Welcome to the second 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 "The Night Before X-Mas" from Marvel's 1994 Holiday Special, by Karl Bollers and Sal Buscema.

"A Visit from St. Nicholas" was published anonymously in 1823 and soon became the most popular poem ever associated with Christmas and, at the same time, the most influential piece of popular culture related to Christmas, as it informed pretty much everyone's idea of both what Santa Claus (or St. Nick) looked like and what kind of Christmas traditions that people should do on Christmas Eve. It was all in this poem (which has had some dispute over who, precisely, wrote it).

The poem is SO famous that it has sort of become the low-hanging fruit for people when it comes to doing parodies of it. There are probably more parodies of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas than there are Salvation Army Santa Clauses around the world (and there are a lot of Salvation Army Santa Clauses around the world).

This one, by Karl Bollers and Sal Buscema, was not bad, but at the same time, a number of the rhymes are a bit...odd. For instance, right off the bat, we get "mansion" rhymed with "bamfin'."

Yes, seriously.

During the 1990s, Sal Buscema was probably the last regular Marvel Comics artist who drew regularly for Marvel during the "Golden Age" of the Marvel Age of Comics. His older brother, John, was also working during this period, but not like Sal, who was still the regular artist on Spectacular Spider-Man at this point (a gig he had held since the late 1980s). While Buscema had inked himself for most of his Spectacular run, around this time, Marvel began to pair him with Bill Sienkiewicz as an inker and that style seemed to bring out an edgier look to Buscema that the artist even brought over to his stuff that he inked himself, like this piece. One of the more interesting things during the 1990s was seeing older artists drew the new costume designs that guys like Jim Lee came up with, that tended to be a lot more ornate than classic superhero costumes....

That's a pretty cool splash page, right?

Weird to have the Phanlanx worked into a poem. It doesn't exactly flow off of the tongue. Anyhow, it turns out that it is the Starjammers surprising the X-Men for Christmas!!

I like the idea of Corsair and Bishop having some deep conversation. Also, come on, Cyclops, I know Jean's your wife, but your dad just came from outer space to visit you, maybe you could spend a little time with the old man! Wolverine was away from the X-Men at this point in time, which is why he is not present for the celebration (although I guess you could use your own head canon to assume that he would just skip it anyways, as he is a bit of a gloomy gus).