Advent Calendar House - TV Holiday & Christmas Specials

🎄It’s 1984, and Ebenezer Scrooge is threatening to raise his asking price for a warehouse full of corn.  

This Christmas Eve episode not only drops on a Scrooge Sunday, but it’s also the Advent Calendar House’s 150th episode. To celebrate, I let listeners vote for which “Christmas Carol” to cover, and the winner is the 1984 TV movie starring George S. Scott, along with original “Equalizer” Edward Woodward as a sassy Ghost of Christ...

🎄It’s 1980, and my spoiled nephew just got beaten in a ski-jumping contest by a bear who’s never seen winter before.  

Join us we fail upward through middle to upper hotel management featuring a simultaneously very mature and very immature conversation about cartoon bears discovering mistletoe. What could be the Jellystone Winter Lodge’s final Christmas carnival manages to wake up Yogi Bear, who hibernates directly underneath it bu...

🎄It’s 1970, and Santa’s been locked up in an underground cave with 2 giant Muppet monsters.  

Join us as we venture through the tunnels under Santa’s workshop to uncover Jim Henson’s first ever TV holiday special, presented by The Ed Sullivan Show and featuring the first Muppet performances by Richard Hunt, Fran Brill, Marilyn Sokol, and John Lovelady, as well as the first appearances of Thog and a familiar-looking Frackle who’d la...

🎄It’s 1983, and the Worst Kids in the World are taking over the church Nativity play, smoking in the ladies’ room, and helping themselves to the sacramental grape juice.  

Join us as we meet the Herdmans in a classic Christmas story turned TV movie starring Loretta Swit from M*A*S*H and a young Fairuza Balk in her on-screen debut.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Scott Leopold (Holly Jolly X’masu)  

Bob Baker (Festive Foreign Film Fans) ...

🎄It’s 1994, and the Jeffersons are poisoning Metropolis with greed spray from toy atomic space rats.  

Join us on an unpredictable flight through the first Christmas episode of “Lois and Clark,” written by Dean Cain and starring Sherman Hemsley as the Toyman and Isabel Sanford as his reluctant assistant, plus Denise Richards, Dick Van Patten, Doug Llewellyn, and terrible special effects.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Gerry Davila (To...

🎄It’s 2001, and a magical partridge is sending me on a coat drive for some kind of Karate Kid-style Santa training.  

Hop in our light blue ’54 convertible and buckle up as we take you on a joyride through the very last and most forgotten Rankin/Bass Christmas special, featuring a mostly black cast starring Patti LaBelle, Gregory Hines, and a criminally underused Eartha Kitt as a talking cat.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Andre Benne...

🎄It’s 1989, and a killer in a Santa suit is making it really hard to hide my dead husband’s body.  

You better watch out as we dig up the first filmed episode of “Tales From the Crypt,” a cozy Christmas nightmare directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring his then-wife and talented screamer, Mary Ellen Trainor, and the kid who gets her hoverboard stolen by Marty McFly.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Jamie Ray (Fave Five From Fans, Compl...

🎄 It’s 1979, by way of 1933 — or the other way around — and the human from Fraggle Rock has broken into my garage with a haunted choir of singing children.  

Join us as we turn the dial on our haunted time-traveling radio to find Henry Winkler at the height of his fame as the Fonz hiding under multiple layers of makeup as a Scrooge figure in Great Depression-era New England.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Tom Coombs (The Pop Daddy)  

S...

🕎 It’s 2003, and a team of Hebrew school basketball players think they’ve found the ghost of Judah Maccabee in a random guy living in a van.  

It’s time once again to think about the Seleucid Empire as we watch a Disney Channel Original Hanukkah Movie very loosely based on the true story of former college basketball star Lamont Carr and a yeshiva’s struggling team looking for a leader.  

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🎙 Guests:  

April Ryley (@wher...

🎄 It’s 1987, and someone stole Santa Claus in the middle of his hot dog break.  

Join us as we follow a renowned novelist who may or may not be a teenager and her animated mouse writing partner on a quest find out who kidnapped a department store Santa, while we solve the mystery of how anyone remembers this Christmas special that only aired once.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Lindy Kempe (Bluesky).  

Emily Rowley (Threads).  

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🎄 It’s 1991, and Santa Claus is fighting with a talking dog over a park bench.  

By some Christmas miracle, this obscure special was rediscovered over 30 years later. For years, people on the Internet tried to identify it on a TV in the background of an old family photo, until finally, thanks to the power of positivity, it was identified as “The Soulmates in The Gift of Light.” Join us as we meet the intergalactic Soulmates in what...

🎄 It’s 1977, and Happy Gilmore’s grandmother is surrounded by dancing chickens.  

It’s a beautiful day for a podcast, and this season of the Advent Calendar House begins with a visit to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in a Christmas special that hadn’t been available for more than 40 years until it resurfaced in 2022. It’s surprisingly less festive than some might expect, but it makes up for that with some extremely bizarre adventures....

🎄 After spending 3 months locked in a water tower, the Advent Calendar House has escaped in time for Christmas Podcast Day, a fake holiday originally made up for a hashtag back when social media was slightly less stupid.  

It’s not Scrooge Sunday, but the theme for this year’s Christmas Podcast Day is “A Christmas Carol,” so I’m playing a long, but also cheating a little by covering both segments of a 1993 Christmas episode of “Ani...

🎄 Previously on the Advent Calendar House, we watched a cavemen take over Santa’s job after he fell off the roof in “A Flintstone Christmas.”  

This time, our reunion tour of previously podcasted-about characters makes its final stop of the season in Bedrock, where Fred Flintstone is letting the lead role of “Ebonezer” Scrooge go to his head, while Wilma is doing the workload of I lost count of how many victims of the highly contag...

Previously on the Advent Calendar House, we let the goofy alien puppet with the jokes toy with our emotions in “ALF’s Special Christmas.”  

🦃 This time, join us around the Fappiano table as we aim a spoonful of squash back to 1988 for a special, 2-part Thanksgiving episode of “ALF.” Too bad he’s already eaten the turkey, but there might still be some  sweet potato pie in the garage, with the homeless man.  

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🎙 Guests:  

🎄 Previously on the Advent Calendar House, we went on an apocryphal adventure with the story of The Little Drummer Boy.  

This time, Rankin/Bass drums up an unnecessary sequel from 1976, its busiest year for holiday specials. Join Aaron on a side quest to retrieve the stolen silver bells from a troop of greedy Roman soldiers in the “Rogue One” of Christmas stories.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Brandon Medley (@brandmed, 📸 @blesseda...

🎄 Previously on the Advent Calendar House, we spent Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, Hanukkah on “Shalom Sesame,” and even uncovered the oddity, “A Special Sesame Street Christmas.”  

This time, join us as we fly faster than time backwards around the globe to 1996 to watch Elmo save, then ruin, then fix Christmas, featuring Maya Angelou, Harvey Fierstein as the Easter Bunny, and “Doc Hopper,” himself, Charles Durning as Santa.  

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🎄 Previously on the Advent Calendar House, we saved Punky Brewster’s Christmas spirit in “Yes, Punky, There Is a Santa Claus.”  

This time, join Punky in 1985 on an animated adventure to the North Pole, courtesy of Glomer, her new magical leprechaun-gopher Ewok lookin’ friend. The ’80s were weird.  

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🎙 Guests:  

Adam Pope (WIZARDS The Podcast Guide to Comics, @hojukoolander).  

Steven (UFO Club).  

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