After a few weeks off, we’re back with another installment of Trope Tuesday, our weekly sojourn into TV Tropes and the lovely literary devices that make our favorite entertainment work. This week, we’re looking at a trope called You Mean Xmas:

Even if the Christmas Special is widely used, a few writers catch on that some stories take place in a setting where certain holidays and celebrations shouldn’t exist in the original sense. So the characters celebrate a holiday that’s (hopefully) just coincidentally similar enough to have the audience roll their eyes.

Despite the eye-rolling, this can be a Justified Trope if the world of the story has solstices and equinoxes like our own, which would be logical times of the year to have a celebration.

Naturally, these episodes are aired around the holiday they’re really trying to depict, and sometimes may receive a name change in order to comment on them without raising the ire of Media Watchdogs.

Two words, folks: Holiday Special.