A Saturday Night Live Christmas special will have you laughing like Santa tonight, December 18

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Popular SNL Christmas skits from the past 50 years will help get you in the holly jolly mood.

Chloe Fineman on Saturday Night Live
Chloe Fineman on Saturday Night Live (Image credit: Rosalind O’Connor/NBC)

There’s always been plenty of Christmas spirit on Saturday Night Live, as come December, the late-night sketch show has loved to poke fun at the holidays over the years. NBC is giving fans the chance to rewatch many of their favorite SNL Christmas sketches in primetime this year, as A Saturday Night Live Christmas airs on Wednesday, December 18, at 9 pm ET/PT.

With more than 50 years worth of sketches to choose from, A Saturday Night Live Christmas is a two-hour special that will run great sketch after great sketch about Christmas. That could very well include when Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer meets Santa, Kate McKinnon’s Ms. Rafferty and her not-so-great experience at the North Pole, Eddie Murphy’s Mister Robinson and Chloe Fineman’s pitch-perfect impression of Jennifer Coolidge during the holidays.

To see exactly what classic sketches are featured, anyone with access to their local NBC station can tune in to watch A Saturday Night Live Christmas on December 18. NBC is available to those with a traditional pay-TV provider, a TV antenna, a live TV streaming service (Fubo, Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV, YouTube TV) or a Peacock Premium Plus subscription. If you just have a Peacock Premium subscription, the special will be available to watch in its entirety the next day, Thursday, December 19. All Peacock subscribers can look for any of these sketches on their own with the streamer’s complete Saturday Night Live library.

This all means that fans are getting a double dose of Saturday Night Live this week, because in addition to this weeknight special, an all-new episode of Saturday Night Live season 50 is airing on December 21, at 11:30 pm ET/8:30 pm PT, with Martin Short hosting and musical guest Hozier. You can bet there will be a Christmas sketch or two in that new episode as well. FYI, the December 21 episode will be the last SNL episode of 2024, as the show will go on break for the holidays but be back in 2025.

A Saturday Night Live Christmas has become something of an annual tradition on NBC, airing for a number of years now. That has also expanded to a Saturday Night Live Thanksgiving special, which aired earlier this year and is streaming on Peacock.

Do you have a favorite SNL Christmas sketch that you hope makes it into this year’s A Saturday Night Live Christmas? Share your favorites in the comments below.

Michael Balderston
Michael Balderston

Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca, Moulin Rouge!, Silence of the Lambs, Children of Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars. On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd.

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