Blackadder's Christmas Carol, and if we're including New Year in the holiday season, Blackadder Back and Forth.
3. Seinfeld, "The Strike"
The episode that gave us Festivus for the rest of us! My friends and I actually observe this fake holiday, and "the airing of grievances" has become one of our favorites.
2. Twilight Zone, "Night of the Meek"
The best and wierdest Santa Claus story ever. If you haven't seen it, you really REALLY need to.
1. M*A*S*H, "Death Takes a Holiday"
This is probably the best episode of the whole series. The crew of the 4077th entertain a bunch of local orphans, which adds some much-needed levity to the main plot: BJ, Hoolahan, and Hawkeye work to save the life of a soldier so that his family won't think of Christmas as the day their father died.
These are all wonderful things, but episodes from existing series and movies were excluded by the OP criteria.Otherwise I go with It's a Wonderful Life.
I don't see what is odd about it. The 'TV Special' is a type of entertainment product familiar to most westerners who grew up from the 1950s to the end of network tv prominence. These tend to congregate around holidays, with the OP's timeframe limitations approximating what growing up I would have called the Year-end or Christmas-and-Christmas-adjacent holidays. This is a discrete conceptual thing (if hard to capture in a simple phrase), and OP wants to know which ones are our favorites.It's an oddly narrow set of criteria…
It's an oddly narrow set of criteria…
I don't see what is odd about it. ...
Of things not yet mentioned, I would add A Garfield Christmas (which is separate from the Saturday morning cartoon of the 80s) is surprisingly poignant.
Here's the thing about The Year Without A Santa Claus - everyone remembers the Heat Miser/Snow Miser thing (which is fantastic!) but the rest of the show is really bad. There's a reason everyone remembers Heat Miser and Snow Miser.Year Without a Christmas seems to be very popular with the memes these days, quoting the Snow Miser/Heat Miser songs.
... retort to anyone who claims Garfield is boring because he only eats lasagna and hates Mondays.