A Very Mary Sue Holiday: Our Alternative Holiday Special Picks to Make Your Season Weird

It’s Thanksgiving! The start of the holiday season! (For most people. I start mine on November 1, but not everyone’s into that for reasons lost on me.) Today, as you stuff your face full of all kinds of delicious food and get ready to knock down someone’s grandpa at Walmart at midnight, take a peek at our recommendations for your off-the-beaten-path, geeky, just plain weird, or all-of-the-above holiday viewing.

Let’s start with the Thanksgiving-themed stuff that you can enjoy with your loved ones today.

1. Addams Family Values‘ Thanksgiving play

You can watch this one right here!

Okay, so this is a Thanksgiving special that features a lot of white kids dressing up as indigenous people—as so many Thanksgiving specials unfortunately seem to include. But as far as specials go, this one’s still pretty subversive, not least because it features Wednesday Addams concluding the camp play by burning the Pilgrims’ feast to the ground. Spoiler alert, I guess? She recites a pretty epic monologue before doing the deed, so it’s well worth your watch.

2. Thankskilling

This one kinda defies explanation. Worth watching for the title alone, we say.

3. Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

That Peter Pan lookalike up above? That’s Santa Claus. Young Santa Claus. You may have thought gritty reboots were a new trend, but this one from 1985 got a head start on them all—and the book it’s based on came out in 1902.

There story features a weird council of … uh … Gods(?) and a random baby that will one day grow up to be Santa. Over the course of his life, he … essentially invents toys, Christmas, and battles evil forces—you know, Santa stuff—before he becomes an old man on the brink of death. At that point, there’s a debate over whether or not his contributions to humanity have been awesome enough for the Great Ak (?????) to bestow immortality upon him so he doesn’t have to die. No, it doesn’t make any more sense upon actually viewing it.

This. This is in a Christmas movie.

If you track this down and watch it, try to imagine being a child growing up thinking this is a regular Christmas movie that everyone watches. Why would I—er, someone, definitely not me—think something like that? Perhaps that person’s mom recorded it on VHS and played it every year, and that person was too young not to realize it wasn’t an annual TV tradition.

Please, share in my pain.

4. Star Wars Holiday Special

Here’s another one you can watch online, but you’ll have to head over to where it lives on YouTube, and to be honest, you may never return—not because you don’t love our site, but because the Star Wars Holiday Special may have melted your brain. This one may not seem too off-the-beaten-path, because it’s basically become a legend, but not many people have actually managed to sit down and watch it in its entirety. (Probably not a mistake on the part of those who created it.)

This year, enhance your Star Wars fan experience with the only part of the franchise that puts the prequels in a significantly better light.

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