It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened and you can then click to see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries or just click here to see the countdown without the Advent Calendar aspect involved. This year, we'll be counting down my 24 favorite X-Men (or X-Men related) Christmas comic book stories!

The X-Men have long been a steady place for Christmas-related stories. Chris Claremont worked a Christmas story into his fifth issue of X-Men ever, and he consistently had Christmas references worked into X-Men comic books throughout his tenure on the titles. This did not always rise to the level of saying that it was a "Christmas story," like Kitty Pryde and Doug Ramsey hanging out at the mall while there were Christmas decorations at the mall or Nightcrawler giving a suggestively placed "Bamf" doll to Amanda Sefton for Christmas, but Claremont was always aware of the holiday in his comic books (which, of course, does a whole number on the idea of "Marvel Time," as roughly, what, two-three years passed during Claremont's original run on X-Men despite them celebrating 14 Christmases?). Sometimes, he would spend enough time on the holiday for the stories to qualify as "Christmas stories," and those are the comics that we will be looking at in this countdown, using the rather subjective "Whichever ones Brian likes the most" ranking system. Not just X-Men stories, though, as I'll also be looking at Christmas stories from other X-Men related teams or solo books (like Generation X, X-Factor and Wolverine). I'm not counting the awesome GLX-Mas Holiday Special, as there doesn't really seem to be enough of an X-Men connection for that one. Similarly, no Deadpool stories on the list. He could practically merit his own countdown!

There is specifically an X-Men Christmas Special released this year, but I won't be counting that into the countdown, either, as it is too new. Some other year! It looks great, though!

The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Wolverine and his "slay bells" and "santa claws," is by Nick Perks.

And now, Day 7 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)...

And here is the story for Day 7, #18 on the countdown of my favorite X-Men (or X-Men related) Christmas comic book stories!