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"Back on Earth, we called this Christmas, or the Winter Solstice. On this world, the first settlers called it The Crystal Feast."
Kazran Sardick, Doctor Who, "A Christmas Carol"

Even if the Christmas Special is widely used, a few writers catch on that some stories take place in a setting where certain holidays and celebrations shouldn't exist in the original sense. So the characters celebrate a holiday that's (hopefully) just coincidentally similar enough to have the audience roll their eyes.

Despite the eye-rolling, this can be a Justified Trope if the world of the story has solstices and equinoxes like our own, which would be logical times of the year to have a celebration.

Naturally, these episodes are aired around the holiday they're really trying to depict, and sometimes may receive a name change in order to comment on them without raising the ire of Media Watchdogs. Thus, it's a handy way to address only the secular aspects of a holiday and even save yourself some of the work. The holiday may feature a Pseudo-Santa in place of the regular Santa Claus.

Occasionally, they use a real holiday that would make sense in the world of the series but isn't commonly celebrated among most of the target audience. For instance, the second-season Xena: Warrior Princess episode "A Solstice Carol."

Note that this trope only covers the use (or abuse) of Christmas or 'Christmas-ish' holidays in fictional, fantastical, or historical settings where the celebration as we know it would not exist; random other terms used for the holidays in modern settings should not be listed here.

This trope is named after the Christmas Special of Futurama, in which Santa Claus is actually an evil robot that kills everyone because he judges everything as naughty (except Zoidberg). The letter X (coming from the Greek letter χ, "chi") has been used as an abbreviation for "Christ" (Χριστός) for centuries. In modern times, however, the spelling "Xmas" is sometimes misconstrued as part of the supposed "War on Christmas" to secularize the holiday, literally "taking the 'Christ' out of 'Christmas'" by people on both sides of the argument. Also there are some people who come up with folk etymologies for the X such as that it means 'Criss (cross) mas' (as in the onomatopaeic description of drawing an X) and are genuinely surprised to learn about the Greek letter.

They may have a tradition of caroling. Compare Crystal Dragon Jesus, Uncoffee, Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp", Fictional Holiday, Santa Clausmas. Opposite of Everyone Is Christian at Christmas.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • One of the Nickmas commercials from the early 2000's stated that the Rugrats characters were celebrating "Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice Time". Others have various Nicktoon characters celebrating "Nickmas".

    Anime & Manga 
  • The Big O episode "Daemonseed" introduced "Heaven's Day", and had the Humongous Mecha beaten by a mutant Christmas tree! Subverted at the very end of the episode, where Alex Rosewater remarks on how mutated Heaven's Day had become, and how nobody remembers that its origins were to celebrate the birth of God's Son—although Alex is ego maniacal to the point that he could be referring to himself. Another possibility is that this is to illustrate that Alex has recovered memories from before "40 years ago", which would logically include the significance of the holiday.
  • Lucu Lucu uses the real Christmas, but as a demon says in chapter 15:
    Bubu: No commandments... No religious conversations... Emptiness changed from a religious event into a hollow skeletal shell of idol worship; it's become rotten and corrupt with the smell of decay! Christmas is the Demon's holiday!
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • Early Seasons of the anime had a couple of Surprise Santa Encounters, but the Earth Drift of the franchise put a kibosh on that. Fast forward to Pokémon the Series: XY, where Ash's visit to Coumarine Gym and Serena's first Performance coincides with the celebration of the Pledge Tree festival where the Gym (which is a huge tree) is all lit up and trainers present gifts to their Pokemon (though not to fellow trainers, for the most part). Incidentally, it aired in Japan a month after the civil New Year and two weeks before the Chinese New Year.
    • One episode has a Halloween Episode about a "Gourgeist Festival", where the characters dress up as Pokemon at night and trade candies with each other.
    • In the Japanese-only short "Pikachu's Ghost Carnival", Pikachu and several Hoenn Pokémon celebrate a Buddhist festival, though it's never described as such.
  • Episode 7 of Sound of the Sky features the Fiesta des Lumiéres, which is pretty much a Japanese Obon festival in a French-speaking Spanish town in Switzerland.
  • In Tamagotchi, the Tamagotchis celebrate a holiday called Tamaween that is completely indistinguishable from Halloween in all but name (and even then the name is similar enough!), having the same pumpkins and costumes and whatnot involved in its celebrations.
  • One of the Tenchi Muyo! films depicts a Juraian holiday called "Startika" which, although it is celebrated in the middle of June, bears a suspicious resemblance to Christmas, at least as celebrated by the Japanese. Somewhat subverted because A: the festival has nothing to do with exchanging gifts,note  and B: actual Christmas is also celebrated in the same story.

    Comic Books 
  • Bone: The characters celebrate a holiday with strong resemblances to Christmas (or some sort of solstice festival) by bringing a green pine tree into their house during the depths of winter. Phoney even lampshades this trope;
    Phoney: Different reasons... Different names... It all comes down to th' same thingBusiness picks up, an' I make A lotta money!
  • A story in the Krypto the Superdog comic book has Krypto and his pals celebrating the Galactic Holiday of "Fun Day". Brainy Barker tells Krypto that a jolly delivery man will be stopping by to drop off packages and cards. Krypto guesses Santa, only for Brainy to say the Intergalactic Mailman does that.
  • DCU Holiday Special '09 revealed that in the future of the Legion of Super-Heroes, all the midwinter festivals have been merged into a single event, simply called Holiday.
  • Rogue Trooper: According to the story "Runaway", the Norts celebrate a festival called Feinkart. We don't learn much about it, and even the viewpoint Nort runaway isn't sure what it actually celebrates, but since the story appears in the 2000 AD Christmas Special 2023 and ends with Rogue wishing the kid "Frolikke Feinkart" (clearly derived from "fröhliche", as in "Fröhliche Weihnachten"), it's presumably this trope. The name itself would seem to translate as "fine card", possibly in reference to Christmas cards.
  • Shade, the Changing Man: The Metan counterpart of Christmas is called the Day of Bones, and celebrates the day, 2500 years ago, when a "prophet, or son of the Godhead, or whatever you want to call him" dug up the bones of the dead and brought them back to life.
    Shade:In older days folk would dig up the actual bones of relatives and hang them in their parlors festooned with garlands of flowers and tinsel. Nowadays the skeletons are plastic, usually filled with a special liquid that glows with bright colors. Sometimes the plastic skeletons play tunes. Some people think the Day of Bones is becoming too commercial. We’re forgetting the real meaning of digging up our ancestors' skeletons.
  • In DC's Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book, "Spirit in the Sky" (the story in issue #2) had a Christmas theme, complete with an energy being based on Santa Claus and evil aliens based on the Grinch.
  • The UK ThunderCats (1985) comics introduced Rammastide, which while technically celebrating when Third Earth was liberated from Mumm-ra, is basically Christmas in blue and gold. It also has the bad luck of being the day the Metokangmi walks around mourning its dead mate. And its preferred path happens to be right through the Cats' Lair, which ends up working out because the Metokangmi is basically a gigantic feline yeti.
  • The Transformers (IDW): Played for laughs twice in the holiday special, where only one of the stories is technically about Christmas (and it's an in-universe story being written by Thundercracker, whose grasp on things like "how many days are in December" or "is a noirish murder investigation good subject matter for a children's picture book" is loose at best). The story for The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye is set on December 24 and has a situation where, purely coincidentally, the crew of the Lost Light need to set up a big green conical thing decorated with brightly coloured round objects, wear hats that look like paper crowns, and all be tucked away safe in their BEDs by a set time; it even lampshades the absurdity by saying that Brainstorm has been working on a "contrivance engine". Meanwhile, in The Transformers: Till All Are One, Starscream actually creates a loosely Christmas-esque holiday based on generosity and fellowship where people get each other gifts by pure accident when he declares a new holiday about being nice to him and the last few words where he drops the puffery and makes it clear that it's all about him are Lost in Transmission.
  • Transmetropolitan has a Christmas special where Spider Jerusalem is deliberately trying to avoid any sort of holiday celebration. As this is the future in a city where a new religion is incorporated every hour, these range from the typical (Christmas) to the more... off-beat (Drink-My-Urine-Day, where one religion's vat-grown Messiah's heart caught fire, which was only extinguished by someone pissing down his throat). It's Warren Ellis, what do you expect?
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Wonder Woman (1942): In the original Golden Age continuity the Amazons celebrated Diana's Day at winter solstice. One woman was chosen by lots to play the Goddess and distribute presents while the others are entitled to try to unmask her and take over the Goddess role. Those who try and fail are tied up, of course, and have to dress up as deer on the following day for a mock hunt. The "deer" are caught, "cooked" and served, whereupon they have to dance. Hey, it's Marston.
    • Post-Crisis, as seen in DCU Holiday Bash #3, the Amazons celebrate Solstice with a contest of strength. When Artemis criticizes Diana for celebrating Christmas, Wonder Woman seems to attack her, but she's actually just demonstrating she can still follow Amazon traditions as well.
  • The Unbelievable Gwenpool: The Gwenpool Holiday Special: Merry Mix-Up features a wide range of Marvel-specific riffs on the holidays that our No Fourth Wall protagonist can't help noticing have never, ever, been mentioned before.

    Fan Works 
  • In Did I Make the Most of Loving You?, one chapter sees the Adamas and Kara celebrating Saturnalia, which appears to be the Twelve Colonies’ equivalent of Christmas.
  • In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, the Smurfs celebrate Redemption Day, which is the closest thing to Ash Wednesday for them as far as religious celebrations go. They also celebrate the Harvest Feast, which is their version of Thanksgiving Day, although since the Smurfs are vegetarians, a pastry dish called a cornucopia is substituted for turkey. And in a few stories before the Smurfs encountered humans on a regular basis, they celebrated the Winter Solstice instead of Christmas, in which they recount the Creation Myth of how Mother Nature and Father Time created the universe.
  • A Growing Affection has Yuletide, which takes place on 12/21 and involves an exchange of small gifts. There is a Santa figure active in the capitol of the Land of Fire.
  • The Hunger Games Prequel Collection:
    • The main series has a companion piece called Twelve Tidings of Panem, a collection of one shots about winter in the districts. Six of these stories feature characters from the main series celebrating their respective districts' winter festivals, some of which are clearly rooted in Christmas traditions. The names of these winter festivals are Yuletide (District 1), New Year (District 2), the Seabreeze Times (District 4), the Returning of the Light (District 5), Wintertide (District 7) and Bobbin Day (District 8).
    • A companion piece, Carol of the Allies, reveals that District 3 celebrates a winter festival called Lighting.
  • Living The Dream has a christmas One-Shot Fic called "Lesson's Learned". It starts with Cody Benson being released from prison. Hatred still burning in his heart, he sets off to attempt to kill Lance once again. On his way, he encounters several ponies that challenge his beliefs, and make him feel the spirit of Hearth's Warming.
  • My Huntsman Academia:
    • Color Week is a week long series of holidays that sound suspiciously similar to the Japanese Golden Week.
    • The Long Night is also Halloween in everything but name, with kids trick-or-treating in costumes and the adults dressing up and getting wasted at parties.
  • In Queens of Mewni Mewni celebrates holidays that correspond to both Earth holidays and former queens: for example, St. Eclipsa's Day is their equivalent of Halloween, while St. Febe's Day is their Valentines Day. The canon Stump Day is also referenced: namely, that the Stump found out the hard way not to mess with Helia, the Light of Power.
  • Shadow Realm: Holiday, is a one-chapter fic set in an Alternate Universe where Duel Spirits live; while there is no Christmas in this world (justified, as there is nothing similar in their history), the fic shows the residents celebrating All Shadow's Beginning, which is similar.
  • In Their Bond, Hyrulians celebrate Winter Solstice in a manner similar to Christmas, which is unsurprising considering the Crystal Dragon Jesus nature of their religion in Zelda canon. It's a festive holiday with religious overtones celebrating the Rebirth of the Golden Gods. People hang strands of evergreen around, sing carols, and spend time with loved ones.
  • In the This Time Round fic "A TDF Christmas," the Trakenite equivalent is Keeper's Day. This gets a Continuity Nod in the later "Nyssa's Christmas Carol."
  • In Warrior Cats, the cats don't celebrate holidays; however, one of the writers still wrote a non-canon fanfic about winter solstice. It's called The Longest Night and has the cats celebrating a relatively Christmas-like solstice celebration.
  • In Warriors Kingdoms: The Prophecy Begins, the kingdoms celebrate Snowstar and Snowstar's Eve in winter.

    Film — Live-Action 

    Literature 
  • Up until they created Kaya, a Nez-Perce Indian character from 1764, each of the American Girls Collection characters had a Christmas story as a part of her book series. Since Kaya obviously wouldn't have celebrated Christmas, living before the Nez-Perce had much contact with Europeans, they gave her a story about "giving" as her obligatory "holiday" book.
  • Erastide is the winter solstice festival and the most important holiday in The Belgariad. It includes a Christmas pageant Erastide play, with masked family members reenacting the roles of the Seven Gods. According to Belgarath the Sorcerer it's mainly celebrated in Senderia — since they don't have a single patron god like the other kingdoms — and while it's supposed to be the day the Seven Gods created the world, it's actually an arbitrary date.
  • Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy has Winsol (presumably meaning "winter solstice"), an obvious stand-in for Christmas, complete with tree and gifts.
  • In A Brother's Price, Jerin at one point complains that he looks like a "midwinter tree" with all the jewelery he's wearing.
  • Averted in The Chronicles of Narnia, specifically The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Narnia is full of fauns, dwarfs, tree spirits, talking animals, and other mythical creatures who celebrate many fantasy holidays and rituals. Nevertheless Father Christmas — the old-fashioned, bad ass half-pagan-nature-god version — exists in Narnia, and the White Witch's rule is said to lead to Narnia forever being in a state of 'always winter, and never Christmas'. (The name "Christmas" was quite possibly introduced to Narnia by King Frank and Queen Helen, who used to be working-class Brits before becoming Narnia's first monarchs.)
  • The Deptford Mice — from the Robin Jarvis trilogy of that name — celebrate "Yule" in the winter, named after the pagan/Germanic solstice festival.
  • Hogswatchnight, along with its patron spirit the Hogfather, from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, though this is used more to examine and comment on Christmas and winter solstice holidays in general. Traditions include strings of paper sausages, an oak tree in a pot, and of course the Hogfather in his sleigh pulled by four wild boars called Rooter, Tusker, Gouger and Snouter.
    • The name is a combination of New Year's Eve being "Hogmanay" in Scotland and "Watch Night" in traditionalist Christian communities (and also a pun on "hogwash"); it is also on the Discworld (at least around the Circle Sea) the culmination of the pig-slaughtering season.
    • It has other equivalents, too; for instance, the Soul Cake Days are a mix of Halloween ("trickle-treating" is mentioned by a small girl in Reaper Man, and "soul cakes" used to be given on All Souls Day in real life) and Easter (there's a "Soul Cake Duck" who lays chocolate eggs).
    • In the rarely-mentioned 800-day Astronomical Year, the other winter solstice is called Crueltide. We don't learn of any customs or celebrations connected to it (because most people use a 400-day Agricultural Year and consider it the next Hogswatch), but the name is obviously a pun on Yuletide.
  • One of the Disney Princess books has Rapunzel from Tangled celebrating what is essentially Halloween but in summer (on Marmalade Moon Night). She uses watermelons instead of pumpkins for making Jack-o'-lanterns.
  • The Doctor Who New Adventures novels have Otherstide, a Gallifreyan festival honouring the Other. We learn very little about it, but one Christmassy touch is that the Otherstide season ends on Thirteenth Night.
  • In A Dog's Purpose, the protagonist is a dog who doesn't understand humans much. He refers to Thanksgiving and Christmas as "Happy Thanksgiving" and "Merry Christmas".
  • In Dragonlance, the people of Krynn celebrate Yule (as a Christmas stand-in, Yule being an archaic name for Christmas), Harvest-Come (Halloween, complete with carving faces onto gourds), the Festival of the Eye (also Halloween, when children dress up and go door-to-door for cookies) and Spring Dawning (Easter).
  • One of the Garrett, P.I. novels mentions White Day, a fantasy-world counterpart to Valentine's Day. Different in that it's a custom to give boxes of candy to one's good friends as well as to one's beloved. White Day is a real holiday in Japan; it's celebrated a month after Valentine's Day and is a day when men are expected to reciprocate for the gifts they got on Valentine's Day.
  • The Heralds of Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey has a "Midwinter Festival" in which all students get a week off from school, go home to their families, exchange presents, etc. There is no corresponding "Midsummer Festival", however.
  • The Framing Device of The Legend of Podkin One-Ear (and the opening of the story itself) is set on Bramblemas Eve, when presents are left in the warren by the mysterious Midwinter Rabbit.
  • In Littlenose, a series of children's books about a Neanderthal boy, Littlenose's tribe celebrate the Sun Dance, where they build a big bonfire and gather together as much green plants as they can find, to remind the sun what summer looks like.
  • Llama Llama Holiday Drama has Llama Llama and his Mama Llama doing holiday sales and otherwise prepping for the holidays, eventually resulting in "holidrama," but even though all the details are Christmasy, the word "Christmas" is never mentioned. In the board book Llama Llama Jingle Bells, however, they explicitly celebrate Christmas and a "Llama Santa" is even mentioned.
  • The Alternative Calendar in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings shows that the hobbits also celebrate Yuletide, or at least that's how J. R. R. Tolkien chose to translate the name of their midwinter holiday.
  • This Perfect Day by Ira Levin features Christmas...in a future dystopia where literally no one is religious. Of course, they also celebrate Marxmas on Karl Marx's birthday. Both are basically just rare excuses for the supercomputer that rules the world to let the human workers have an extra day off work. They also celebrate Unification Day on New Year's.
  • Disney's A Tale of... series treats Winter Solstice as the equivalent of Christmas, complete with a solstice tree.
  • A fairly common substitute in fantasy novels is some variety of midwinter or solstice festival. The Tortall Universe books by Tamora Pierce feature feasting and gift-giving at midwinter and the Kushiel's Legacy books by Jacqueline Carey have masked balls on the Longest Night — which are lampshaded in the first book by saying that the tradition pre-dates the coming of Elua, who found it so charming and amusing that he kept it around.
  • Vorkosigan Saga: Winterfair on the planet Barrayar in Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books, which involves gift-giving and family get-togethers. Complete with a Captain Ersatz Santa Claus, Father Frost. (Or not so ersatz. Father Frost is the Russian Santa equivalent, in what passes for real life, and one of the founding ethnicities of Barrayar is Russian.) The Barrayarans are non-theists (if a bit superstitious) and there's no spiritual aspect. The Emperor's birthday celebrations are at roughly the Thanksgiving Day time of year, also — at least for the current emperor.
  • Many of the Expanded Universe novels in the Warhammer 40,000 universe mention a holiday known as "Emperor's Day" that appears very similar to Christmas. Of course, considering the Emperor has supposedly been several influential people throughout history, there's a reasonable chance it actually is Christmas.
  • The Wheel of Time has the Feast of Lights. The name also bears a noticeable resemblance to Hanukah, the Festival of Lights.
  • In The Wicked Years, the Ozites celebrate Lurlinemas, a winter holiday celebrating the birth of the goddess Lurline. It's mentioned that Unionist chapels have appropriated much of the holiday. Included are mentions of gift-giving, gingerbread, snowball fights, wreaths, and even the phrase "happy holidays." The Fairy Queen Lurline rides in a winged chariot with her assistant, the minor fairy Preenella, and the two give gifts from their magic basket. Just about the only thing that differs from Christmas is that the designated holiday colors are green and gold rather than green and red. (And even that isn't too far off, as gold is often associated with Christmas as well.)
  • In 1954 C. S. Lewis wrote a text called Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus, in which the people of Niatirb celebrate two holidays: A secular one with parties and gifts and a religious one in temples. Herodotus concludes that "Exmas" (the commercial racket) and "Crissmas" (the religious festival) are two entirely distinct festivals that just happen to fall on the same day.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Adventures in Wonderland plays this trope straight with the Thanksgiving-esque "Thanks-A-Lot Day," but averts it with Christmas, Halloween and Valentine's Day, which are all celebrated in Wonderland, albeit in unusual ways.
  • While Battlestar Galactica (2003) doesn't appear to have any equivalent to Christmas, Colonial Day has some similarities to Independence Day, combined with a hint of State of the Union given the political implications. Justified, given the canonical history of the Colonies.
  • The Big Comfy Couch has an episode called "Comfy and Joy" wherein the whole cast gets together, exchanges wishes and gifts, and stays up until sunrise, on what is repeatedly referred to as The Longest Night of the Year.
  • Caprica reveals the existence of a St. Valentine's Day equivalent called Eros Day.
  • Community episode "Comparative Religion":
    Dean: "Ha ha ha! Merry Happy!"
  • Doctor Who: As shown in the page quote, this is discussed in "A Christmas Carol", where Kazran Sardick mentions in narration that the first settlers of his planet called Christmas "The Crystal Feast". It's averted in the rest of the episode, however, as Christmas is actually called "Christmas".
  • Girl Meets World has a Christmas Episode where the characters fuss over Christmas Eve dinner, and the Matthews family has a large, beautiful Christmas tree. However, no one ever actually says the word "Christmas".
  • Hercules: The Legendary Journeys features a thinly veiled Nativity story in the episode "A Star to Guide Them". Aeolus and two others have visions of a star guiding them to some sort of "important event", they have gold and frankincense and myrrh as presents, Herc explicitly calls him a "wise man," and at the end you see the three entering a manger with a bunch of animals sitting around and some very familiar looking folks. About the only thing they didn't do was have the happy couple introduce themselves as Mary and Joseph before fading out.
  • Ernest P. Worrell spends an entire of episode of Hey Vern! It's Ernest trying to celebrate all the holidays of the year in one day.
  • A sketch on The Kids in the Hall featured a society in the future that had Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions and instead had a holiday called Bellini Day, celebrating recurring character Bellini, who always wore only a bath-towel and never hurried or wore a watch.
  • The second season of LazyTown had a winter episode with no holiday at all, but featured a relyricked version of a song from the Icelandic forerunner's Christmas album as the episode's song.
  • The concept was parodied in Maid Marian and Her Merry Men where the Sheriff of Nottingham and his henchmen, Gary and Grayhame, invent a public holiday called "Bloopy" in order to get out of trouble with King John, and every single cynical thing ever said about Christmas applies to Bloopy as well.
  • The O.C. featured resident Deadpan Snarker Seth Cohen inventing "Chrismukkah" to cope with having a Jewish father and a Christian mother.
  • In Quark, Christmas has become "Holiday Number 11." The last episode focused on Obstructive Bureaucrat Palindrome giving The Captain Quark a murderous computer as a Number 11 gift.
  • In the Seinfeld episode "The Strike" George Costanza, in a miserly effort to avoid giving Christmas gifts at the office, celebrates Festivus. A holiday previously created by George's father, Festivus was a response to the over-commercialization of Christmas.
  • Star Trek sometimes gives suspiciously similar holidays to alien cultures to make up for the general lack of focus on human holidays, which are occasionally mentioned, but never used as subjects for episodes.
    • Voyager had an episode involving the suspiciously Christmas-like Talaxian holiday of Prixin.
    • There's a Bajoran "Gratitude Festival" in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — they stop short of eating turkey, although there is a reference in one episode to a Thanksgiving Day dinner Sisko served, which did include turkey and stuffing.
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special is rather infamous for its "Life Day", to the point where it's even a redirect to this page.
  • Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! held a "Chrimbus Special." Apparently the Winterman (an old bald guy wearing naught but a vest) will leave presents in your Chrimbus bush, but only if you've eaten a pound of hair during the year. More subtly, the holiday was consistently referred to as "the season of getting/receiving."
  • Xena: Warrior Princess has "A Solstice Carol". This episode features orphans about to be evicted on Solstice eve, a solstice tree, a toy maker named Senticles who disguises himself with a red suit and a white beard and falls down a chimney, a king who hates the Solstice and has banned it, Xena and Gabrielle sneaking into his bedchamber to pretend to be the Fates and ghosts of past, present, future and convincing him to mend his evil ways. To top it all off, Gabrielle gives her donkey to a married couple with a child who look suspiciously like a few religious figures that will remain nameless, while a bright star hangs in the sky above. Seriously. Of course, fans of the show will tell you that this trope was just made for this show. Funnily enough, if you take out "Senticles" and the Christmas Carol shout-outs, it's actually a pretty damned good representation of Solstice festivals of the time... in NORTHERN Europe, anyway, if not Greece.

    Puppet Shows 
  • Fraggle Rock had an episode titled "The Bells of Fraggle Rock". This invented holiday was surprisingly well-handled. Furthermore, the episode was very thought-provoking for a (de-facto) Christmas Episode: Gobo searched his maps for the location of the legendary Great Bell at the Heart of Fraggle Rock, then set off just before the Festival of the Bells on a quest to find the Great Bell and bring it back to show the other Fraggles and prove that the literal meaning of the holiday is true. The other Fraggles promised to wait for him, so they could ring the bells together, but came to regret this decision as the cold encroached and the Rock began to freeze over. At the end of Gobo's quest, he found a seasonally heartwarming Aesop. The Festival of the Bells was also mentioned in the crossover special A Muppet Family Christmas, where it was explicitly described as the Fraggles' winter solstice holiday and likened to Christmas.
  • Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock has the Night of Lights, where the Fraggles and Gorgs fill the Rock and the Castle with "glow grapes" on the darkest night of the year. The holiday is mistakenly thought to be about fighting the darkness, but the real lesson is that you need the darkness in order to appreciate the light. Move away from the glow grapes and you can see the aurora borealis.
  • In the The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss episode "Mrs. Zabarelli's Holiday Baton", the citizens of Seussville celebrate Jingle Day. Jingle Day Eve is the shortest day of the year, with the longest and coldest night (which implies that it takes place on the same date as the Winter Solstice). The annual Jingle Day pageant is held, and although each act in the pageant is different every year, it always ends with the youngest performer tinking the tink, which makes the sun rise, ending the night and properly beginning Jingle Day.
  • The first Christmas Episode of The Furchester Hotel has Monster Monster Day, which is apparently Elmo's favourite holiday, despite him never once mentioning it in Sesame Street. The second one is just Christmas.
  • Johnny and the Sprites celebrate "Brightly Shining".
  • Dinosaurs features "Refrigerator Day" celebrating the invention of the refrigerator. It is considered a watershed moment in dinosaur history because the storage of food allowed dinosaurs to settle in one place. The holiday is celebrated with a combination of Christmas and Thanksgiving trappings.

    Radio 
  • In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Spare Parts, the Mondasians, dwelling in an underground city in a planet that was hurled out of the solar system, have a midwinter holiday in which an artificial tree symbolising the forests Mondas used to have is decorated with lights symbolising the stars, baubles representing the planets they pass, tinsel representing their path through space, and an uppermost star representing the sun they hope to return to.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Averted in Forgotten Realms as far as Christmas itself goes: Midwinter/Deepwinter is not a time of general celebration, but played straight with the Feast of the Moon, the Autumn festival that honours the dead, and Greengrass, the Spring festival that celebrates growing things with flower garlands (May Day).
  • The various Mystara nations' calendars are littered with Expies of familiar Real Life holidays, such as Ierendi's tropical version of Christmas (ribbon-bedecked palm trees).
  • In Planescape, the first day of Sigil's year (in as much as the City of Doors at the centre of the multiverse has something you'd call a year) is the Day of Grace, commemorating a time when the Lady of Pain was approached by a small girl and nothing terrible happened to the girl, indicating that even the Lady can show mercy. On this day, people in Sigil try to show the same mercy and grace the Lady demonstrated (even factions like the Doomguard and Fated at least make the attempt, sometimes). There's also a parade, and while there isn't exactly a tradition of gift-giving, a combination of shopkeepers "showing grace" by reducing prices and people wanting to show grace to their friends means that it does happen.
  • Warhammer 40,000 occasionally mentions Sanguinala, a memorial day for Sangunius, the Primach of the Blood Angels who gave his life to give the Emperor chance to kill Horus. Out of all the Imperial heroes, kind of convenient that the most respected is the one who's name sounds just like the roman holiday of Saturnalia. On this day, Adepts wear Blood Angels red and guardsmen give each other whatever gifts they can scrounge for.

    Theme Parks 
  • Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge makes use of made-up holidays in order to sell special event merchandise without breaking the illusion of being on another planet. In addition to "Life Day", which had alredy been established by the Holiday Special and following works as a stand-in for Christmas, Pop Culture Holiday "Star Wars Day" is celebrated as the local holiday "Black Spire Day" commemorating the town where the land is set, the Black Spire Outpost, while the parks' after-hours "Star Wars Nites" are instead referred to as "Twin Moons Eclipses".

    Toys 
  • BIONICLE has "Naming Day", in which all the Matoran get a day off work and give each other gifts. One character mentions Mata Nui coming down the transport chutes to deliver presents. Some Matoran are also able to change the spelling of their names on this day. This trope was enforced not by a holiday special, but because LEGO was threatened by legal action from Maori activists over the use of their words as character names, and the dev team needed an in-story excuse to change them. Once the holiday was established in-universe, then it became the go-to when the writers wanted to make a Christmas reference.
  • Ninjago, also by LEGO, has the "Day of the Departed", which is an awesomely bizarre mashup of Halloween (costumes and trick or treating), Dia De Los Muertos (remembering loved ones), and a Japanese lantern festival. It originally aired on October 29th, so fans have taken to celebrating the holiday in real life as a Halloween pre-game of sorts.

    Video Games 
  • In AdventureQuest's world of Lore, they celebrate Frostval, a day marked by the Frost Moglins of Frostvale making and delivering presents to the people of Lore. While this is pretty much where the similarity between Frostval and Christmas ends, there are two Santa Claus-themed monsters: a mutant crab named Sandy Claws and a skeleton in a Santa suit named Gris Dingle. Quests around this time generally involve the holiday being held up by a war against a powerful Ice Dragon and the players having to help deliver the presents before they magically unwrap themselves. Other holidays include Grenwog (Easter), Good Luck Day (St. Patrick's Day), Hero's Heart Day (Valentine's Day).
    • AdventureQuest Worlds had a Moglinster (basically a monstrous version of a moglin) called Santy Claws for 2009's Frostval.
    • Pretty much all of Artix Entertainment's games have alternate versions of real-world holidays. Frostval is Christmas, of course, but there's also Thankstaking (Thanksgiving), Mogloween (Halloween), Hero's Hearts Day (Valentine's Day), and a traditional Gold Fever War on St. Patrick's Day (which is called Good Luck Day). There are many celebrated under their real-world names, such as the Fourth of July, April Fools' Day, and Talk Like a Pirate Day. Every Friday the 13th is also celebrated.
  • Animal Crossing: Most games in the series feature real-world holidays, many of which aren't referred to by their real-world names. For instance, Christmas is known as Toy Day, Thanksgiving is known as Turkey Day (the Harvest Festival prior to Animal Crossing: New Horizons), Mardi Gras is known as Festivale, and St. Patrick's Day is known as Shamrock Day. In the international and e+ releases of the first game, the Fireworks Show occurs specifically on July 4 as an analog for American Independence Day (in other titles, it occurs on August weekends).
  • Animal Jam has Friendship Festival (Valentine's Day), Lucky Day (St. Patrick's Day), Spring Festival (Easter), Freedom Day (Fourth of July), Night of the Phantoms (Halloween), Feast of Thanks (Thanksgiving), and, of course, Jamaalidays (Christmas, plus Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and winter holidays in general).
  • ARK: Survival Evolved's "Winter Wonderland" event is Christmas in all but name. There's even a Raptor cosplaying as Santa Claus who rides a Megaloceros-drawn sleigh across the night sky, belly-laughing and dropping festive packages of high-level loot.
  • Borderlands 2 has Mercenary Day, which was invented by the Dahl Corporation as a promotional stunt in which all mercenary services were free for a day. In Pandora, it's since been adopted as the resident equivalent of Christmas.
  • Cave Story: Parodied in Cave Story+, in which the achievement for playing the game in Christmas Mode is "Merry Holiday Happy Euphemism" with the description "For the rest of us!"
  • City of Heroes has the simply named Winter Event, during which for a month the city gets randomly attacked by giant monster snowmen and the Ski Chalet in Pocket D, the interdimensional dance club, is open for business.
  • Club Penguin traditionally held a Christmas Party (later renamed to Holiday Paty in 2009) every year since its founding in 2005. However, in 2014 they instead held the Merry Walrus Party, themed around the titular Santa Claus-like figure who delivers presents around the world to everyone, regardless whether they have been naughty or nice. The Holiday Party returned the next year and continued until Club Penguin closed in 2017. Merry Walrus himself did return after December 25, 2015 during the 2015 Holiday Party to give out a free Deluxe Gingerbread House to all players.
  • DC Universe Online has a holiday event for the month of December. While it's clearly only celebrating Christmas, the NPCs refuse to refer to it as such, often simply calling it "the Winter Holiday".
  • Destiny 2: Citizens of the Last City, and presumable other surviving humans, celebrate the Dawning (Christmas/New Year's Eve) at the end of every year. Justified, as Ikora explicitly describes it as a combination of thousands of holiday traditions from before the Collapse, including (Cayde's favorite) giving each other gifts.
    • The Last City also celebrates the Festival of the Lost (Halloween) every October, which, like its real-world equivalent, involves dressing up in costumes and collecting lots of candy.
    • Other holidays and events celebrated include Crimson Days (Valentine's Day), the Revelry (Easter/Spring equinox) Solstice of Heroes (Summer solstice), and Guardian Games (Summer Olympics).
  • In the multiplayer version of Don't Starve, the characters stranded in the wilderness celebrate Hallowed Nights and Winter's Feast, which are clearly meant to be Halloween and a combination of December winter holidays, respectively. Though Winter's Feast has a very Christmasy flavor, with a decorated evergreen tree and Christmastime treats like gingerbread and candy canes, though there are also foods associated with other holidays, like latkes, available. In spite of the fact that the characters seem to mostly have come from the real world, Winter's Feast is the only winter holiday they acknowledge as existing.
  • Dragalia Lost has Dragonyule, which is similar to Christmas, down to folks decorating Yuletrees. There's even a Santa Claus stand-in named Saint Starfall. Unlike a lot of Christmas knockoffs, there's also a in-universe religious aspect to this one; as it celebrates the birth of the setting's messiah figure, the goddess Ilia. (Oddly, though, Halloween and Valentine's Day were not given the same treatment and are just like our versions of those holidays.)
  • Dungeons & Dragons Online has Festivult, where a dwarf in bright clothing gives presents to all the good little clerics and wizards. It's typically a month-long event where players collect coins and exchange them for cookies and treats that cast magical effects on whoever eats them. You might also get a lump of coal or a twig as "punishment" — though the twig can be crafted into a rechargable Eternal Wand of Frost, where most wands have a limited number of uses before being consumed.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Tamriel has the "New Life" festival on the 25th of Evening Star (December), and is even explicitly described as a 'time of gift giving'.
    • Morrowind's Bloodmoon expansion has a side quest with a Santa Claus-type figure named Uncle Sweetshare. (Only instead of presents, he gives you drugs.) The game's files include an unused version of Sweetshare named Grandfather Frost, who was even more Santa-like. (Supposedly he was replaced for being too much like Santa.)
  • EverQuest II has Frostfell, a general winter holiday that lasts through all of December and parts of January. Other celebrated holidays are Bristlebane's Day for April Fools Day, Erollisi Day for Valentines, Brew Day for St. Patrick's Day, and Nights of the Dead for Halloween.
  • Final Fantasy XI has substitute holidays for many Western and Eastern celebrations alike.
    • The "X-mas" is called the Starlight Festival, and of course involves people in Santa hats and coats called "smilebringers" giving presents to children. Interestingly, it's suggested that the smilebringer tradition may have been started by goblins, who are (usually) an enemy race in the game. Oddly enough, despite the presence of a goddess whose worship is sometimes reminiscent of Christianity, neither the Starlight Festival nor any of the other holidays seem to have any relation to any in-game religious practice whatsoever. Wishing on stars is as close as it gets.
    • It should also be noted that the entire calendar is based on holidays celebrated in Japan. St. Patrick's Day? Nope. April Fool's? Not a chance. Boxing Day? Oh, never. Writing haiku and placing them on bamboo stalks? Sure, why not? Considering the international playerbase, it's kind of odd. While the developers are Japanese, you'd think they could just Google some holidays celebrated in other countries and incorporate them for the sake of the fans.
  • The Starlight Celebration also appears in Final Fantasy XIV. This time it is started by a Santa Clausesque commander of Ishgard and his knights bringing succor to kids by dressing them up in their red uniforms and hiding them in the Barracks during winter, and also like XI, the in game religions don't seem to be referenced with the holidays. Also like XI, they also incorporate other holidays into the game in all but name. How involved an event is varies from year to year as the dev team seems to rotate on which one gets the most attention each year, expecically during times of the year with many holidays in quick succession. Short List:
    • Heavensturn, a New Year's event, inspired by the Chinese Zodiac. Emissaries from the far east show up with tasks related to the new Zodiac year. Eeorza itself do not actually follow these views and are instead celebrating the the end of year; which means each of The Twelve, the local gods, have had a month and it's time to start over. Notably an event which has ties to the In-Universe religion ironically. Usually rewards Samurai style helmets themed after the Zodiac animal of the upcoming year.
    • Valentione's Day, obviously a Valentine's day event. Named for Countess Arabelle de Valentione of Ishgard, whose quest for love centuries ago became famous. Her descendants in House Valentione are in the main runners of the holiday, doing their best to carry on her spirit and help others find love. The holiday, like the real Valintine's day, has been noted to to have become over commercialized as of late, largely due to the Culinarin's guild and their wares of chocolates.
    • Little Ladies' Day, based on Girl's day/Dolls day. Notably the only largely Japanese holiday with elements of the Prince and the Pauper. A largely Ul'dahin holiday, it was created when the daughter of a now long deceased Sultan traded places with the daughter of a miller and snuck out. The Sultan, discovering the ruse, assumed she was kidnapped and ordered the fake's home ransacked. The princess was actually discovered near the palace and taken home, where she revealed her own actions. Her father, horrified at his own unjust actions, rebuilt the girl's home and offered himself as the miller girl's Senshel for day. As the story spread of his humility, the Sultan declared this would be a yearly tradition with him acting as the Senshal to a randomly selected girl. In memory of this event, Modern men (largely their fathers) serve girls as their own Senshal for the day, and princess doll sets and rice balls are common. The last few years contained a running story about an idol group called The Song Birds.
    • Hatching Tide inspired by Easter, noted to be a fairly new holiday created shortly before the Calamity by Jihli Aliapoh, a Miqo'te woman who claims to have had visions from the Twelve Archons of old, of them returning from the heavens atop brightly decorated eggs. Her followers help spread these visions and secretly try to recreate them for her so they come to pass. To her credit, many of them do come true, in a manner of speaking, and not always the way her followers plan. Like modern Easter, decorated eggs are everywhere and egg hunts are common. Spriggans, the closest thing to Rabbits in the game, often pop up in this event as either helpers or hindrances.
    • The Moonfire Faire: A generic "It's summer!" celebration, serving as a blend of various cultures' summer and beach activites including Obon. Its exact theme and rewards change yearly, having themes such as Oban, Hula Dancing, Aglity Courses, fending off shark attacks, and Tokuotsu parodies. Originally created as the Firefall Faire, the first in game holiday. (It was renamed in its second year, and the name stuck.) A fairly new holiday, it was created by the Cascadiers to get citizens to help fend off an invasion of the classic Final Fantasy monster, the Bomb, at the Lomisan beaches. When the bombs stopped returning after a few years the celebrations continued unabated and became a general fun in the sun event, though given the event is run by the Adventurers' Guild, fighting, agility or crafting help is often requested. Like the general themeing of the event, its rewards vary wildy though they almost always have a summer theme to them, ranging from Binkis, Summer Kimonos, Final Fantasy I style armor, Hula outfits or other various generic summer or swimwear. Fireworks are a secondary reward.
    • The Rising, a nonholiday holiday, as it's simply a anniversary event for the Relaunch of the game out of universe, while in universe it serves as a memorial to the Calamity. A fairly low key event and often (But not always) takes place during the Moonfire Faire, creating a somber element amongst the festivities, though special fireworks are set off in memorial. As time has gone on, the event has split off more and gained its own decorations. It replaced Founding Day, which was the original game anniversary and a honoring of the founding of the Eeorzan Alliance. Fitting its nature as a game anniversry, the event usually includes a fourth wall breaking sequence involving Yoshi-P (Not to be confused with his avatar, the Wandering Minstrel, who also appears) and other members of the dev team, including the famous Developer's Office, and deliberate hints about updates in the year to come. Rewards for the event usually consist of minions, namely wind up dolls in the likeness of major NPCs.
    • All Saints' Wake, a Halloween event. Believed to be a night in which the various historical figures of great deeds, who are pictured on Guild Leves, can watch over the living from the heavens as the Twelve themselves invite them to dinner. Monsters are said to stalk the night unabated, well, more unabated then normal. Citizens were said to hide at home and bar their doors, and if they had to go out, they disguised themselves as monsters, leading to a very western Halloween celebration in modern times. The stories tend to be somewhat true, as monsters disguised as people, or monsters disguised as people disguised as monsters, often posing as the Continental Circus, infiltrate the various towns. Despite their best effort they tend to be harmless or easily thwarted.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes: The Spring Festival is an Easter counterpart, featuring painted eggs and characters dressed up like bunnies. There is also the Harvest Festival in fall, where Halloween-related festivities—including trick-or-treating—also take place. The Winter Festival is a Christmas counterpart, with characters donning festive attire and presents delivered by the Winter Festival Envoy. The Day of Devotion is a counterpart to Valentine's Day, though it celebrates familial and platonic love as well as the romantic variety. New Year's Day is just New Year's Day, but is specifically Japanese New Year; this is handwaved by always taking place in Hoshido.
  • Guild Wars has Wintersday, which is more accurately New Year's Day but celebrated more like Christmas, with a little bit of Groundhog Day — the observation, not the movie nor the trope — thrown in.
    • There is also an equivalent Halloween holiday, where special candy-corn minions are available, and Mad King Thorn (a pumpkin-headed undead ruler) comes and transforms NPCs into monstrous creatures and gives commands to people. Those who don't follow the commands are killed temporarily.
    • The Canthans also celebrate the Lunar New Year, being inspired by the Chinese theme. Adding to the allusion is the Celestial creature of the appropriate year (eg. 2008 had a celestial rat).
    • The Canthans also celebrate the Dragon Festival, both to commemorate the launch of Nightfall and to coincide with the Fourth of July/Canada Day.
    • Less explicit are Lucky Weekend(St. Patrick's Day), Sweet Treats Weekend(Easter), and Special Treats Weekend (Thanksgiving). These are limited to special drops with no other events.
  • Guild Wars 2 also features Wintersday as one of the six yearly special events, with Wintersday trees (Christmas trees) in major cities and almost any event-related activity awarding Wintersday presents. They also kept Lunar New Year and Shadow of the Mad King/Halloween from the earlier game, but the other three special events note  are not tied to real-world holidays.
  • The online game Kingdom of Loathing has "Crimbo", complete with Crimbo Elves and Uncle Crimbo himself. Also, Hannukkah is replaced with "Hannukimbo", Thanksgiving Day with "The Feast of Boris", St. Patrick's Day with "St. Sneaky Pete's Day", and Easter with "Oyster Egg Day" (during which players can hunt for "oyster eggs" left behind by a Magical Flying Oyster). They even have a holiday called "Dependence Day", during which the citizens of Loathing set off fireworks. Oddly, Halloween and Valentine's Day are in the game unchanged.
    • There's also the somewhat less subtle examples of "Arrrbor Day" (it involves pirates planting trees), "Labór Day" (celebrating the Rasputinian Death of Manuel Labór) and "El Dia de Los Muertos Borrachos".
    • It is perhaps worth noting that "Crimbo" is used as slang for Christmas in some parts of Britain, although it does not extend to "Crimbo Elves". Also, whilst the Crimbo story starts out pretty much like any Christmas story, it has gone through many things that aren't precisely expected in a holiday story. Such as the Crimborg, festive radiation, the Penguin Mafia, and the Crimbomination.
  • LEGO Dimensions: The Gremlins adventure world is decorated with snow, colorful lights, and decorated trees, yet no actual mention of Christmas is made. Lampshaded by one NPC who proclaims one of the world's restorations to be a "non-specific holiday miracle". Subverted by Pete Fountaine, who states that he needs a "Christmas miracle", being the only character to refer to the holiday by name.
  • Littlewood:
    • The Scavenger Hunt is fairly subtle about it, but still recognizable. The festival is in Spring, the items that need to be found are eggs and the officiating NPC is a Bunnyfolk called the Scavenger Bunny, making the festival an easter analogue.
    • There is a festival called "Punkin day" in the fall. Punkins are clearly the setting's counterpart to pumpkins, the day's minigame can be best summed up as chasing ghosts and all the residents in the Player Character's town wear costumes for the occasion. This festival is clearly the setting's counterpart to Halloween.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online:
    • The game has an annual Yule Festival in Winter-home, a town that can't be found on the maps. Yule celebrations involve playing games and doing chores to win tokens that can be spent on surprise gifts, clothes, and horses. There's a Christmas charity subplot of Winter-home's mayor exploiting workers, and the player character choosing whether to help or take advantage of said workers. At the end of the quest, you get a special set of clothes depending on which path you chose. Perhaps needless to say, one of them is much more elegant and showy than the other (though if you chose to help the workers and got the shabby clothing, you'll get a bonus gift of a possibly even nicer outfit a couple of months later from a relative of the workers who lives in Bree).
    • There are a number of seasonal festivals scattered throughout the year but roughly corresponding to Easter (Spring Festival, which has events involving colored eggs), (US) Independence Day (Summer Festival, which prominently features fireworks), and Halloween/Thanksgiving (Harvest Festival, which has a series of daily quests set in a "Haunted Burrow").
  • MapleStory:
    • Maplemas. Cue eye rolls.
    • Versalmas, which is the same as Maplemas but more purple.
  • Moshi Monsters has "Twistmas", which is basically Christmas except without Jesus and Santa delivers to adults too, and "Pranksgiving", which is basically April Fool's.
  • Pixie Hollow Online had events that correspond to real-world holidays:
  • Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: Every year, there is a "Feastivus" event where zombies wear Christmas sweaters or elf costumes.
  • Portal:
    • ApertureScience.com has celebrated Christmas twice, once on 2007 and once on 2010. Both times the holiday was designated as "<Holiday Name Here>", and was celebrated by various Portal- and Portal 2-themed (also with themes of The Orange Box in 2007, as Portal 2 was unheard of) props with a Christmas theme being placed in the "Holiday Vault".
    • Thinking.WithPortals.com, a fan site, takes this one step further by replacing any instance of "Christmas" in posts with "<Holiday Name Here>", much to the dismay of people who haven't played the first Portal.
  • The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 both include holidays that are very similar to real-life ones in their Seasons expansion packs:
    • The Sims 3 has Snowflake Day (Christmas), Love Day (Valentine's Day), Spooky Day (which, despite the name, is a combination of Halloween and Thanksgiving) and Leisure Day (US Independence Day).
    • The Sims 4 once again has Love Day and the straightforward New Year's Eve, but the other holidays have different names now, including Harvestfest (Thanksgiving) and Winterfest (Christmas). Winterfest even comes with its own Santa Claus stand-in known as Father Winter. There is also a minor holiday that can randomly show up in calendars called Prank Day, which seems to be based on April Fool's Day.
  • Splatoon:
    • Splatoon has Squidmas, mentioned by the Squid Sisters when re-fighting DJ Octavio, as the main theme of the North American Splatfest "Naughty vs. Nice", and as an aside when the European Splatfest "North Pole vs. South Pole" was introduced:
      Callie: [...]Don't you want to go visit Father Squidmas? I'm voting for the North Pole!
      Marie: You know Father Squidmas is just Gramps, right?
      Callie: Hmph, you can believe what you want. It's your fault if you get a lump of coral for Squidmas!
    • Splatoon 2 also references Squidmas in the "Sweaters vs. Socks" Splatfest. While introducing said Splatfest, Marina mentions Octivus, which is presumably the Octarian equivalent, before she remembers she's surrounded by Inklings and hurriedly uses a Verbal Backspace of "or whatever holiday you celebrate!"
  • Stardew Valley, like the game series it is basically an unofficial installment of, has its fair share of in-game holidays that are analogous to real-life ones. The Egg Festival is Easter, Spirit's Eve is Halloween, and the Feast of the Winter Star is an amalgamation of Thanksgiving and Christmas (complete with a Secret Santa-like gift exchange).
  • Startopia's Groulien Salt Hogs have a festival/holiday called Chrimbas. Apparently it involves handing out a random selection of wrapped-up gifts and low-grade toxins to their youngsters, who either squeal with delight or choke as their respiratory system temporarily shuts down.
  • Star Trek Online celebrates Christmas by having Q slam the numerous counterparts to the holiday for a month-and-a-half long celebration just referred to as "Q's Winter Wonderland".
  • Star Wars: Galaxies:
  • The Story of Seasons series features mostly Japanese Holidays, but (with the exception of New Year's) the real holiday names are never used. Valentine's Day and White Day become "Winter Thanksgiving" and "Spring Thanksgiving". Christmas Eve and Day become "Starry Night" and "Stocking Festival". That last bit is subverted in a few games where you can actually unlock a holiday called the Goddess Festival in honor of — who else? — the Harvest Goddess.
  • Team Fortress 2:
    • Team Fortress 2 has Australian Christmas. It takes place a week before regular Christmas, and instead of giving good children toys, Old Nick (Nicolas Crowder) takes all the bad kids to the South Pole and forces them to build hats and weapons for the next twelve months, at which point the fruits of their labours are given to him as gifts.
      "Naturally, given the sheer number of hats and weapons Old Nick receives, there are bound to be duplicates — And every December 18th, he posts them online, selling them at prices so low he's practically giving them away."
    • The 2011 Australian Christmas update introduced "Smissmas", which seems to be celebrated identically to Christmas. As of 2012, Australian Christmas is completely absent from the equation, having presumably died with its perpetrator.
  • Twisted Wonderland: Christmas is called "Winter Holiday" but Halloween is still called Halloween.
  • Undertale: The monsters in the underground invented a tradition of putting presents for one another under a decorated tree as a result of some teenagers picking on deer-like monster by decorating its tree-like horns against its will, so they gave it gifts to make it feel better. Though they don't specify a specific day or even a specific time of year that they exchange gifts, it's still very clearly a Christmas tree with a star on top, with the same gift-giving tradition associated with it.
  • Azeroth of World of Warcraft holds the "Feast of Winter Veil" every December. This is apparently universal among the disparate cultures, and comes with people who think the holiday is being overcommercialized, and its own versions of Santa Claus. For the Alliance we have Greatfather Winter, a dwarf. And for the horde there's Great-Father Winter, an orc. Both are dressed as Santa and have white beards (their names could be based on Grandfather Frost, the Eastern Slavic equivalent of Santa).
    • World of Warcraft also includes renamed versions of Halloween (Hallow's End), Easter (Noble Garden), Valentine's Day (Love is in the Air), Fourth of July/Canada Day (Midsummer Fire Festival), a Thanksgiving Day-esque holiday (Harvest Festival), Children's day and Mother's Day (Children's Week) and the Chinese New Year (Lunar Festival) in the game. October 2007 even saw the introduction of an Oktoberfest analogue, Brewfest. The Spirit of Competition showed up for the Olymipcs in 08. Even the unofficial Holiday, Talk like a Pirate Day is celebrated with Pirates' Day.
    • They have also implemented Pilgrim's Bounty (Thanksgiving analogue) and Day of the Dead (after the real-world event).

    Webcomics 
  • Cucumber Quest: According to Word of God, Dreamside has some of the same holidays as our world, but by different names. For example, Halloween is Candy Corn Day, Christmas is Candy Cane Day, and Valentine's is Bouquet Day.
  • Keychain of Creation:
    • Lampshaded in this strip; the joke, of course, is that in the Exalted universe where the strip takes place, not only Christmas but the concept of winter would be completely alien to the characters.
    • Not the concept of winter (Exalted does have seasons with climate changes), but the word itself does not refer to a season in the setting. Cue the Deathlord named Mask of Winters. For reference, the winter seasons are late Air and early Water.
  • Taken to its logical extreme in Checkerboard Nightmare where the titular character creates "X-Holiday", a more secularized and commercial version of Christmas. Buy your festive X-Holiday obelisks today!
  • Exterminatus Now has the Annual Gift Day™. At least they're calling it straight. The main characters even talk about how awful it is that some people are ascribing a religious meaning to a purely commercial holiday.
  • Taking place over 2000 years in the future, and in a fantasy setting to boot, Christmas has evolved into "Winterfest" in The Dragon Doctors.
  • From Platypus Comix:
    • Ms. Munupi from Keiki makes her students celebrate "Sparkle Day". One of them accidentally provokes her to refer to Christmas by its actual name, prompting some police to arrest her.
    • The self-contained story "How the Kvetch Stole Hannukah!" details a Grinch-like monster's attempts to frame Jewish people of ruining the holiday season by disguising as a Jew, then forcing the public media to remove all potentially offensive references to Christmas.
    • The title character of Princess Pi celebrates Life Day once, but the traditions shown in The Star Wars Holiday Special apparently became replaced with fighting the Frizzies at 11; the name refers to the fact the winner gets to live a longer life than the dead loser. Any assumptions that Peter Paltridge did this to avoid Christian references become negated when Pi explains they fight the Frizzies "to honor Jesus".
  • Homestuck has 12th Perigee's Eve. The Trolls and their Lusus may decorate the hive or just stay inside, and the Lusus goes and collects a "behemoth leaving" in the style of a Christmas tree. A 12th Perigee's Eve coincided with the trolls finishing their session and about to win when Jack Noir gets in their way and they are forced to retreat.
  • Huckleberry: The Desert Towns have a Christmas-like midwinter event where extradimensional plants inside Mock Mountain produce gifts and send them to well-behaved people.
  • In Glorianna, a bearded, jolly, fat man appears out of nowhere on the winter solstice to give the heroine a spiritual pep talk.
  • Ctrl+Alt+Del has Winter-een-mas, invented by Ethan McManus during one particularly cold winter. Despite not taking place during the end of the year, it is held in winter, is celebrated over an extended season that ends with the holiday itself, has a central figure in the King of Winter-een-mas (which is Ethan), and has themes of appreciating what one has, specifically video games. It also has parallels to the Church of Gaming, also created by Ethan.
  • In Guilded Age, almost every race seems to have its own holiday around the winter solstice. The Gastonians have Axemas, as well as a Passing Day for giving gifts to the poor. The gnomes have (well, had) Spanner's Eve, the trolls have a Tectonicalia (similar to the Saturnalia in Ancient Rome), the Savasi dwarves have an Olympics-like competition, and the gnolls have another gift-giving holiday called Traal. Both the puns and the coincidental timing of the celebrations make perfect sense once it's revealed where Arkerra came from.
  • In Alice and the Nightmare, the Wonderlandians celebrate Lights Festival, which happens in winter and involves exchanging gifts. In a unique spin, it has its own reason to be (unification of Suit tribes) and its own paraphernalia (lanterns).
  • Gently parodied in the Fuzzy Knights Christmas Special storybook Little Bear Awakens, where it's revealed that the Fuzzies (whose entire culture and society is based on borrowed concepts from the humans) celebrate "Newchristmashannakwanzaeidyear," a mash-up of Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Eid al-Fitr and New Year's, which is held on a randomly-chosen day in December.
    "It's not about that Political Correctness crap. Fuzzies don't have their own religion, but all religions have good Stories. So we have this instead. At least until we find a way to shorten the name..."
  • In Housepets!, believers in Zach's Unwanted False Faith as The Opener of Ways celebrate Openermas.
    Zach: Everyone else is out Christmas shopping, so don't worry...
    Jessica: What's Christmas?
    Zach: Please let's not make this any more complicated than it already is.
  • In the world of Sleepless Domain they celebrate a holiday called Crimmus, where the immortal Magical Girl Holly Jolly uses her powers of slowing down time, passing through barriers, and carrying infinite presents in her Bag of Holding to give to children. Anemone also hints they have some sort of equivalent to Easter (with the magical girl Spring Rabbit), while the Alt Text hints at an Hanukkah equivalent called Honkah. A later comic discusses their Halloween equivalent, Fright Night, in which children dress up as monsters and ask for candy from the adults in order to placate the monsters' spirits.
  • Latchkey Kingdom has the holiday Xmas, which is likely new, as none of the cast seems to have heard of it. It features a white reindeer who delivers presents by sleigh (who is only ever referred to as "Present Lady"), a workshop with helper mice, three ghosts of past, present, and future, and The Krampus locked in the basement. There's also supposed to be a True Meaning of Xmas, but apparantly Randy from corporate dropped the ball on "marketing the intangibles", so everyone's decided that it's about getting free stuff.
    There are three chapters about Xmas:
  • In Girl Genius, Europa celebrates the same festivals as our world, but Mechanicsburg has its own Solstice celebrations, as revealed in "A Mechanicsburg Solstice Story". In the days when there was a Heterodyne in the castle, he or she led all the Jägers in a wild parade called the Jägerstomp in which the townspeople give them drinks and they threaten kids into good behaviour, before they have a huge party in the Jägerhall, and the Heterodyne ... does something else. The Professoressa Foglio is fascinated to hear about this, calling it "a classic Night of Misrule", and comparing it to the Bavarian Rauhnacht and Swiss Tschäggättu, although people keep trying to tell her that's not the whole story. She's even more delighted to take a starring role, since Agatha's out of town, and everyone was so excited about having a real Jägerstomp instead of the touristy thing they did when there wasn't a Heterodyne. It turns out the second half of the ceremony is a scapegoating ritual where a child offers her an antlered crown, tells her "You are our Heterodyne. It is you who carries the blame. For all of us", and the Mechanicsburgers - normally proud of their Heterodyne - suddenly go all Torches and Pitchforks on her. The old Heterodynes appear to have enjoyed it, the Professoressa, not so much.
  • In Full Frontal Nerdity, when the group's adventuring party helps a teenaged Chosen One ascend to godhood, Frank tells them the day is now a holiday for that religion:
    Frank: It's going to be a time of gift-giving, singing Falgen carols, and children hoping Mr Tentacle Face leaves them gifts in the long-fingered gloves they hang on the hearth.
    Shawn: Sure, why not?

    Web Original 
  • The character Blockhead celebrates a holiday called "Ghostmas Day", which he celebrates really whenever he feels like. However the holiday seems closer to Halloween than anything and really is just an excuse for the already batshit insane character to cause more random havoc and more reason to frustrate his Conscience.
  • The Homestar Runner universe has "Decemberween", which started out as being just a different name for (secular) Christmas. Since then, it's morphed into its own Bizarroland version of it, with TV specials about "the Mystical Sword of St. Olaf" and Santa Claus displaced by "the Dethemberween Thnikkaman." The latter may or may not just be something Strong Bad made up, but this is a world where things Strong Bad makes up tend to either become, or get retconned into, real things with no explanation, so who knows. The holiday's also abbreviated "X-berween", which brilliantly makes perfect sense because X is the Roman numeral for 10, or as the Romans would have called it, "decem" (December having originally been the tenth month of the year).
  • Starmen.net has EB no Matsuri (Literally EB Festival), which has Annual Gift Man decent from his base on the moon, where he gives all the good children copies of Earthbound for the SNES, and all the bad children vials of flesh eating viruses hidden under their pillow, shoes, etc...
  • Subeta and their Luminaire. They are doing it with every other holiday, though.
  • "Holiday," observed by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
  • Britsune Garden has Fuyu Matsuri, which is a Kamitan winter celebration originating from Japan, but was eventually brought to western countries and celebrated there with even their own original traditions of the holiday (which are, not surprisingly, identical to real-world Christmas traditions). The holiday has its own origin story, which revolves around the Kamitan winter god Koriyomi and the Yuki-Inu, a gift-giving figure analogous to Santa Claus. It is also inspired by Tanabata and Obon.
  • In the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions there was Kwistanakahdon which was a Politically Correct winter celebration designed to combine various beliefs into one holiday designed to make the most money for retailers.
  • Rhett & Link, who are Christians, played around with this trope on a collection of fake outtakes from a fake commercial. Rhett also mentioned in one podcast that he celebrates the Harvest Season as opposed to Halloween.
  • Trinton Chronicles has Yule instead of Christmas, though it’s essentially the same minus the Christian overtones: there is no Christ or reason to have a mass for such a figure. Instead it’s modeled after the Germanic celebration of Winter Solstice, complete with Yule Log and giant effigy burning.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: "Slavemas" an ancient Egyptian holiday where the people of Egypt had to serve as slaves to Pharoah Atem. Until the thief king tried to ruin it, at which point he just made EVERYONE slaves all year round. And it's done as parody of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, too. Yes, 'tis awesome.
  • Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
    • Santa never came to the Saiyans on Planet Vegeta, they heard of the joy he brought to children, of the presents, of the merriment, that they were denied. Planet Vegeta never got Christmas, all they got was Freeza Day. It is later revealed that Santa did try to deliver gifts to Planet Vegeta, but the Saiyans kept trying to shoot down his sleigh.
      Goku: Well what'd you get for Freeza Day?
      Turles: He blew our planet up!
    • HFIL's Christmas Special is "A Freeza Day in HFIL" and shows some of the traditions of Freeza Day: namely, everyone gives Freeza gifts and he blows up the house of the giver whose gift he liked the least. The ogres note that they allow them to celebrate Freeza Day despite the house explosions in order to foster camaraderie and because Jesus (and by extension Christmas) is a sore subject to them, being demons, after all.
    • HFIL also mentions that a holiday called Spacegiving exists.
    Cell: Please don't tell me that's Thanksgiving...
    King Cold: IN SPACE!! Yes!
    Cell: [groans] Top me, Zarbon.
  • In the abridged X-Men series by Lets Burn Holes we get "Jesus Christ's Birthday" in place of the Christmas special, with lines such as "Let's go home and sing some Jesus Christ Carols!". And it ends with Beast (Professional Jerkass) and the Morlocks convincing Wolverine, Storm and Jubilee that Jesus Christ has been reborn on Earth. It also features such traditional Jesus Christ's Birthday traditions as ice skating, shop lifting, AIDS jokes and cannibalism.
  • My Brother, My Brother and Me has Candlenights, a "pan-religious, pan-sexual, personal pan pizza winter holiday" which the brothers celebrate with a family-friendly, obscenity-free episode of the podcast. It later crossed over into their sister podcast The Adventure Zone, which had a special Candlenights arc.
  • Tales of MU has Khersentide, a winter solstice feast that celebrates important events in the life of the local Crystal Dragon Jesus, Lord Khersis. It involves ornaments and presents.
  • Qwerpline: Nsburg celebrates "Fourth Quarter Holiday". Instead of decorating a tree in the town square, they use it to start a bonfire.
  • RWBY Chibi takes the trope and runs with it as they celebrate 'Nondescript Winter Holiday', complete with Christmas Tree and presents.
  • Acquisitions Incorporated:
    • In a spin-off comic, midwinter is when Lord Wynter, accompanied by Servitor Elves and Paindeer, brings treats to the virtuous youth. The adventure revolves around gaining the Enscriptor Malefica, or "naughty list" — people evil enough to get on the list get their souls sold to a demon.
    • A Holiday Special episode features an adventure revolving around "Deadwinter Day".
  • The Hidden Almanac has so far had two episodes dated 25 December, and both have avoided any mention of Christmas, focusing instead on the pagan festival of Dies Natali Solis Invictus, the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. In one of them, Reverend Mord remarks: "Other people were born today, but very few of them can compete with the Unconquered Sun." (There are, however, a few scattered mentions of Christmas in other episodes.)

    Western Animation 
  • Abby Hatcher had the characters celebrate a Valentine's Day event known as "Hearts and Hugs Day".
  • In The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, a holiday called Dress-Up Day is celebrated instead of Halloween.
  • Amphibia:
    • The residents celebrate a similar Halloween event known as the Blue Moon Shut-In. Residents go from door to door gathering supplies, similar to trick-or-treating, and construct fear gourds, similar to jack 'o lanterns. The frogs then use the supplies to board up their homes and hide inside for the whole night, as anyone who looks at the blue moon will transform into a hideous beast.
    • In a later episode, we learn frogs also celebrate a holiday called “Swamp Hallow’s Eve” that is apparently similar to Christmas, with the exception that it also involves ritual sacrifices.
  • Lloyd in Space portrayed not only a Christmas clone called "Droimatz", it even had its own Hannukah clone "Thierlap". Oddly, Thierlap traditions don't resemble Hannukah at all; more like an ersatz combination of the Jewish harvest festivals Passover and Sukkot that involves eating one type of durable ethnic food for about a week inside a small, non-permanent building.
  • Sealab 2021 referenced "Alvistide", the Christmas-like major holiday of the Alvians, more than once. Somewhat atypically, Alvistide was similar to Christmas in its religious aspects (the celebration of the birth of a great prophet, purportedly to a virgin), more than in its secular trappings (which mostly involved revenge, excessive consumption of whiskey, and firearms). This is an interesting example, as the episode was originally going to involve Christmas itself; the writers were warned off by Standards and Practices. There was also mention of "sheikrahdan," a month during which the menu had to be changed to accommodate the "sheikrahs."
  • Rolie Polie Olie featured "Jingle-Jangle-Day", indistinguishable from Christmas in its secular trappings. Jingle-Jangle-Claus (seriously) even puts in an appearance. There's also Spooky Ooky Day (Halloween) and Gooey Hearts Day (Valentine's Day).
  • In Futurama, it is revealed that in the Standard English of the year 3000, the holiday is pronounced "Ex-Mas" (much as "ask" is officially pronounced "axe", as it is in many dialects today). The spirit of the holiday is markedly different, as people stay inside in fear of the robot Santa Claus who puts almost everyone on his naughty list and then tries to kill them, so while this is the Trope Namer, it's closer to an inversion of Santa Clausmas. The underground mutants seem to celebrate Christmas, however, as they worship their giant unexploded nuclear missile on that day.
  • Clone High had Snowflake Day, an inclusive, non-specific holiday that replaced Christmas, as well as Kwanzaa and Hanukkah, a year before the series. The Snowflake Day episode also contained a Stop Motion scene where Santa Claus tells Snowflake Jake, the holiday's pirate-captain mascot, that he's realized that "a harmless celebration of our religions is oppressive", suggesting that this was meant to be an overall parody of this trope.
  • Breadwinners has Crustmas, which is a bread-themed version of Christmas, with Santa Crust.
  • Buzz Lightyear of Star Command includes a winter celebration wherein people all over the galaxy put up decorated fir trees, exchange presents, and eagerly await the nighttime arrival of Santa Claus. It's only ever referred to as "the holiday."
  • Butterbean's Cafe: Subverted in "The Sugar Plum Fairy!". The celebrated holiday is Christmas, but the characters call it "the holidays" and nothing else. Said universe's version of Santa Claus is the Sugar Plum Fairy.
  • My Gym Partner's a Monkey has "Animas". It involves embracing your instincts to know what day is Animas and sniffing out the holiday communal territory marking rock so you can add to it.
  • Nickelodeon series ChalkZone has a holiday episode where the people of Chalk Zone celebrate something called "Chris-hanukah-mas" and "Rama-kwanzaa-dan". No mention of Tet anywhere, though. Apparently, Buddhism doesn't exist in Chalk Zone.
  • Corn & Peg celebrate "Horse-o-ween" in place of Halloween. There's also "Hoofsgiving" (Thanksgiving) and "Hoofsmas" (Christmas).
  • On Ed, Edd n Eddy, Funny Foreigner Rolf celebrates Christmas just like the other kids of the cul-de-sac... sorta. As revealed in the Christmas Special "Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy's Jingle Jingle Jangle", Christmas in Rolf's Old Country is a bit closer to the original Yule: his living room is decorated with meats, fish, and cheeses, and instead of receiving presents from Santa, good little boys and girls receive gifts of food from Yeshmiyek, an old bearded witch who lives at the center of the Earth. There's even a song about her, if you dare to listen.
  • The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack uses Low Tides Day. People put their boots into the water, and in the morning when the water has been pushed back, there is a gift inside (left by Poseidon). Bad people get thrown in sacks and tossed around by mermen. But, at the end of the special, Poseidon "rewrites the rules" of the holidays so that it mirrors a modern-day Christmas in the USA (you get a present whether you're good or bad, etc.)
  • The PBS kids cartoon Cyberchase had an episode, Starlight Night, where penguin cyber-citizens celebrated a holiday where penguins used special fairydust to fly around their town and give out presents, including a very corny "Holiday" song. Starlight Night also involved all of Cyberspace celebrating the relighting of Cyberspace's stars (in a fashion similar to the countdown to the midnight balldrop in Times Square on New Year's Eve, complete with a Starlight Night parade grand marshal pulling a switch to relight said stars).
  • The Emperor's New School:
    • Despite being set in the pre-Columbian Incan Empire, the series features 'Kuzmas' (and other holidays such as 'Kuzcoween'). The series is ambiguous as to whether it takes place in a Flintstones-like past, or in the present in a modern day Peruvian village.
    • This series' closest counterpart to Christmas is 'Giftmas', when Papa Santos grants wishes to nice people who believe him and would even make Kuzco emperor again had it been wished by someone in the nice list. However, Papa isn't all-knowing, considering his naughty list has 'Yzma' and 'Amzy' as second and third naughtiest. (At least until Kuzco started to work his way out of the list.)
  • Blue's Clues had an episode where the characters celebrate "Love Day" instead of Valentine's Day.
  • On Chowder Christmas is called "Knishmas" in line with the series' naming everything after food. It involves making large Gingerbread Houses for Knish Kringle, a large caterpillar like version of Santa that will trash the house if the Gingerbread House isn't to his tastes.
  • Sanjay and Craig celebrate a Christmas-like event called "Huggle Day". Bizarrely, the actual holiday Halloween is celebrated, and Christmas itself was mentioned in a few early episodes.
  • Super Mario World: Mario and Luigi invent "Cave Christmas" for Dome City because it's August and the cavepeople don't know what Christmas is.
  • Dino-Riders had an episode where the Valorians stranded on Earth celebrate "Thanksgiving." Since they are time travelers from the future and know of Earth's prehistoric animals, it is never clear whether they are Human Aliens, or merely humans who settled on Valoria at some point. If the latter, then their celebration may actually be a descendant of the American Thanksgiving Day holiday. If the former, then it is merely their own home-grown holiday for giving thanks.
  • Donkey Kong Country has the characters celebrating a holiday called the Kongo Bongo Festival of Lights, which revolves around presents and visiting loved ones. Oh, and there's also fireworks.
  • Watership Down had the Feast of Frith (definitely not in the book) which just happened to fall on December 24.
  • An animated Christmas Special based on the comic strip B.C. had Peter (voiced by Bob Elliot) accidentally discover how nice it is to give something to someone. So, with the help of Wiley (voiced by Ray Goulding), he puts together a scam: a fake holiday where everyone gives everyone else gifts, in the name of a mythical figure called Santa Claus. And Peter & Wiley hope to make a bundle by selling everyone rocks (as gifts) and trees (as decorations). Since their plan involves selling " X amount of gifts to the masses", they call the holiday Xmas. But, as could be expected, things don't turn out as they planned: Santa is actually real.
  • Sheep in the Big City has "Clearance Day," an obvious comment on the commercialization of the holiday season. The holiday was invented by Clarence von Clearance when he discovered that there was a whole week on the calendar with no holidays in it.
  • Dave the Barbarian has Harvest Day, complete with its own version of Santa Claus, the Harvest Hog.
  • Kiff: “Halfway There Day” is a holiday celebrated on July 2, the exact halfway point of the year. The day is dedicated to “half-heinie-ing it”, or putting in the least amount of effort possible. The centerpiece of the holiday is the “Halfway There Day dinner crawl” where the celebrants go from house to house and the hosts put out the easiest snacks they can make. It’s said that if Halfway There day is celebrated properly, “Centaur Claus” will visit and absolve everyone of their New Years’ Day resolutions.
  • My Little Pony (G3):
    • Twinkle Wish Adventure has the Winter Wishes Festival, which has all the trappings of Christmas, but is never referred to anything other than "holiday." The main attraction of the festival is placing the Twinkle Wish Star on top of the Ever-Forevergreen tree, a huge pine tree in the center of town, decorated with ornaments and colored lights. Once the star is up there, it grants everyone "one holiday wish."
    • Averted in A Very Minty Christmas where the ponies in Ponyville celebrate Christmas. The Winter Wishes Festival seems to be ia G3.5 thing.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Several episodes are about the pony equivalent of Christmas, "Hearth's Warming Eve". It's also about the founding ponies of Equestria using friendship to survive and defeat a magical winter, making it more of a collision between a National Day and Thanksgiving which is just celebrated using typical Christmas decorations. As seen in "A Hearth's Warming Tale", it even has its own in-universe equivalent of A Christmas Carol.
    • In "Winter Wrap Up", Rainbow Dash alludes to the "awesome holidays" that apparently dot the entire winter season, so there may be more of these that haven't yet been mentioned.
    • They also have their equivalents of Halloween (Nightmare Night, which celebrates the legend of Nightmare Moon as centuries of poor history education had led everyone to understand her) and Valentine's Day (Hearts and Hooves Day, which apparently takes place during spring or early fall).
    • Depending on your perspective, you could throw in a couple of pagan holidays as well: the Summer Sun Celebration (Summer Solstice, also possibly a national holiday given the centrality of Princess Celestia) and Winter Wrap-Up (Vernal Equinox, albeit a day early and with a focus on actually physically changing the seasons).
  • Averted on My Little Pony Tales. The series itself did not have any holiday specials, but Christmas was mentioned twice.
  • Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends adores this trope. Among the holidays referenced include Valentine's Day (Heartwood Day), Halloween (Bug-a-Boo Day) and Christmas (Holly Day).
  • Ren & Stimpy:
    • There is the infamous Yak Shaving Day.
    • The album Ren & Stimpy's Crock o' Christmas features Yaksmas, which was later featured on the show in the episode "A Scooter for Yaksmas".
  • Robot and Monster has Baconmas, which is a celebration of Bacon, and how it holds society together.
  • The CBC cartoon Little Bear had an episode where the titular character and his family celebrate the Winter Solstice, which had its own song, a big dinner, and the tradition of decorating a live tree outside with lanterns and food for the "snow angels" (wild animals). In another episode, instead of Halloween, Little Bear and friends celebrate "Goblin Night," where they dress up in costumes, have a nighttime picnic around a bonfire, and watch out for goblins' mischief.
  • Tripping the Rift: The Santa clown celebration.
  • Strawberry Shortcake:
    • The 2009 reboot has the inhabitants of Berry Bitty City celebrating First Frost, which is essentially the solstice, but with a little bit of Thanksgiving thrown in for good measure. The celebration includes marching through the patch with berry lanterns (in remembrance of the first settlers of BBC, who did so to save their crops), giving gifts (only the girls do this, though. The Berrykins have their own tradition that isn't mentioned), and ends with a fancy dress ball called the Glimmerberry Ball.
    • The 2021 reboot has three so far: Frightfall for Halloween, Berry Bounty Banquet for Thanksgiving, and Winterswirl for Christmas.
  • Quoting the listing for The Kung Fu Panda Holiday Special: Po learns that his duties as Dragon Warrior will prevent him from spending his favorite holiday, the Winter Feast, with his family.
  • Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-Lot has the Care Bears celebrating the Giving Festival. Interestingly, in an earlier adaptation, they simply celebrated Christmas, even doing an adaptation of The Nutcracker.
  • In Ruby Gloom, instead of Christmas they celebrate Yam Ween.
  • Frosty Returns has the characters celebrate a "Winter Festival" without ever mentioning Christmas. This seems especially strange since CBS always airs Frosty the Snowman before it, and the two specials share DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs, and that contains a frequent number of references to Christmas.
  • How to Train Your Dragon has a short special called Gift of the Night Fury, in which the Vikings celebrate “Snoggletog” by decorating a big green tree, hanging up lights, exchanging gifts, and so on. Astrid decides she wants to start some new holiday traditions. Among other things, she serves a drink called Yak-Nog. The need to make up a new holiday for this franchise seems a bit odd, since it's an historical fact that the Vikings celebrated Yule or the Winter Solstice long before the Nordic countries were christened.
    Hiccup: Why we chose such a stupid name remains a mystery.
  • Team Umizoomi has "Just Because I Love You Day" for Valentine's Day.
  • The "Winter Harvest Festival" on the planet of Galaluna in Sym-Bionic Titan. On Earth, Ilana plans the school's dance (which is in winter, or at least snow) in the style of her planet's festival, but nothing indicates it's Christmastime in Illinois.
  • The citizens of Gravity Falls apparently love Halloween so much, they celebrate it a second time in late June and call it "Summerween". Aside from the jack-o-lanterns carved out of watermelons and the presence of a sinister "Summerween Trickster", it has the typical trappings of Halloween.
  • Because Halloween is the day that the Smurfs in the 1980s cartoon show celebrate Jokey's birthday, a similar holiday called Spook-A-Smurf Eve is celebrated by the main characters in the cartoon episode "Monster Smurfs." There's also Smurfy Friendship Day, which is basically a second Valentine's Day for the Smurfs, and the Feast Of Plenty, which is probably the closest thing they have to a Thanksgiving.
  • The 7D has "Jolly Day" for Christmas.
  • Dinosaur Train shows the denizens of the Mesozoic celebrate the winter solstice. In addition, the northern Troodon also celebrate a "Festival of Lights" (the "lights" referring to the aurora borealis).
  • In League of Super Evil, the villains have their own anti-Christmas called Chaos-mas, where Kinder Kreep comes up from the toilet to give presents to the evilest of villains.
  • In Sofia the First, the kingdom of Enchancia celebrates "Wassailia" during a certain day in winter. It's as grand and family-togetherness-based as Christmas and also takes from Hanukkah and St. Lucia's Day, and the traditional décor is only slightly different, while the holiday is not given an actual origin ("Wassailing" is a paganish version of caroling in Real Life). In the book "Sofia's First Christmas", Christmas is celebrated in Zumaria. Regardless of the book being canon or not, Christmas is hinted to exist in the cartoon when a reference to Santa Claus is made in the second Wassailia episode. While gifts are part of Wassailia, neither Santa nor any similar character is said to be.
    • In an interesting variation, "Princess Butterfly" has everyone celebrate All Hallows' Eve, the equivalent of Halloween. However, "The Ghostly Gala" and "Too Cute To Spook" has everyone celebrate the actual Halloween. (In Real Life the name Halloween began as a contraction of All Hallows' Eve, meaning the eve of All Saints' Day.)
    • Meanwhile, in the spinoff series, Elena of Avalor, this is trope is interestingly averted for the most part and points to Avalor being predominantly Roman Catholic. The people of Avalor — a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of numerous Latin-American countries — celebrate Navidad, although Naomi mentions in a throwaway line in the first Navidad episode that she celebrates Christmas where she's from (which seems to be a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Netherlands), meaning they are one and the same holiday.
      • It is established that the Avalorans celebrate Carnaval, which is similar to the Brazilian Carnival, but with an "a". Interestingly, Carnival is a celebration of Ash Wednesday, also known as the beginning of Lent (in other words, the forty-day period before Easter).
      • Not a Christian/Catholic holiday or necessarily a religious one, but Dia de Los Muertos is also celebrated in Avalor.
      • Word of God has also stated that the Avalorans also celebrate La Semana Santa, also known as Holy Week — the week leading up to Easter Sunday.
      • The existence of these religious holidays in the Ever Realm can at least be justified by some level of historical interaction between the Ever Realm and the "real world", as the Sofia the First series finale reveals that the Ever Realm takes place on the same world as Neverland.
  • In Jake And The Neverland Pirates, the pirates celebrate Winter Treasure Day. It's similar to Christmas, except Peter Pan leaves presents instead of Santa.
  • In the Disney Fairies "Pixie Hollow" online game, the fairies of Pixie Hollow celebrate the Great Winter Light-Up and the Winter Solstice, and also hold a Holiday Festival when Christmas comes around.
  • One episode of The Land Before Time has the characters celebrating what they call the "Bright Circle Celebration". It has elements of Thanksgiving (since the characters are showing appreciation for what they have) and New Year's Eve (not only do some characters make resolutions, but it also starts snowing near the end of the episode, showing that the episode takes place around winter).
  • Fanboy and Chum Chum has the gang celebrate "Icemas", an ice-themed variation of the holiday with Man-Arctica as the Santa Clause. Despite this, the real holiday is mentioned in two early episodes before this, and bizarrely, they celebrate the real holidays Halloween and Thanksgiving.
  • Long Live the Royals has the Yule Hare festival, which is a mix of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Alex is the only person that actually believes the Yule Hare legend. It turns out the Yule Hare is real.
  • Creative Galaxy has the story "Heart Day," which is promoted as a Valentine's Day special, but the holiday is called "Heart Day" within the story, as indicated by the title. Eye-rolling may commence because even though the characters are all aliens, the show also has a Christmas Episode, with Christmas actually called "Christmas."
  • Little Charmers has the characters celebrating "Sparkle Night" and "Pumpkin Moon Night".
  • On Star vs. the Forces of Evil the people of Mewni celebrate "Stump Day", where they share love and good cheer in honor of the Great Stump that sheltered the first Mewman settlers during their first winter... and as Star and her friends find out, there had better be good cheer or else.
  • The Powerpuff Girls (2016) episode "You're A Good Man, Mojo Jojo," celebrates Generic Tree-Lighting Day, a secular substitute for Christmas (obviously).
  • Dragon Tales:
    • This show gives us Dragontine's Day for Valentine's Day.
    • "Pigment of Your Imagination" also has "I Love Mommy Day," which is just Mother's Day by another name.
  • The monsters from Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop celebrate Mishmash.
  • Parodied in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Spider-Man is revealed to have done a Christmas album at one point. Or rather, a “Non-Denominational Holiday” album. Every instance of the word Christmas is replaced with that phrase, leading to titles like “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Non-Denominational Holiday”.
  • Tuca & Bertie:
    • Tuca and Bertie celebrate Molting Day, where the ghost of a bird named St. Oriole, who died instead of migrating with his family, delivers candy to spread familial love. Other than that, it functions just like Christmas, with songs like "Silent Night" appearing with slightly tweaked lyrics and a poster with Santa Claus appearing in the background.
    • One episode features “Corpse Week”, a holiday with elements of Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and Thanksgiving.
  • Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood had an episode called "Snowflake Day!" which centered around a winter festival that was similar to Christmas. The show also had a non-Christmas example, with a Valentine's Day-like celebration called "Love Day".
  • Trolls: The Beat Goes On! has an episode with an event called the Harvest Moon where a person called The Giver gives presents to all the Trolls, similar to Christmas.
  • Teen Titans Go! had an episode called "Career Day" about a stand-in for Labor Day that also happened to be called Career Day.
  • T.O.T.S. has Totsgiving in place of Thanksgiving.
  • PB&J Otter has Hoohaw Hoo from "The Ice Moose", with the titular character (who is named Old Tim) as the obligatory Santa stand-in. Old Tim will grant wishes to those who make a wish on "the star of Hoohaw Hoo". Unsurprisingly, the actual holiday Halloween is celebrated in "A Hoohaw Halloween".
  • Pig Goat Banana Cricket gives us an unusual holiday called "Chalawunga".
  • Nature Cat has the episode "Winter Dance Party" in which every year on the day of the winter solstice, Daisy's Granny Bunny celebrates with a winter dance party. Daisy has been caught unprepared for the occasion, however, and must hurry to get everything set up before she arrives with the help of her friends. Later on, the series did have a Christmas Episode, titled "A Nature Carol".
  • Wander over Yonder's Christmas Episode "The Gift" has Wander as seemingly the inventor of his universe's version of this trope, as he takes advantage of a natural phenomenon that allows him to travel around the entire universe within a single day to deliver presents to everyone he met over the past season (of his life, that is). He and Sylvia simply refer to the event as "Today."
    Sylvia: ...I hate today.
  • The Patrick Star Show: Zigzagged in "Blorpsgiving". The episode does name Thanksgiving as such, and starts on the day. However, in the Show Within a Show that Squidina and Patrick watch, it's called Blorpsgiving and celebrated by robots. This is despite the traditions of "Blorpsgiving", being an extended family gathering and a feast, basically being Thanksgiving with a robot twist.
  • Work It Out Wombats!: In "The Treeborhood Harvest Day / The Treeborhood Thankfulness Stew", Harvest Day is a stand-in for Thanksgiving, as it revolves around thankfulness and eating a big feast together. (Harvest Festival is roughly the UK version of Thanksgiving in Real Life.)

    Other 
  • Localities in the Society for Creative Anachronism often accommodate their members' desire for a Christmas party by scheduling a winter solstice "revel", an event that many of their personas in its Anachronism Stew would have celebrated in one way or another. Too often for SCA authenticity mavens' taste, someone in power insists that the obligatory evergreens include an obvious Christmas tree, which not only contravenes the SCA rule against favoring any religion but is significantly later than the Society's chosen pre-17th century period. But the feasting, dancing, and rejoicing manage to survive such contretemps.

    Real Life 
  • New Year's instead of Christmas in Russia.
    • Christmas was always a very religious holiday in Russia, and New Year's was popular as a chance to celebrate Christmas again without all the candles and dourness. The Soviet Union was militantly anti-religious until Stalin relaxed things in 1942, and even after that it was hard for the religious to rise very far in the Soviet state. The USSR moved the Christmas festivities over to New Year's, complete with a secular Santa Claus. Even today, with Putin trying to help the Russian Orthodox Church rebuild popular belief, New Year's is the winter festival season and Christmas is far from universal.
    • New Year's is also earlier than Christmas. The USSR switched to the Gregorian calendar in the 1920s, but the Russian Orthodox Church still follows the Julian Calendar, so Christmas Day falls on Gregorian January 7th.
  • Turkey, a highly Westernized Muslim country, also celebrates a Christmas-like New Year's — with gifts, trees, and even a Santa Claus counterpart.note 
  • Hanukkah is a minor holiday in the Jewish religious calendar — a celebration of a military victory against the Seleucids, a sort of religious V-J Day — but it's a minor holiday that just happens to fall close to Christmas, and it's come to be a huge cultural event in the US. Some families even add trees to the celebration, calling them "Hanukkah Bushes," but this is itself a Dead Horse Trope among Jews — perhaps particularly because the Christmas tree is a pagan European custom (specifically a pagan German one), not specifically Christian and definitely not Jewish.
    • Christmas Day spent seeing a movie and eating Chinese food is its own trope.
    • Hanukkah is a significant holiday in modern Israel, but for different reasons—the military aspect has made it a kind of Armed Forces Day celebrating the prowess of the Israel Defense Forces, sometimes even with military parades.
  • Most Japanese aren't Christians, but that does nothing to stop them. Japanese Christmas is a romantic holiday, like St. Valentine's Day with elves, hats, and cake. It's New Year's that has Christmas-like associations, being a very family-, home-, and religion-oriented holiday; most TV channels will ring in the new year with majestic images of shrines tolling their bells in remote, snow-covered locations.
  • The Republic of China, a.k.a. Taiwan, celebrates its Constitution Day on December the 25th. This was arranged deliberately by the country's first President, Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang, who was Christian, wanted an excuse to make Christmas a public holiday in a predominantly Buddhist/Taoist society.
  • For the entire Southern Hemisphere, Christmas is a summer holiday, but it's still celebrated with the full Victorian paraphernalia. It's not unusual for an Australian Christmas (for example) to involve roast turkeys and fake snowmen during a 40 degree Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) day. And Surfer-Santa!
  • Related to the above, most of the southern United States sees Christmas the same way that the Southern Hemisphere does due to it not getting cold enough to snow down there except in particularly high-altitude areas or during a freak cold-snap that coincides with both an incoming low-pressure system and the holiday itself. This has led to certain sights such as Florida flamingo lawn ornaments decorated with Santa hats and lights, snowmen made from sand on the beach and decorated with seashells, and the ever-present Surfer Santa or Santa in beach attire chilling on a lounge chair with a delightful beverage.
  • The Wiccan Yule is basically a rebranding of Christmas with some neopagan elements replacing the Christian elements, and otherwise the same. It often does not resemble the ancient Germanic festival that is its namesake.
  • Having some kind of celebrations/ceremonies for spring, midsummer, fall, and midwinter/january appears quite universal even among cultures that didn't necessarily have much contact with each other.
  • Because of the official separation between church and state in the United States, a lot of government-funded public schools have started merely referring to their winter festivities as holiday parties. Generally they consist more or less entirely of traditional Christmas activities.


 
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Freeza Day

In the world of Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Santa never made it to Planet Vegeta, mostly because they kept trying to shoot his sleigh down, so instead of Christmas we have Freeza Day. While this was mostly just a small running gag, Freeza Day became an actual celebrated holiday in Hell for the natives of HFIL, with each house giving the Space Emperor a present, after which he'll blow up the home of the one with the worst gift.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (7 votes)

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Main / YouMeanXmas

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