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redirected from Main.DoTheyKnowItsChristmasTime

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 (The whole story is rather long and complex, but in essence the "Miracle of Hanukkah," what is actually being celebrated as a mystical and holy event, is not the miraculous triumph against an overwhelmingly powerful foreign military force, but rather the long-lasting candles which were used to celebrate that victory. Tht's right, the candles are the miracle). 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. Another way to try to make a "balance" is for a character to be stated to celebrate Hanukkah in an otherwise normal Christmas Episode. Do not expect there to ever be another reference to said character's Jewishness in any other episode.

(Of course, if you want to get logical, the big holiday for Christianity should be Easter, as the whole religion is based around Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, which redeemed humanity, not his birth, which merely got three wise men to schlep to the Middle East. And Christmas was indeed relatively unimportant until the Counter-Reformation.)

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:

• Now I got that song in my head damnit!
  • But it's a nice song.
    • It was, until the likes of Justin Hawkins and Dizzee Rascal got their hands on it ...
• 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."
  • Of course he does! How do you think the old man makes his living?
    • I don't know, but surely it can't be by giving his entire inventory away for free.
    • No, Santa sells batteries. He's like a dentist that gives out sugary candy.
• 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.
  • in Kimagure Orange Road the Christmas episode involved Kasuga time traveling three times in order to create a Christmas Eve meeting that didn't leave either Hikaru or Madoka furious at him, due to the Serious implications of a Christmas Eve Date.
  • 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.
  • A character working his behind off to buy his significant other the perfect Christmas or other holiday gift (which is far outside his normal means) is a standard anime plot. Examples include Ah My Goddess and Ai Yori Aoshi.
  • Ranma 1/2 has one of these. Genma and Soun are grumbling about how, in their day, everyone was still Buddhist and didn't celebrate Christmas. Kasumi comes in and asks if everyone is ready for a Christmas ham, leading Genma and Soun to cry, "Hooray for Christmas!"
• 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".
• In the show Clone High, Christmas had been replaced by the highly-secularized "Snowflake Day", with "traditional gifts" of hot sauces and a pirate mascot. Joan of Arc learns the True meaning of Snowflake Day from what she suspects was an angel, but was really a homeless person whose buddies looted her house. (I would recommend not watching the episode if you are offended by gratuitous amounts of blood.)
• 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.
  • To be fair, Halloween, Christmas, and Easter all are at the time they are each year largely due to the fact that it was easier to borrow existing pagan holidays (harvest, winter solstice, spring equinox) than just create new ones, and those pagan holidays are at least in other media portrayed as "magical" times. Also, even though they're wizards, they still live in Britain and one would assume that those holidays are as widely celebrated as secular and/or commercial holidays in the Potter-verse as they are in the "real world".
• 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.
    • Which has been an age-old way of keeping the heroic myths alive in the Christian era, and allow people like Shakespeare occasionally refer to plurality of Gods. Though in Prince Caspian Lewis goes his way to include Bacchus without a single reference to wine!
• 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...
• East Enders is infamous for subverting this trope most years, by turning the usual tone of the series up to 11.
• As a radio show, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy almost did a Christmas special in which Marvin would have been both figuratively and literally the star (of Bethlehem), and by participating in a nativity scene would be cured of his depression. This concept was What Could Have Been; the episode broadcast instead on 24 December 1978 was the pilot for the second series.
• In the Whateley Universe, the story "Ayla and the Grinch". Except that Ayla and her big sister can't go to the Christmas Eve church service because of what they are.
• Inverted in Real Life by certain Christian sects such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, which ignore or condemn Christmas on the grounds that it's pagan in its antecedants and has no biblical sanction.

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