Welcome to the nineteenth 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 #6 in the countdown, "A Miracle a Few Blocks down from 34th Street" by Scott Lobdell, Dave Cockrum and Joe Rubinstein from Marvel's 1991 Holiday Special.

This was the first true Marvel Holiday Special. There were holiday-themed Treasury Editions before, but they did not really have new content in them (some framing sequences, but that's it). So it was not until this 1991 special that Marvel actually went all out on a Holiday Special and boy did they go all out! Besides the Arthur Adams gatefold cover showing the heroes of the Marvel Universe chasing after Santa Claus, the stories within the collection had a shocking amount of top talent working on them. I mean, for crying out loud, there was a Walter Simonson/Arthur Adams Fantastic Four story in this collection! The regular writers of Thor and Ghost Rider wrote their stories, classic Punisher writer Steven Grant wrote the Punisher story in there, there was all sorts of effort put into this collection.

Perhaps the most notable one, though, was the opening story, which was written by Scott Lobdell before he became the regular writer on Uncanny X-Men and drawn by Dave Cockrum and Joe Rubinstein long after they STOPPED being the regular artists on Uncanny X-Men. This is one of the very last X-Men stories ever to be drawn by the late, great Cockrum (it was colored by his wife, Paty, which is a nice touch for one of his last X-Men stories).

Anyhow, the story opens with the X-Men trimming the Christmas tree at the X-Mansion...

Suddenly, they're called to action when a powerful mutant seems to show up at a department store. They head there to check it out and run into the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who are also looking for that same mutant!

The heroes fight against the villains for a little bit...

But then, suddenly, the evil mutants are transformed into action figures by...Santa Claus? What the what?

"Santa" (it is unclear whether this is supposed to be the actual Santa Claus or not. Most likely yes) then wipes out the memories of the X-Men of what they just saw and then transports them to Rockefeller Center, which, of course, sets them up for where they were when X-Men #98 began....

Clever story by Scott Lobdell and some great artwork by Cockrum that managed to both fit in with the style of the past while showing some of the evolution of his artwork in the ensuing decades (his Wolverine, for instance, seems to be a lot more modern in appearance than it used to be). Lobdell was best known for his humorous work at the time (he has a funny Captain Ultra story later in this very holiday collection), so it was nice to see something with a bit more heft to it. This was a heck of a way to launch Marvel's first Holiday Special and started a really nice tradition that lasted for the next few years.