Both Series 2 and Series 3 of Sherlock have aired in the festive period, beginning on New Years' Day. If this pattern continues then it would be nice to acknowledge it as part of the seasonal schedule with an adaptation of Doyle's one Christmas-specific Holmes story: The Blue Carbuncle. In this story a man comes to Holmes with a battered hat, having picked it and a plump Christmas goose up after they were dropped in a street brawl. After taking the goose home to eat, he found a valuable gemstone in its throat. Using his deductions based on the hat, Holmes is able to track down the gem's thief who had fed it to the goose hoping to pick it up later before mixing up which goose was which. Unusually, and it being Christmas, Holmes allows the thief to go free, saying that to arrest him would only make him a hardened criminal later. While this would be a nice nod to the generous spirit of the season, it would also serve to remind the audience that Holmes operates by his own morality and sometimes outside the law. As he says in the story: "I am not retained by the police to remedy their deficiencies". The goose farming element of the plot has some modern mileage as well. It would be interesting to see how the story, in which the thief James Ryder has a sister breeding geese for Christmas and personally selects the one for him before she sends the rest to a pub for selling, would fit with modern food production and sale methods. Perhaps there is an opportunity to comment, in the wake of this year's food adulteration and horse meat scandal, about how many people don't know where their food is coming from these days. Perhaps when he thought he was getting a goose he wasn't getting one at all.
