Every Simpsons Christmas Special - Ranked

While The Fight Before Christmas is a little scattergun, Simpsons Christmas Stories picks great stories and sticks with them. It doesn’t complete with the very best Treehouse episodes, but it’s decent nonetheless. Much better than a lot of the modern Halloween specials and more in line with stuff like Simpsons Bible Stories anyway.

The three segments are really two segments and a Nutcracker song to close the episode out. While that feels a little like filler, the other two are strong enough to save it. Marge and Homer as Mary and Joseph is a tad predictable, but there’s enough gags to make it fresh.

Usually the weakest segment is sandwiched in the middle, but here it’s the episode’s strongest offering. We see a younger Grampa Simpson and Mr Burns stranded on a desert island during World War Two. It does lose the Christmas theme here and there but the duo bounce off each other well. There’s a sweet moment where they exchange Christmas gifts, brilliantly undercut as Burns then shoots down Santa Claus.

These chopped up episodes will never compete with the very best narratives, but it’s an enjoyable 22 minutes of Christmas TV anyway.