These Are The Top Bob's Burgers Holiday Episodes According To Fans

Every holiday season, Bob's Burgers gives us one of the best presents of all: a delightfully quirky, wholesome, and amusing half hour of television. Or course, during the regular season of the show, we get this gift every week, but it's especially exciting to see what kinds of escapades the writers will build around the theme of a particular holiday. For middle-class families like the Belchers, these celebratory occasions are ripe for odd shenanigans. From pinching pennies to cooking turkeys, the Belchers take the quintessential holiday experience of the everyday American family and make it at equally relatable and absurd.

The series rarely goes more all out, in both of these arenas, than it does in its seasonal episodes. The highest-rated episode of the show on IMDb is the 2015 Halloween special "The Hauntening," and many other holiday episodes enjoy top spots as well: the 15 8.1-and-above-rated episodes on this list are all in the top 50. What is it about each of these gems that makes them so special? 'Tis the season to find out.

Instead of revolving specifically around Christmas and the hijinks that often accompany the holiday, "Better Off Sled" is a Christmas episode that, initially, seems to center around the exact opposite of the Christmas spirit: hatred. The chief antagonist of this episode, teenage bully Logan Bush, has been built up as Louise's archnemesis since Season Three. After Logan and his friends take over the Belchers' usual sledding spot, the kids recruit Regular Sized Rudy's cousin Mandy, the pitcher on the high school softball team whom Logan used to bully, too.

As with most episodes of Bob's Burgers, this one offers a bit of affectionate exposition through gentle vulnerability. We see Rudy's hope that he will eventually grow as big as his cousin (though he topples over when she high-fives him). On Bob and Linda's side, Linda teaches Bob to knit so she can help her complete three scarves in time for Christmas, only to find out to her chagrin that he's a natural, knitting two perfect scarves in the time it takes her to complete a haphazard one... But the kids fall in love with Linda's imperfect scarf anyway.

By the time we get to season ten, Bob's complicated relationship with Thanksgiving is pretty familiar to the audience, and all too familiar to him. As a cook by trade, Bob sees the Thanksgiving turkey dinner as a source of tremendous pride, but life often gets in the way. The misfortunes of "Now We're Not Cooking With Gas" should be pretty self-explanatory: Bob comes into possession of a rare heritage turkey (he's been on the waitlist for years), but the gas goes out on Thanksgiving. Not to be deterred, or at least not to admit it, Bob constructs a makeshift spit in an alley.

What's truly impressive about this episode is that Bob's demented pursuit of the perfect turkey is a storyline that can still make us laugh after 10 seasons. It's ironic in that Bob does accomplish this after all, but not through his own obsessive efforts: It's only because he accidentally knocks the turkey onto the fire, burning it badly on the surface but cooking it perfectly underneath.

Bob's Burgers is well-known for extremely popular holiday episodes, and although only one Easter episode has aired so far, it kept up that tradition. "Eggs for Days" rests, as such episodes often do, on the Belcher parents' overzealous holiday shenanigans. This time, it's the intensely competitive orchestration of an Easter egg hunt for the kids: The last parent with an egg yet to be found is declared the winner.

But Bob and Linda get a little too tipsy the night before, and on Easter, they can't remember where the final egg has been (apparently very) well-hidden. No one is a winner here, though, because the egg quickly starts to rot and stink (though as fans aptly pointed out, a hard-boiled egg wouldn't start to smell so bad right away). Eventually, the putrid egg is adopted by a family of raccoons, which means we get to revisit the crawlspace Bob knows so well from when he hid there from Linda's parents in season one.

We all know the Belchers have terrible luck on Thanksgiving, but in season four, we see that bad Thanksgiving luck translate into a Christmas misadventure. The family is forced to search for another Christmas tree right at the last minute because the first one died on Thanksgiving and the second one died on Christmas Eve. If you think you smell a curse, you might be right: "Christmas in the Car" is another example of the classically creepy Bob's Burgers take on the nativity season.

After picking up the tree, the Belchers narrowly miss a collision with a candy-cane-shaped semi. Linda plays "Jingle Bells" on the car's horn in an attempt to spread holiday cheer, an adorably characteristic misguided notion that only serves to irritate the other driver. The truck drives off, but actually lies in wait and stalks them through the night. The tension is heightened by goofy but lovable antics such as Gene running down his cell phone battery while waiting on hold to request "Jingle in the Jungle" on the radio. Christmas carols do seem to bring bad luck rather than good cheer in this somewhat suspenseful holiday episode, and that's exactly the drama that makes it so fun to watch.

From what we've seen of Bob's love-hate relationship with Thanksgiving, doesn't it make sense that he would eventually swear it off forever? Well, in season five's Thanksgiving episode, "Dawn of the Peck," that's exactly what he does when his family decides they'd rather spend Thanksgiving at the new Turk-Tacular Turkey Town Festival. (Of course, his boycott is not actually permanent.)

Though Thanksgiving on Bob's watch does always seem to go off the rails, this episode suggests that his yearly misadventures should be the natural order of things. The Turk-Tacular Festival turns out to be a nightmare for everyone involved when there aren't enough turkeys for the Turkey Trot, a marathon where competitors run with turkeys, and the organizers of the festival enlist a bunch of random farm fowl to round out the roster. This throws the pecking orders of the suddenly intermingled bird communities into chaos, causing them to become unnaturally aggressive. What do we learn from this episode? As miserable as it may make him, Bob's ill-fated attempts at the perfect Thanksgiving may just be a law of nature, and like all laws of nature, it's best not to mess with it.

Millie Frock seems to obsess over and attempt to emulate Louise in every way, to the point of modeling her room exactly after Louise's, with all the same merchandise, though we don't know exactly how she broke into Louise's room in the first place. But as we see in "Fort Night," Millie has already surpassed her idol in one crucial area: Though Louise can sometimes come across as a sociopath, we know she cares for her family and friends. Millie, though, displays purely evil tendencies in this episode.

When the Belcher kids get stuck in an alley on Halloween after a loading truck backs up against their fort and parks for the night, Millie is the only one who hears their screams for help. If she were as truly cold as she herself might like to believe, Louise probably would have been able to contain her irritation at Millie's talkativeness long enough to secure her aid in their escape. Instead, Louise explodes and Millie quickly turns on her classmates, tormenting them in their prison all night. What follows is a surprisingly enthralling tale of manipulation, betrayal, insanity, and even a near-death experience: pretty impressive stuff for an episode that essentially takes place in a box.

In the second-most-popular holiday episode of this show, love is in the air — literally. "Bob Actually" shows us a set of storylines almost too ridiculous to be actually happening. Well, okay, it's actually pretty easy to believe that Bob would forget to get Linda a Valentine's Day present until the last minute. But everything else is just wacky in the best way, like Tina finally getting a kiss with Jimmy Jr. (a floating kiss, no less!) only to have the romance thwarted by the impending threat of diarrhea.

The show is near its most theatrical here because one of the plots revolves around Jimmy Jr., who perpetually acts like a showman (even if he will never learn to act like a man). This time around, he is bent on getting a "sky kiss," which is apparently a kiss in the air while bouncing on a huge trampoline. In the cafeteria, Gene has a weird flirtation with one of the lunch ladies, who is responsible for making chocolate pudding, so the bond is understandable. But the most unbelievable and heartwarming turn of events? Louise kisses Regular-Sized Rudy. (Of course, she slaps him afterward and tells him never to speak of it, which is much more on brand.)