The Yuletide Gay: Five memorable holiday episodes from gay television's Christmas past

Snicks may already be feeling all humbug-y, but the rest of us are still eagerly sucking down the eggnog, engaging in a week-long bender of holiday cheer (and willfully oblivious to the post-Christmas letdown that will surely hit us on Friday like a brass nutcracker in the, well, nuts).

What's my favorite part of the holidays? In addition to the antiquated holiday specials, it's the labored "holiday episode" of my favorite shows. You know the episode I mean: the one where the main characters learn a Christmas-related lesson, usually after being "snowed in" and unable to go "home" for the holidays, or else after being visited by three ghosts, played in painful cameo-like fashion by the show's put-upon secondary characters.

Weirdly, most shows seem to only do one or two "holiday" episodes no matter how many seasons they run, which they then proceed to rerun each year in the "Christmas" slot. I guess even they can only take so many sweltering Julys where they have to pretend it's Christmas and snowing outside.

But the Christmas lessons learned are a little different on most of our favorite "gay" shows. How so? Find out after the jump!

Will & Grace

In "A Christmas Queer," Will and Grace are off to Connecticut to Will's mother's house for Christmas. Once there, it seems that Will's 10 year-old gay-seeming nephew is being discouraged from putting on a Christmas show ... just as Will was never allowed to be who he was as a boy, either.

"I don't remember driving into the town from Footloose!" Jack says. "Let the boy dance!"

Will and Jack help the budding queer — "We'll make an opera cape out of...well, your opera cape," Jack tells him — and the show eventually does go on. To Will & Grace's everlasting credit, no lessons whatsoever are learned, but Karen does manage to stay bombed and Grace actually gets laid.

As the World Turns

Ah, the infamous "mistletoe" episode! Was it really only last year that ATWT did its appropriately-mocked camera-pan upward from Luke and Noah just as they finally started to kiss, to the mistletoe hanging over their heads? It was a purely "artistic decision", of course!

Speaking of Will & Grace, someone put together a hilarious edit of Will, Jack and Grace "reacting" to last year's cut-away on ATWT:

Pee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special

I confess that I didn't appreciate this show in first-run; in retrospect, I can see that it's fricking brilliant — probably the best, most wonderfully subversive "kids'" show ever. It was at its absolute creative peak for the 1988 Christmas Special.

Why is this show "gay"? Well, this episode alone has k.d. lang, Grace Jones, Little Richard, Charo, Annette Funicello (who announces "Annette!" in the opening credits just for the hell of it), hot soldiers in uniform (who almost immediately start boogie-ing), and a set design that has to be seen to be believed.

Ugly Betty

Remember the infamous "pink" Christmas tree from last year's Ugly Betty holiday episode? The episode begins with Betty and company sorting through the family ornaments — including Betty's popsicle stick Santa, which pales next to Justin's spectacular "Madonna and child," (which, of course, features the Material Girl along with her daughter Lourdes). Hilda and Justin want to jazz the tree up this year — or maybe get a pink tree like everyone is talking about down at the mall. But Betty, reeling from one too many changes, is relying on the old family traditions to give her a sense of stability.

You know, of course, where this is leading: by the end of the episode, Betty will basically "carve the roast beast" and buy everyone a pink Christmas tree, talking about how part of "tradition" is making new traditions. The fact that the show can pull off schmaltz like this is testament to how great it is!

This has nothing to do with Christmas, but earlier in the episode, Wilhelmina tells Marc she's planned something that would have everyone remembering them forever, and Marc replies: "Is this going to be some murder-suicide thing? Because Cliff and I have A Chorus Line tickets for tonight!"

Rick and Steve the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World

And finally, this week's Christmas episode of Rick and Steve looks amusing. I'm not saying the partner and I have ever discussed gift-giving quite so crassly, but let's just say this isn't a totally undiscovered country that Rick and Steve are living in: