Viewers have enjoyed sharing holidays with their favorite television characters since the medium’s infancy. We grow invested in our friends on screen over the years; spending Christmas with them is a rite of passage, a chance for us to share tradition from our world with the fictional ones we see on screen.Some shows embrace the season wholeheartedly, characters in good spirits and enjoying the trappings of the season; others skew a little darker, bringing the more oppressive, burdensome side of the holidays to life. Either way, Christmas episodes tend to demonstrate the strengths of our favorite series, and it’s long been a festive ritual of mine to wheel out old DVD sets and settle back for a few favorites during December.“A few” is one thing, but a top 100? That’s a whole other ballgame. As I set out to compile this list of the all-time greatest Christmas TV classics, it quickly became clear that a few ground rules were required, so as to prevent the project from becoming too unwiel...
