Let's Talk About The Absolute Joy Of A TV Christmas Special

Christmas has thousands of traditions, but none seem to be as universally adored — and followed — like watching a television Christmas special with your family. From Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to streaming platforms categorizing all of the Christmas episodes of your favorite shows for easy watching, television has become an iconic part of our festivities.

What is it about a television Christmas special that gets us all in our feels? Even in a world where you can click buy or rent or play on nearly every piece of entertainment you can think of, there’s still something about gathering around the TV at 8 p.m. to watch a Christmas special the moment it airs. Some Christmas specials have taken on a life of their own, becoming huge pop culture moments that reverberate for decades, inspiring everything from ornaments and holiday decor to entire franchises (he’s a mean one, but The Grinch knows exactly what he’s doing).

Nostalgia is king of so many things, but it truly reigns supreme when it comes to our entertainment choices. And what’s more nostalgic than your favorite Christmas show?

Like so many of our favorite things about Christmas — stocking stuffers, Christmas trees, outdoor inflatables — Christmas specials owe a lot to good ol’ commercialism. (Yes, this is an argument we’ve been having since before Miracle on 34th Street in 1947.) Television took a minute to kick off, so Christmas radio specials were absolutely a thing, but after a 1962 NBC showing of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol had surprising success, advertisers were ready for more, Tim Stevens, a writer at Connecticut College and pop culture critic, tells me.

Advertisers and other networks were now looking for their own version of the holiday classic, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was next in 1964. “Rudolph essentially began his life as a piece of advertising, the star of a children’s book commissioned by the Chicago department store Montgomery Ward and written by one of its advertising employees, Robert L. May,” Stevens says. “The special was sponsored by General Electric and featured what we now think of as the ‘classic’ Santa Claus, actually a creation of Coca-Cola. So while a ton of talent and effort went into it, advertisers were in the mix, too.”

As a popular advertiser, Coca-Cola kept the hits coming with A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. But while this one’s considered an absolute classic these days, rumor has it the advertisers and networks weren’t exactly stoked about this one Christmas special. “Schultz, unsurprisingly, wasn’t interested in a happy-go-lucky Christmas special,” Stevens says. Network execs were convinced it would be a disaster because of many of Schultz’s creative choices, like a melancholy tone, the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack, using child actors for the voices, and a lack of a laugh track. “However, it was only finished less than two weeks before it was set to air, so they had to grin and bear it.”

The thing is, networks wanted Christmas specials that were upbeat and memorable, says Stevens. A Christmas special needed to pull in viewers, especially “during a time of year that was both very busy and largely devoid of original television programming because of breaks in production schedules.”

This could also explain why so many movies feel like “Christmas” movies to some — The Wizard of Oz was originally broadcast on television for the first time in November 1956. It was a huge TV event that drew high ratings, and because most people hadn’t seen the movie since it was first in theaters in 1939, it always felt like a big thing to sit down and watch. (And helped networks fill some major airtime.)

Because that’s the thing about a Christmas special: It’s a universal experience. And especially now, when everybody can watch exactly what they want at any time on any number of devices, there’s something so joyful about settling down with your family to watch a Christmas special all together, all at the same time. “Given the era they were conceived during — the early/mid-60s — the typical American household would only have one television, and for years, cable didn’t exist. So watching TV together as a family during the first hour of primetime was the norm,” Stevens says.

Christmas specials were also an easy way for television shows to slide in something memorable without a lot of extra work.

I asked Stevens specifically about the I Love Lucy Christmas special, which aired on Christmas Eve, 1956. It was one of my favorites as a kid, but it’s hard to find these days, and doesn’t show up in the episode line-ups on streaming platforms like Paramount+. It wasn’t a normal episode, although it did air on the normal Monday night scheduling of I Love Lucy. Stevens tells me that the I Love Lucy Christmas special was actually the first-ever clips episode of a sitcom — the episode is mostly made up of previous episodes as the Ricardos and Mertzes reminisce under the tree. It was an easy way for CBS to squeeze in something festive with their most iconic program, and it didn’t require a whole lot of extra work for the writers or actors as a winter filming hiatus began.

And hey, they knew the family was going to gather for I Love Lucy no matter what, right?

Because as much as a Christmas special is about money, Stevens acknowledges that networks have to — if they want to make money — give people what they want. “They saw families liked ‘events’ at the holidays that brought the family together for a watching experience and wanted to emulate that,” he says.

When you look at the Christmas specials, there’s so much work put into them to make them entertaining for the whole family. “The full orchestra in Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, the stop-motion animation in Frosty and Rudolph, real name voice talent like Boris Karloff (The Grinch), all the original music made for these specials, airing them during primetime — all of that points to a certain seriousness in the project and an expectation that parents would be watching them along with their kids,” Stevens says. And more adult-aimed Christmas specials or variety shows likely aired in later time slots, he adds.

And now, even with DVDs and streaming and cable television, families still gather for the absolute magic and joy of a Christmas special. Maybe you recorded it, maybe you bought it on Prime Video, maybe you found it on Paramount+ — but chances are, you aren’t watching it until you’re all together on the couch. Of course, nostalgia plays a huge factor. When I ask my grandmother about watching Rudolph now, she tells me it catapults her right back to being a young mother of two little boys, all the wonder and excitement of Christmas through their eyes hitting her again.

That kind of joy trickles down, generation by generation. When I think about my girls being obsessed with the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and Rudolph and Frosty, I think about how one day they might have children who will carry on the tradition. At some point, these specials will be 100 years old, and people will still keep watching them, a family tradition rooted in so deeply, they can’t remember which great-great-grandmother started the whole thing.

When we watch these specials, we catch a little bit of our parents and our grandparents and all the excitement and joy and hope they had for the holiday ahead. Even with all the work poured into these specials put aside, what we can see and feel when we rewatch them is love. Love for our grandparents who made sure kids were out of the tub by 8 p.m. so they could catch Rudolph. Love for a time where gratification was delayed, and there was magic in being there for something right when it happened. Love for a world that really isn’t all that different from ours today. We’re still worried about commercialism. We still say things like “back in the good ol’ days.” We still believe in traditions.

And we still believe in Christmas.