Welcome to the third installment of A Very Merry X-Mas, where I count down my 24 favorite X-Men (or X-Men related) Christmas stories!

Today, we look at "Home for the Holidays" from Generation X #24 by Scott Lobdell, Rick Leonardi, Mitch Byrd, Bud La Rosa and Jason Martin.

The issue took place at a point in the X-Men Universe where Grayson Creed (the human son of Mystique and Sabretooth) had just been assassinated during his campaign for the Presidency of the United States, running on an anti-mutant campaign. So Emma Frost took her three female charges - Jubilee, Husk and M - to Monaco with her for Christmas. The issue opens with Emma Frost seductively talking about the special hope that is involved in Christmas Eve, where everyone can hope for the future - we cut to see that she is talking to the girls (it's a bit of an odd bit, honestly). While they sit around celebrating the holidays, they decide that they should get to know each other a bit more (after all, 24 issues into a series is not a whole lot of time for them to spend together, all things considered)...

They each decide to tell the story of how their mutant powers first manifested. In the case of Jubilee, she is a mallrat, who finds herself caught by some security guards when she took a wrong turn and she freaked out and set off her powers. She realized at that point, of course, that her life was never going to be the same again...

The next up is M, who tells a storybook style tale of how her powers first manifested and, of course, no one seriously believes her, since she is pretty clearly making it up...

The fascinating aspect of this one is that this was back when Scott Lobdell had a different approach in mind for the character. He was trying to do something with the idea of an autistic superhero. Later, in turned out that she acted this way because she was actually her younger twin siblings combined to take the place of their older sister and they are trying to act as how she would act (man, that really does sound like a bad idea, right?).

Next up is Husk, who literally asked god to give her mutant powers like her older brother, Sam, noting, "If I don't get powers soon, I'm going to tear my skin off" and then, shockingly enough, she gained mutant abilities that are based on her tearing off her skin to uncover a new mutant ability underneath her skin...

Yeah, that was actually what happened.

Finally, Emma Frost tells a relatively chilling tale of her disturbing adolescence in a mental institution...

I do like that her story was MEANT to be disturbing, but her charges know her well enough by now that they are not very easily shocked.

So the four mutants go to the beach and celebrate Christmas together, knowing that the world was a dangerous place for mutants at the time, so they have to be there for each other...

Not a bad story, but, like the previous Generation X story on the list, a bit light on the whole "Christmas" element of the tale.