The Best Holiday Episodes From Popular TV Shows

The annual holiday season certainly can be fun, merry, and bright. But at the same time, the year's most festive few months can be pretty difficult, which means there's plenty of material that writers can use in scripts for TV shows. Between comedies and dramas, TV series have been mining the holidays for quite some time. After all, the holidays are a universal experience, from wild family feuds to those last-minute mad-dashes for gifts. 

And for just that reason, some of television's best episodes have been based on holiday experiences, whether they're about the more relatable moments or totally absurd incidents. But which episodes are the cream of the holiday crop? Which ones put a smile on your face during the holiday season and deserve a rewatch every single year? Well, from Christmas and Thanksgiving to Festivus and Chrismukkah, here are the very best holiday episodes of popular TV shows.

Many TV shows create their own unique holidays, and 30 Rock is no exception. In season two, we're introduced to "Ludachristmas," a deranged, debauched party concocted by the fictional TGS writing team — one that ends up thwarted by do-gooder page Kenneth (Jack McBrayer). In the same episode, NBC executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) must face off against his formidable mother, Colleen (the late Elaine Stritch). 

As the episode kicks off, Colleen unexpectedly arrives in New York despite initially finding herself at the heart of a Florida hurricane, much to Jack's chagrin. Before too long, Colleen meets Liz Lemon's (Tina Fey) plucky, cheerful family, and she immediately sees through the cracks, vowing to Jack that she'll break them yet. Sure enough, after a short lunch with the Lemons, the normally happy family ends up at each other's throats, grappling with revelations about Liz's brother (Andy Richter) and his longtime head injury, as well as Liz's parents' real feelings about her stint on the high school football team. No matter how much you like your family, anyone can enjoy a half hour about how every family is damaged in their own way, and watching Stritch gleefully torment normal people is a twisted delight.

One of the longest-running and most underrated shows in television history, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has carved out a place as one of the most deranged and bizarre shows on television, featuring a main cast of five degenerates — Charlie (Charlie Day), Mac (Rob McElhenney), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), "Sweet" Dee (Kaitlin Olson), and Frank (Danny DeVito) — who operate a bar in Philadelphia. "The gang" always seems to have a new scheme, and in "A Very Sunny Christmas," one of their lone holiday episodes, it's obvious that the year's most festive season is no exception.

This double episode, which aired during Sunny's sixth season, features some of the show's most unforgettable and bizarre moments, even reverting to stop-motion animation in the middle, which is preceded by a sequence where Frank emerges from the inside of a couch, nude and covered in oil. Plus, there's an earth-shattering revelation that Charlie's mother might've worked as a prostitute during his childhood. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia might not seem like the usual Yuletide fare, but watching Charlie verbally abuse a mall Santa is a delight at any time of year.

During its momentous run from 1989 to 1998, Seinfeld introduced plenty of catchphrases and terms into the cultural lexicon, from "close talkers" and "double dipping" to "re-gifting" and "spongeworthy." However, few have left quite as firm of an impression as Festivus, the holiday "created" by George Costanza's (Jason Alexander) bombastic father in a tenth season episode called "The Strike." Festivus actually existed before this Seinfeld episode and had been created by writer Daniel O'Keefe, but his son, Dan O'Keefe, wrote the holiday into this episode, which truly made it famous.

Though the title of the episode refers to a strike executed by Kramer (Michael Richards), it probably should've been called "The Festivus," since Frank Costanza's (Jerry Stiller) signature holiday — a rebuttal to the capitalist Christmas — ultimately steals the show. Rather than a Christmas tree, you'll want to secure a stark metal pole to celebrate Festivus, which pairs perfectly with traditions like "airing of grievances" and "feats of strength." Years after the episode aired, Festivus has become entirely real, is constantly referenced during the holiday season, and is even celebrated by those who, like Frank, want an alternative to Christmas.

Of course The Office has more than one great Christmas episode. Coming in season three, "A Benihana Christmas" was directed by the late, great Harold Ramis, and it finds that Michael Scott is often at his funniest when he's heartbroken. After his girlfriend, Carol (Carell's real-life wife Nancy Wells), dumps him over a creepy Photoshop incident, Michael is left bereft, looking for any unlucky woman to accompany him on a trip to Sandals in Jamaica. He and Andy Bernard (Ed Helms), one of the office's newest transfers, hit up a Benihana looking for love in all the wrong places, which goes exactly as well as you might expect.

Back at the titular office, war is brewing between Angela's (Angela Kinsey) tightly run Party Planning Committee and the unexpected duo of Pam and Karen (Rashida Jones), who team up despite the fact that Karen, another transfer, is dating Jim, whom Pam clearly loves. Throw in a classic prank on Dwight where Jim and Pam manage to convince him to wait on the building's roof for a CIA "recruitment helicopter" that never arrives, and you've got yet another amazing Office Christmas party.

Throughout its nine-season run, How I Met Your Mother created an incredible amount of long-running gags, and one of its funniest and most successful was the "Slap Bet," based around a second season bet between Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Marshall (Jason Segel) over Robin's (Cobie Smulders) secret past. Once it turned out that she was a teenage pop star in Canada, Barney, who assumed a much dirtier outcome, lost the bet, and agreed to endure five slaps from Marshall spread out across eternity. Unfortunately for him, Marshall decided that Thanksgiving would feature one of those slaps alongside turkey and stuffing.

Barney's fate was revealed in HIMYM's third season episode, "Slapsgiving," which revolved almost entirely around Marshall's countdown to slap Barney during a Thanksgiving hosted by Marshall and his wife Lily (Alyson Hannigan). In the midst of all this, Robin and Ted (Josh Radnor) are still grappling with their recent breakup alongside Robin's new boyfriend, and the impending slap almost ruins the entire day, but in the end, Marshall gets to deliver his third slap, accompanied with a song, "You Just Got Slapped." From Marshall torturing Barney throughout the day to Ted and Robin making amends, the episode perfectly shows how dramatic a typical Thanksgiving can be, even among friends.

Led by Jon Hamm as Don Draper, the fraudulent yet insanely successful Manhattan ad executive navigating life and love throughout the 1960s, Mad Men became one of the most perfect TV shows and one of the most important prestige series of the 21st century. But while Mad Men often focused on real-life events, like the Kennedy assassination and the rise of the Beatles, it rarely focused on holidays. However, the show made an exception for the season five episode "Christmas Waltz," which finds the employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce — the fledgling ad company comprised of the series' main characters — struggling to land a high-profile account with Jaguar. And in one of the most emotional moments of the season, Don and Joan (Hendricks) spend some time before Christmas commiserating over Joan's imminent divorce, showing that Don truly cares about his friends and colleagues and that he'll stand by their side in the toughest of times.

Throughout the years, there have been plenty of beloved television comedies, but few have stood the test of time as well as Cheers. The story of a group of bartenders and barflies who frequent one particular Boston bar, Cheers holds up spectacularly well, and it gave the world stars like Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, and more, setting a standard for sitcoms that future shows tried to match for years to come.

Cheers had plenty of holiday episodes, but its defining one was "Thanksgiving Orphans. During the episode, the regular group at the bar realizes that none of them have family plans for Thanksgiving, so they try to pull together a holiday gathering among themselves, which immediately devolves until the food is cold and inedible, leading to a raucous food fight. Only the Cheers gang could pull off an episode like this and still remain lovable, which is a testament to the show's overall quality and legacy.

Ever since the success of Friends, networks have been desperate to replicate the lightning in a bottle effect of this ensemble comedy, so it makes sense that it would boast plenty of outstanding holiday episodes. With a cast that included huge stars like Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer, Friends succeeded thanks to the chemistry and talent of its lead actors, and they always shined in the show's holiday episodes.

If you're thinking of Friends' quintessential holiday episode, you might immediately think of "The One with All the Thanksgivings," but in terms of the series' holiday episodes, "The One with the Holiday Armadillo" reigns supreme. When Ross (Schwimmer) feels like his son, Ben (played by Riverdale's Cole Sprouse), is too attached to Christmas and hasn't experienced any Jewish holiday traditions, he inexplicably creates a new holiday mascot that he calls the Holiday Armadillo. During all of this, Phoebe spends the episode trying to trick Rachel into living with her again, while Chandler dresses as Santa to impress Ben while also battling a restaurant hostess for a timely table. All in all, it's a particularly excellent half hour of Friends, themed around the difficulties of the holiday season.