How do superheroes celebrate the holidays?

What with having to stop would-be world conquerors seemingly once a month, superheroes probably find it hard to celebrate the holidays. But sometimes festive occasions do pop up in the Marvel Universe.

Nobody seemed to celebrate X-Mas as often as the X-Men. The first Christmas I remember is at the beginning of the Chris Claremont run. Marvel Girl, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Banshee celebrate Christmas Eve 1976 by taking a trip to Manhattan. Unfortunately, Sentinels attack and ruin their night on the town, kidnapping Jean, Scott and Logan into space. It was in this storyline that Jean ends up becoming Phoenix after the team’s spaceship crash lands.

A famous holiday X-Men story took place in Uncanny X-Men #143. Kitty Pryde has just joined the team and is spending Christmas Eve 1980 alone at the mansion. A nasty monster attacks her and she must use her wits to defeat it, which she does by trapping it in the hangar bay and incinerating it in the Blackbird’s engine thrust, a move explicitly inspired by Alien. The battle wrecks the Danger Room and a lot of the house but the Kitty proves herself very capable. The issue ends as the X-Men bring Kitty’s parents to the mansion for a surprise Hanukkah visit.

The X-Men later proved they have no luck visiting Manhattan for Christmas. In 1996, the same thing happened as it did in the ‘70s as the team gets kidnapped into space during a holiday visit. This time it was the Gladiator who spirits the team away for a battle in the Shi’ar Galaxy.

I don’t remember any Avengers Christmas stories, so I guess things were quiet around Avengers Mansion in December. I do remember Christmas 1981 at the Baxter Building, when Reed Richards invents a high-tech artificial Christmas tree that sort of folds into itself. This aggravates Susan, apparently not a fan of fake trees.

Christmas 1985 was a particularly bleak holiday season for Matt Murdock in my all-time favorite comic story, “Born Again” in Daredevil. Kingpin has discovered Daredevil is Murdock, a blind lawyer, and destroys Matt’s life. He ends up penniless and mentally unstable, confronting a small-time crook wearing a Santa suit in Times Square, getting beaten up for his troubles. Meanwhile, Matt’s estranged girlfriend Glorianna gets mugged at Rockefeller Center while Christmas shopping and leaves him for his best friend Foggy Nelson. Daredevil spends a horrible Christmas morning collapsing and nearly dying at the gym he trained at as a kid, before being saved by his long-lost mother, who has become a nun. Yeah, it was kind of an involved story.

Anyway, happy holidays, whether superheroic or not.