Welcome to the sixteenth 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 #9 in the countdown, "If the Fates Allow" by Jim McCann, Todd Nauck and Chris Sotomayor from 2009's Marvel Holiday Spectacular.

This took place during the period where the X-Men had pulled up stakes at their home in Westchester County in New York and decided to move out to San Francisco, where the Mayor of that city offered hospitality to the mutant heroes.

However, this was also during a period where Kitty Pryde was believed to be dead following the end of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men run. So a lot of the story is about the various members of the X-Men dealing with Kitty's death. It opens, for instance, with Storm traveling across the country from Westchester to San Francisco, making sure to make a stop over in Kitty Pryde's hometown of Chicago...

Then we see the X-Men all interacting with the people in their new community. McCann does a great job here showing the various holidays celebrated by the X-Men characters besides just Christmas...

So Colossus made a giant menorah in honor of Kitty Pryde (I wonder if Kitty ever noticed it when she came back to Earth later on? You'd think that would have touched her, right?) and then everyone gets together and listens to Dazzler sing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and see them light up the whole area in Christmas joy...

It's an adorable story by McCann and Nauck. Really gets to the heart of the various characters in the start of their new lives on the West Coast (of course, things would get even crazier in the next year or so, with the X-Men being forced out of San Francisco and out to the island nation of Utopia).