Scooby Doo Holiday Episodes
Specific episodes featured on Netflix, Hulu, Max, Prime Video, Tubi, Youtube
That’s Snow Ghost: The gang encounters a Snow Ghost while at a resort on a ski trip. They encounter an old man who explains it’s the ghost of a Yeti who wants revenge.
Snow Job Too Small: Shaggy, Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo are tasked with bringing a child named Wilbur to his uncle’s house so he can receive his inheritance before the clock strikes midnight. However, they soon find themselves being pursued by the Abominable Snowman who doesn’t want them getting there.
There’s No Creature Like Snow Creature: The gang travels to a mountain resort to watch a snowboarding competition. But when Velma gets sick and Fred gets injured, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby have to investigate the rumors of a snow creature attacking participants.
Watching Mystery Inc. solve mysteries is always entertaining, and their holiday episodes are no exception. If you want to add some playful fear to your holiday break or just catch up on a childhood show, these episodes are a great pick.
Hanukkah TV Specials
Specific episodes featured on Hulu, Max, Paramount +, Youtube,
A Rugrats Chanukah (“Rugrats”): In typical “Rugrats” fashion, this holiday special follows the central characters and their wacky antics, including Grandpa Boris getting involved in a synagogue play about Hanukkah, the babies wanting to defeat the “Meany of Hanukkah” for Boris, and many other fun and festive moments.
The One With the Holiday Armadillo (“Friends”): Ross invents the Holiday Armadillo, and a complementary striking costume, to educate his son Ben on Hanukkah’s history and traditions.
Heck of a Hanukkah (“Even Stevens”): Louis Stevens cannot wait to get his eight days of Hanukkah presents, so he sneaks them upstairs and out his bedroom window to open them, but they break on the way down, and of course he gets grounded for it. He feels guilty and wishes for a world where he isn’t born, but the spirit of his great great great great grandmother shows him the world where this is true. This episode is a comedic parody of It’s a Wonderful Life.
Merry Christmas by Mariah Carey
Spotify
Released in 1994, this album features ten songs, a mix of originals and covers. This album is also the second best selling Christmas album in the U.S., right behind “Elvis’s Christmas Album” by Elvis Presley.
Mariah Carey’s Christmas album obviously has one of the most popular holiday songs of all time, “All I Want For Christmas is You”, but the album’s assortment of covers of well known holiday songs and original Mariah Carey debuts makes it worth listening the whole way through.
Christmas Hits
Spotify
Composed by the app Spotify, this all-essential album is all one needs to audibly experience the holiday, with a variety of tracks spanning from the mid 1900’s to today. In total, this album has 92 of the most influential and iconic Christmas songs, encompassing 4 hours and 15 minutes.
Frosty the Snowman
Prime Video, Hulu, Youtube
A magic top hat brings Frosty the Snowman to life, but a magician named Professor Hinkle wants it back. The children who created Frosty need to dodge Professor Hinkle, avoid warm temperatures and get Frosty back to the North Pole, or he will no longer be a jolly soul.
The original song by Perry Como inspired the short film, which has now become a beloved and iconic Christmas watch.
A Charlie Brown Christmas
Apple TV
First aired in 1965, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is a Christmas classic sure to invoke nostalgia and cheer alike. Not unlike the other Charlie Brown specials, this thirty minute cartoon follows the festive antics and hijinks of the iconic Peanuts characters Most notably, it features Charlie Brown picking out a humorously pitiful Christmas Tree. The score of the special, composed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, is as integral in invoking the holiday spirit as the rest of the cartoon, and by proxy has cemented “A Charlie Brown Christmas” as a staple of the season.
How To Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow
Barnes & Noble
Published in November, 2022, How To Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow is about a Jewish lesbian named Shani Levine, who has decided to spend her first college winter break on a paleoichthyology (the study of prehistoric fish and their fossils) internship. After almost running over a girl named May with her car, the two are continually brought together again in a series of ironic twists. This novel is a thoughtful and humorous twist on the traditional Christmas-romcom genre through a Jewish lens, and filled to the brim with queer culture and corgi jokes. Don’t let the lighthearted romance fool you though; “How To Excavate a Heart” explores the ramifications and heartbreak of first love with a beautiful realism too.
A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore
View for free on Poetry Foundation Website
“A Visit from St. Nicholas”, commonly referred to as “The Night Before Christmas,” is an iconic short poem that follows Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, as he flies his reindeer over the sky delivering presents to all the houses below him.
This poem was the birth of the line, “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”, but the rest of it is also a great read with lots of descriptions and stories about the traditions of Christmas.
