The holiday season is a time for nostalgia, savoring warm memories created with friends and family – and often, red-nosed reindeer, abominable snowmen, and an elf here or there.

Christmas TV specials are as old as the medium of TV itself, and everyone has his or her favorite.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

Many of the specials that Baby Boomers and older members of Generation X will remember from their childhood were produced by Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment, who cornered the market in stop motion animation. Think Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, The Year Without a Santa Claus – well, you get the idea. In stop motion animation, inanimate objects are moved slightly between photographed frames in order to give the object an appearance of motion. Rankin/Bass TV specials gave us some of our most beloved Christmas characters come to life, all thanks to this effect, which the company called, “Animagic.”

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is among the earliest televised Christmas specials, having been telecast every year since 1964. Telling the well-known story of Rudolph’s embracing of his glowing red nose after being labeled an outcast by his peers, Rudolph was voiced by Canadian voice actress Billie Mae Richards, while American musician and actor Burl Ives lent his voice to the narrator of the special (the doll crafted for the character was made specifically to resemble Ives).

While Rudolph’s story had a happy ending, most of the original puppets used in the 1964 production did not. Most of the original puppets were not properly stored and deteriorated as the years passed; of the surviving puppets, two – one Rudolph and one Santa – were taken onto the TV program Antiques Roadshow and were appraised at a value of between $8,000 and $10,000. According to the Associated Press, in 2020, the pieces sold at auction for $368,000, and later donated to the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.

Cementing its place in pop culture history, in 2014, the U.S. Postal Service commissioned a postage stamp of Rudolph.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Commissioned and sponsored by the Coca-Cola Co., A Charlie Brown Christmas was special for many reasons – chief among them, it was the first Peanuts TV special to feature Charles M. Schulz’s beloved characters, who had delighted readers on the comics page of their local newspaper since 1950.

The TV special was also unique in that non-actor children voiced Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and their pals, with the youngest, only 6 years old and unable to read, having to been fed her lines one sentence at a time (shockingly enough, the voice recordings were completed in just one day). A California-based children’s choir lent their voices to “Christmas Time is Here” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” at the beginning and end of the program, respectively.

The program’s jazz soundtrack, composed by Vince Guaraldi, has sold millions of copies worldwide. A Charlie Brown Christmas has since become synonymous with appreciating one’s blessings during an increasingly commercialized holiday season, with no better symbol than the small sapling tree he finds in a Christmas tree lot.

Against the expectations of the show’s producers, the program was an instant hit, airing on CBS on Dec. 9, 1965, to an estimated 14.5 million viewers. The next year, it would win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program.

“A Charlie Brown Christmas” has remained one of the most popular family programs of the holiday season for more than 50 years; one of the animators, said it was the best special he’ll ever make – This show is going to run for a hundred years,” marveled Ed Levitt upon its release and glowing reception. In 2012, the program was added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2012 as a “culturally, historically”: important sound recording.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

Children’s author Dr. Seuss and veteran animator Chuck Jones of Looney Tunes fame paired up in the mid-1960s to transform Seuss’ classic book How the Grinch Stole Christmas into a short TV Christmas special.

For the animated special, according to Toonopedia, animators spent more than a year penning thousands of cells, background drawings, and character drawings. Jones himself said he animated the diminutive, soft-spoken Cindy Lou Who (voiced by June Foray, best known as the voice of Rocky the squirrel in Rocky and Bullwinkle) to somewhat resemble the Grinch, while Max, the Grinch’s perpetually suffering canine henchman, was designed with Porky Pig’s character in the Duck Dodgers cartoons in mind.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas made its debut on Dec. 18, 1966, amid a spate of other animated holiday specials, following on the heels of other animated Christmas specials released during the mid-1960s (and, not coincidentally, the birth of color television).

Continuing the tradition of the inclusion of employing big names with big voices, Boris Karloff headlined the small list of voice actors, with Karloff pulling double duty as both the Grinch and the Narrator. Audiences from the previous generation would remember Karloff in his iconic role as Frankenstein’s Monster in the 1931 horror classic Frankenstein. Many viewers mistakenly believe that Karloff also sang the special’s “You’re a Mean One, Mister Grinch,” but that designation goes to vocalist Thurl Ravenscroft. If Ravenscroft’s deep bass voice sounds familiar, that’s because audiences knew him as the voice of Tony the Tiger for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal. Ravenscroft voiced Tony for an entire five decades.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas consistently remains in the top 10s of Best Family Holiday TV Specials.