Christmas Specials in December 1987: The Premieres and the Perennials

December was the one month when a kid could turn on the set at random and hit something that only came around once a year. The specials were events precisely because they were scarce: no cassette in the cabinet, no way to see them again until next December, and a real chance of missing one entirely if nobody in the house was watching the listings. December 1987 had three brand new ones.

Three Christmas specials premiered in December 1987. A Muppet Family Christmas aired on ABC on December 16. Five days later CBS premiered two back to back on December 21: A Garfield Christmas and A Claymation Christmas Celebration. Around them ran the perennials CBS already held, including Rudolph, Frosty, the Grinch, and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The three that were new

A Muppet Family Christmas was the crossover a kid had no reason to expect. Filmed in Toronto, it put Muppets from The Muppet Show in the same farmhouse as characters from Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and Muppet Babies, with Jim Henson appearing as himself at the end. Nothing else that decade collected the whole Henson universe in one room.

The CBS pair on December 21 was a different kind of event: two premieres in a row, one traditional and one openly strange. A Garfield Christmas came from Jim Davis, who wrote the teleplay and drew on his own childhood. Davis called the story "very autobiographical" and said, "That was my Christmas on the farm." The Arbuckle farmhouse was modeled on his family's place in Indiana, and Doc Boy was his real brother's nickname. Grandma, the character carrying the special's emotional weight, he made up entirely.

Immediately after it came Will Vinton's clay animation, a special with no continuing characters at all, built instead as a run of stop-motion sketches set to carols. The two ran back to back that night and kept running back to back for years afterward.

What CBS already owned

The striking thing about December 1987 is how much of the permanent Christmas canon sat on one network. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had moved from NBC to CBS in 1972 and stayed there until 2023, inside a run that has been unbroken every year since 1964, which makes it the longest continuously running Christmas special in the United States. Frosty the Snowman aired annually on CBS through the same stretch. How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, first shown on CBS in 1966, had long since become a fixture. A Charlie Brown Christmas ran during the Christmas season for 56 straight years.

So the December a kid remembers was, on the network side, largely a CBS December, and 1987 is the year CBS added two more titles to a shelf it already dominated.

One honest caveat belongs here. The exact 1987 broadcast dates for those perennials are not in the archival record reachable now. What is documented is that each was inside an unbroken annual run on a known network that year, which is why they appear here as returning fixtures rather than as dated entries.

Why the month felt wall to wall

The specials were not the whole story. Underneath them, local stations were running a Christmas movie that cost them almost nothing.

It's a Wonderful Life had fallen out of copyright in the United States in 1974, when a clerical error at the rights holder meant the renewal was never properly filed. The film entered the public domain, and its images could be broadcast without licensing or royalty fees. Through the 1980s it played repeatedly each holiday season on hundreds of local television stations. A viewer in 1987 could find it running on more than one channel in the same week, at odd hours, sometimes twice in a day, because for a station manager filling December airtime it was very close to free.

The situation was messier than the legend suggests: stations still owed royalties on the underlying story, because the film was a derivative work of Philip Van Doren Stern's "The Greatest Gift," whose copyright had been renewed in 1971. The saturation ended in 1993, when Republic Pictures used a Supreme Court ruling on derivative works to reassert control and pull the film back behind a license.

The thing you could not rewatch

Missing a special in 1987 usually meant missing it for a year, and sometimes for good. A Muppet Family Christmas is the standing example: several of its songs were licensed only for broadcast, so every home video release had to cut them, and the complete version has never been issued on tape or disc in North America. The only intact copies in circulation are recordings somebody made off the air that night.

That was the quiet math of December television. A special was a one-time transmission, and the household's ability to keep it came down to whether anyone thought to put a blank tape in before it started.

The honest bottom line

December 1987 was not a golden age so much as a well-defended franchise. One network held most of the perennials and used a single December night to premiere two more, which is less a gift to children than a smart use of an audience that shows up once a year without being asked. The wall-to-wall feeling downstairs was partly a copyright accident, a Capra film going out over hundreds of stations because nobody had to pay for the pictures. And the scarcity that made these things feel like events was not a design choice either, just the state of the technology. The affection survives all of that. A special that ran once, that could not be summoned back, and that the whole house sat down for at the same time was doing something a permanent library does not do.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "A Muppet Family Christmas", "A Garfield Christmas" and "A Claymation Christmas Celebration" (the three December 1987 premieres, with their air dates and networks).
• Wikipedia, "A Charlie Brown Christmas", "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", "Frosty the Snowman", "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" and "It's a Wonderful Life" (documented annual runs).
• Method note, stated plainly: no archival December 1987 listings grid was reachable when this page was built. No night-by-night grid is printed and no specific 1987 date is assigned to any perennial. The dated claims are the three premieres above; the perennials are described as documented unbroken annual runs, nothing more.

Part of the Saturday morning 80s time-capsule series, which also tracks seasonal specials. See also October 1986: The Halloween Specials and the same season's weekly grid, Saturday Morning Fall 1987.

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