YMMV / Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey

• Covers Always Lie: When the special was included as an extra on the DVD of The Year Without a Santa Claus, the picture used to represent Nestor was actually of Speiltoe, the narrator donkey.
• Moe: Nestor has to be one of the cutest looking donkeys in animated media.
• Narm: The death of Nestor's mother is a pretty sad moment to be sure. But the sad mood is undercut when Nestor walks away from his mother's snow-covered corpse, and promptly trips over his ears comically.
  • Narm Charm: Yet this leads to more sadness, as Nestor tearfully reminds himself "Ears, Nestor," the way his mother always used to do.
• Retroactive Recognition: Brenda Vaccaro makes her voice acting debut as Tilly before she did the likes of Scruple and Bunny Bravo.
• Signature Scene: The Heroic Sacrifice of Nestor's mother.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The main song is very similar in both tune and lyrics to "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". It even references Rudolph twice, in the intro and in the last verse, making it a Sequel Song (or rather, Prequel Song) of sorts.
• Tear Jerker: If not the majority of the special, then most definitely the scene revealing Nestor's mother having died in the snowstorm, and the later scene of Nestor hearing her voice and seeing her watching over him from Heaven; Nestor sounds like he's tearing up himself in the latter moment!
• The Woobie: Nestor. Good GOD does that kid deserve a hug. For starters, his whole childhood had him teased by every other animal in his stable, with the sole exception of his mother (and even then, she still chastised him over his clumsiness, albeit gently). Then for the first time he's accepted by the other donkeys and even has fun for probably the first time in his life, it's interrupted by Roman soldiers trying to take him away from his mother and succeeding in taking all his new friends to a life of slavery. Then he's thrown out into a blizzard after inadvertently ruining the farmer's business deal, afterwards his mother dies keeping him warm and safe from the cold (let's not imagine his reaction to waking up and discovering her frozen body...). Granted, things get a little better for him after that for a while, but then he's dumped at a stable where he's constantly made fun of AGAIN for the very thing that indirectly led to his mother's death, until FINALLY he meets some people who are genuinely kind to him and realizes what a gift his ears really are (while also seeing a vision of his mother watching over him from Heaven - c'mon, who WOULDN'T bawl their eyes out if they got such a vision?). Whoof.

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