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That Christmas, with its spirit of giving, offers us all a wonderful opportunity each year to reflect on what we all most sincerely and deeply believe in.

I refer of course, to money.

- Tom Lehrer, A Christmas Carol

Sure no one ever goes to church or mentions a deity the rest of the year, but every now and again, around the start of winter, our heroes are shown the true meaning of Christmas (hint: it's never presents, well, not usually, but see below) and caring, and by golly gee, how darned lucky they really are. They may even go to a service, probably midnight.

Next week: more whining, angst, arguments and adultery.

Common subtropes are the Gift Of The Magi, Christmas Carol.

Every once in a while, a show will attempt to be "Religiously balanced" by doing a "True Meaning of Hanukkah" episode. These tend to feel painfully forced, as Hanukkah's religious significance isn't nearly on par with that of Christmas -- it just gets inflated importance in popular culture because it happens to fall in December. At the end of the TV movie The Hebrew Hammer, the titular Hammer brags to his mother that he's saved Hanukkah, and she isn't at all impressed -- it's not like he saved one of the high holy days.

But then again, perhaps You Mean Xmas.

The title of this trope is taken from the Band Aid song, "Do They Know It's Christmas?"

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Examples:

• The "So-Called Angels" episode of My So Called Life, which features a Waif Prophet if you count "dead" as a subcategory of "ill."
• The controversial episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer "Amends," in which Angel is saved by a miracle snow storm.
• While it was played fairly straight in the rest of the episode, one plot-line of the Justice League episode "Comfort and Joy" involved an alien bar fight.
  • Justified, as it's Hawkgirl, an alien and an atheist, who chooses that particular way of spending their day off. Christmas is just another paid vacation day for her.
• Subversion of the parenthetical note above: Dexters Laboratory had a Christmas short that ended with Dexter and Santa discussing what the holiday's really about. Dexter argues with the usual (family and things like that)... surprisingly, Santa says "No, (it's about) presents."
• This is the same conclusion reached by the kids in "The Spirit of Christmas," the short film that formed the basis of South Park.
• South Park also subverted the trope in the "Red Sleigh Down" episode; Santa Claus is taken prisoner in Baghdad and Jesus leads a commando mission to rescue him. Santa makes it out alive, but Jesus is shot and killed during the escape, which prompts Santa to give a conclusory speech about how Jesus died for him.
• The final episode of Invader Zim entitled "The Most Horrible X-Mas Ever" is a highly absurdist Christmas episode, ending millions of years in the future with a monstrous spider-like Santa Claus who returns to Earth having gathered power from being shot out into space by the show's protagonist.
• Spoofed in the two Christmas episodes of Futurama, "An Xmas Story" and "A Tale of Two Santas", in which everyone is terrorized by a robotic Santa Claus who judges everyone as naughty and attempts to kill them. At the end of the second, Fry comes to the conclusion that Christmas does bring everyone together... through fear of death.
• Note that in Japanese culture, and thus in anime, Christmas is a secular holiday that's about giving presents to other people and, if you're lucky, spending Christmas Eve with the one you love.
  • The Love Hina Christmas special focuses on Keitaro and Naru trying to meet up with each other while it is still Christmas Eve.
  • ...as does the Marmalade Boy Christmas episode.
  • ...and the one from Super Dimension Fortress Macross, only with the added complication of a Humongous Mecha attack.
  • On Vandread, Hibiki gives Dita the gift of Christmas snow, despite their position on a ship in deep space, by grabbing a chunk off a nearby comet with his Vanguard mecha.
  • The Big O episode "Daemonseed" takes place on "Heaven's Day", a day of gift-giving whose origins have been lost to the amnesiac residents of Paradigm City. At the end, Alex Rosewater says, "Tell me, Chief, do you know the real meaning behind Heaven's Day? It's the day God's son was born." Also, a Humongous Mecha fights a mutant Christmas tree.
    • This could be a subtle subversion, as later revelations about Rosewater indicate he was probably talking about himself.
  • More than once in the Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch manga, although in the anime, these episodes were all altered to remove the Christmas element. Oddly, the anime still put out Christmas merchandise with the girls in Santa suits.
  • Tokyo Mew Mew had a Christmas episode where Ichigo tries to give Masaya a magical piece of jewelry she got from Zakuro. He ends up in the hospital after being hit with an exploding Mew Aqua, setting up a plot point that was left unexplained in the manga, so this Christmas episode actually means something.
• The Discworld novel Hogfather spoofs the everloving hell out of this one. Most notably, when Death announces that, as the stand-in Hogfather he can teach people "the real meaning of Hogswatch", his assistant Albert helpfully lists the more unpleasant aspects of pagan solstice ceremonies. Death instead resolves to teach people "the unreal meaning of Hogswatch".
• Huey Freeman of The Boondocks is an inversion as he is seen to become even more cynical and cold around the holidays due to knowledge of the origin of all of the secular traditions and how bastardized the holiday really is.
• In spite of no one ever mentioning deities or religion of any kind (and the accusations of many Real Life Moral Guardians, despite the fact that the books are written by a Christian) in the highly supernatural world of Harry Potter, the entire wizarding world seems to keep Halloween, Christmas, and Easter.
• C.S. Lewis was a fairly inclusive fellow. While Narnia's creator Aslan is indisputably Jesus Christ as a huge talking lion, the world is also populated with various mythical figures. In later books, we would see Triton, Bacchus, and Silenus and their various nymph daughters tending to parts of the world. But in the first book, many was the child delighted to learn that Santa Claus visited Narnia as well as Earth for Christmas. The Narnians certainly had no complaints.
  • I guess what Lewis was saying was that it's fine for pagan deities to exist as long as they kowtow to the Christian God.
• Double Subversion in Scrubs, where Turk, who becomes suddenly very religious, vows to show the more cynical doctors the true meaning of Christmas... which, for doctors, turns out to be working all of Christmas Eve on call, treating victims of alcohol-fuelled violence, car crashes and suicides. Then, just when all hope is lost, a Christmas Miracle™! A star falls from the sky, allowing Turk to find the pregnant teenager who ran away earlier just before she goes into labour and everyone gathers round in the snow as Turk delivers a candy-cane sweet Golden Moment. Awww...
• The song A Christmas Carol by Tom Lehrer, as partially quoted above.
• East Enders is infamous for subverting this trope most years, by turning the usual tone of the series up to 11.

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