my favorite version for it's sense of humor and creativity.  On top of that, it has Bean from The Tale of the Bunny Picnic , which was also a childhood favorite of mine.  This has become a family classic, something we can't wait to watch every year.

There's also another unknown Muppet classic that I adore every Christmas, but haven't seen in years.  It's not your typical Muppet movie, with all your favorite cast and crew.  It only features Kermit for a few minutes in the beginning, and again at the end, but my sister and I used to watch this movie as many times as we could each year, until we drove my mother nuts, I'm sure!  Our absolute all time favorite as kids was Jim Henson's The Christmas Toy.  There's nothing to inspire a child like a story where their toys come to life and they learn about love, friendship, and the holiday spirit.


Another movie I loved and was starting to think I made up entirely can be found in the two disk double feature (conveniently two more of my favorite movies),The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Nestor the Christmas Donkey.  The first is a story about the counsel of immortals deciding whether or not to grant Claus, who grew up in the valley of the immortals and was later sent to face life in the mortal world, immortality for his good deeds.  It's a little sad as Claus will die that night if they don't grant him immortality.  The counsel of immortals was always a little scary to me when I was a child because they're a strange looking lot, especially the creepy wind guy.  The Great Ak, the head of the counsel and the one who brings Claus out into the world is a great old wizard like guy with two giant antlers on his head.  Looking back now the Pagan imagery is just fantastic!  On top of that, the story of how Claus got his start is pretty fantastic too.  He made the first ever toy for an orphan that liked his little cat so much.  The trend caught on, so he began to make and deliver toys to everyone.  Originally it was a lioness (probably a mountain lion?) the one that raised him, that pulled the cart for him to deliver his toys, and he actually had an adversary, trolls, that didn't want him delivering the toys because they believed in living off the villager's fear.  I didn't realize it until I was older, but the Norse mythological imagery included in this film is absolutely fantastic!  It's a refreshing break from the typical view of Santa Claus.

Pairing that with a very Christian film may seem like an odd combination to me, but Nestor was always one of my favorites come Christmas time.  He was a cute little donkey with long ears that tripped him up all the time.  His mother died to save his life, and a little cherub came down from the heavens to guide him where he needed to go.  As it turns out, Nestor, with his long and clumsy ears, was the perfect donkey to carry Mary to Bethlehem.  He wrapped her up in his long ears to protect her from the wind and desert sands.  He's always been one of my favorite Christmas characters, in part because a creature that's so flawed actually finds that his biggest flaw turns out to be the perfect trait that would allow him to do something so incredibly important.  He was chosen above all the other normal donkeys because he was different and special.  On top of that, it's incredibly sweet that it all starts out with a little nativity set up inside Santa's stable.  It was a wonderful link between the standard holiday classics and this wonderful story.

Of course, there are tons of holiday specials out there.  I'm sure there's so many at this point that you could watch ten of them every day from the first day of December until Christmas and still never repeat a viewing! Even so, some classics will always hold a place in my heart.  Over they years I'm going to start collecting all my favorites.  I can't wait to share them with my kids.  It'll be so nice when we can have our own Christmas Movie Night with friends and family like my aunt does back home.  It's just one more way we can bring a little piece of my family holidays and traditions down here to Texas.