A guide to the best Christmas TV episodes

The Christmas season is here, and you know what that means: TELEVISION. Because that's what everything means!

Seriously, Christmas specials are one of the key components of the Christmas season for me. There's something about the characters from my favorite shows indulging in yuletide cheer and getting festive that just...gets to me. So I've compiled a list of some of my favorite TV Christmas episodes. These are the episodes I typically have on repeat this time of year, so please enjoy them and do not shatter my soul by saying they suck.

Community - "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas"

Community might be the show with the best track record for Christmas episodes - gas leak year aside, every Christmas episode the show produced was a classic, from Season 1's heartfelt and down-to-earth "Comparative Religion" to Season 3's nightmare-inducing Glee parody "Regional Holiday Music". But I have a special place in my heart for "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas", which is not only my favorite Community Christmas episode but one of my favorite pieces of Christmas pop culture in general. "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" is simultaneously exploding with cheer and deeply depressing - which, to my mind, are the only two emotions that should ever be used when depicting the Christmas season. It follows Abed as he has a serious psychological breakdown after his mother tells him she won't be visiting him for Christmas anymore - he begins seeing his entire life as if it's a stop motion Christmas special where his only task is to find the true meaning of Christmas. The way his perplexed and worried friends put aside their hesitations and join him in his Christmas wonderland of delusion is completely heartwarming in a way that makes me tear up every time I watch this episode, and it also delivers perhaps the best "meaning of Christmas" I've ever been given: "the meaning of Christmas is the idea that Christmas has meaning." "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" is basically all of my tender, cynical, and painfully nostalgic about Christmas all wrapped up into a funny, heartwarming, slightly devastating and just all around beautiful half-hour of television. 

30 Rock - "Christmas Special"

30 Rock's approach to holiday cheer is to cynically expose some of the darker aspects of the holiday while mixing in few doses of the genuine pathos and comfort that the season can bring, which is exemplified well in plotlines like Colleen ruining Liz's Christmas to prove to Jack that she's not so screwed up after all, or a montage of Jenna and Paul dressed up as 2 "black Swans" singing O Holy Night. But the episode that nails this balance best is Season 3's "Christmas Special", which finds Jack accidentally running over his mother with his car and having to care for her through the holiday season. The entire episode is about people whose Christmases aren't lining up how they wanted them to and the ways they deal with it - Liz being left in the dust by her family this year results in her overcompensating with a Letters to Santa program, and Jack's unexpected holiday with his mother leads to him forcing the TGS crew to put together a live Christmas Eve special where he can make up for all of the Christmas Eves spent playing piano as his mother went to town on a random dude in their living room. But it's this haphazard special that leads to Liz helping Jack realize that the reason her mother spent Christmas Eve putting out was so that him and his siblings could afford presents that year. It's the mix of sick, sweet, disturbing and heartwarming that 30 Rock portrayed so well in its Christmas episodes.

Parks & Recreation - "Citizen Knope"

"Citizen Knope" is more of a Christmas-adjacent episode than a full out Christmas episode, centering around Leslie's adventures as she deals with her suspension from city hall after the fallout of her relationship with Ben. But it still uses the season of giving to build a seriously heartwarming plotline in which the entire Parks departments gets together to show their support for Leslie and offer to take over her terminated City Council campaign, doing so in the form of an elaborate Gingerbread house. That's the entire spirit of Christmas distilled in one plotline right there, and it's also the spirit of Parks & Rec, whose shiny optimism that comes out of even the most unfortunate circumstances is a perfect fit for the Christmas season.

Bob's Burgers - "Christmas in the Car"

Bob's Burgers is a show that often puts our beloved Belcher clan in dire circumstances and than uses off-beat humor and surprising acceptance to get them out of it, and "Christmas in the Car" does that with a little Christmas sprinkle. The Belchers set out on Christmas Eve to find a new tree after their old one dies and wind up on a seemingly life-threatening chase by a giant Candy Cane truck. Of course, in typical Bob's fashion, everything gets a warm and mushy ending when Bob and the truck driver come to an understand and exchange dutch babies. Don't worry, it'll all make sense if you're a Bob's Burgers fan.

American Dad - "Rapture's Delight"

American Dad is sometimes unfairly accused of being a rip-off of Family Guy, which is totally unfair because it's way better than Family Guy has ever been. While Family Guy has devolved into a lazy conveyor belt of shock humor, American Dad at its best is a completely surreal, absurdist animated comedy that goes to weirder depths than nearly any non-Adult Swim show I've ever seen. "Rapture's Delight" is the perfect example of that, as it takes what seems like a normal Christmas episode and turns it into a story about the rapture, the antichrist, and Armaggedon. The extent the show commits to this is impressive enough, but the way they managed to interject the typical Christmas show sentiment without losing a touch of the extreme absurdity and darkness of the rapture is what makes this a true Christmas classic to be enjoyed through the ages.

Doctor Who - "A Christmas Carol"

Doctor Who airs a Christmas special on Christmas Day every year, but none of them are really true Christmas classics - if they're not dealing with a regeneration (as many of them do) then they're typically bland and watered down byproducts of the show itself, often placing easily marketable concepts and guest stars over anything resembling actual quality. (Remember the one where Kylie Minogue rode the Titanic?) But the one exception to this is 2010's "A Christmas Carol", the best Christmas special the show has ever produced by a long shot, and an episode that truly does feel like the holiday classic a Doctor Who Christmas special should aspire to be. The episode is a takeoff of, yes, A Christmas Carol, centering around the Doctor trying to change the childhood Christmases of an evil and powerful man named Kazran Sardick who is tasked with saving Amy and Rory's lives by releasing them from the cloud they're trapped on but refuse to do it. Doctor Who is at its best when it's able to mix its ambitious sci-fi concepts with deep-rooted human emotion, and this special truly shines in that regard, as the Doctor's travels through Sardick's past tap into some really heartbreaking and heavily nostalgic Christmas feelings for pretty much anyone who's ever been a child on Christmas before. Not every Doctor Who Christmas special meets the mark, but this one is so good it makes up for all of the other ones.

South Park - "Woodland Critter Christmas"

You know what this is. It is the most beautiful, fucked up, disturbing, horrifying Christmas special to ever air. Yes, I love Mr. Hanky too, but this is a work of dark art and it needs to be seen by all.