10 Best How I Met Your Mother Holiday Episodes
6. How Lily Stole Christmas
Come on, you knew this one was coming—a standout episode
of one of the show’s earliest seasons, this instalment combines Christmas cheer
with some solid character development as our nominal hero Ted realizes he still
harbours resentment toward Lily for her decision to leave Marshall at the close
of the show’s first seasons.
This revelation is sandwiched between some stellar Christmas-sy scenes as Marshall eagerly awaits his Winter wonderland and aids a present-delivering postal worker in a magical and endearingly silly aside, but through the beating heart of this episode there’s some surprisingly dark and well-written bitterness to counteract the saccharine sweetness of the holiday—think of Ted dropping the titular offending article as a shot of rum in some otherwise-sweet eggnog.
Well worth a re-watch, it’s one of the show’s most grounded holiday outings, and all the more mature and funny for this fact.