Ah, 'tis the season... OK, if you've been listening to the radio or watching TV, it's been "the season" since late October, because it seems that there are more and more Christmas specials these days. Hallmark has made a meme out of churning out generic Christmas movie after Christmas movie, and I'm almost expecting some big-city successful woman to show up in my small town, fall for me and learn the real meaning of Christmas. (A guy can dream.)
Now a few of these have become mainstays of the Christmas special "canon," if you will. A Charlie Brown Christmas and the 1966 version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! have rightfully earned their place as perennials in the Christmas lineup, and Rankin-Bass's specials, thanks to some shrewd licensing, have made household names out of Rudolph and Frosty if they weren't already. The millennial generation grew up with Jim Carrey's version of The Grinch (which despite its mediocre backstory was made worthwhile by Carrey's equally manic and curmudgeonly tour de force performance) and Will Ferrell's Elf. We have Ted Turner to thank for remembering "you'll shoot your eye out!" as he was the one who put Jean Shepherd's semi-fictionalized paean to pre-World War II America, A Christmas Story, on cable repeatedly every Christmas. (If you really want to stretch the definition, I'll include Die Hard, a Christmas movie for people who don't like Christmas movies.)
But even so, even with over a month of space to program, there have been a few holiday specials that, for some reason or another, have fallen through the cracks—either nobody bothered to renew the rights, or they just didn't hold up to the test of time as some of the others I mentioned. This thread is devoted to some of those oddities: some good, some bad.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Briefing Room, I submit for your consideration...
Forgotten Christmas Classics.