Happy Endings, season 3, episode 7, “No-ho-ho”
Like many Christmas episodes, this is about someone hating Christmas and then realizing its value. This is a great example of Taking That Concept Too Far—we, the audience, are robbed of Christmas and are only reunited with its spangly joy in the last 90 seconds of the episode. Every actor on Happy Endings is absurdly, almost scarily charming, but nobody is more charming than Christmas.
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How I Met Your Mother, season 8, episode 10, “The Over-Correction”
This episode uses a great and important comedy trope: people hiding in each other’s closets. But it also uses a bad and boring comedy trope: adult men who have weird sex issues with their moms. Get this off our televisions! Especially in the holy month of December! In this episode Marshall struggles as his mom tries to date, and Lily actually throws up at the idea of their parents dating. Yes, that’s not great, but seeing your adult mom as a fully realized person is important! And if your mom refers to her boobs as “the Minnesota twins,” well, all the better. This episode is disappointingly cheerless overall—it’s not frosted, tinsely, glowing, silver with bells and mist, or snowy. I would rather be at a mall in Canada than with this crew on Christmas.
