The Only Christmas Special You Need To Watch

This Christmas You can keep your creepy stop motion holiday specials. You can have your giant hearts and roast beast. You go on taunting a living snowman with a greenhouse. But, I will not. I will be keeping alive an ancient family tradition in my house.

Well, ancient in the a way. A 1995 sort of way.

If you need a new tradition in your home, I invite you to join and watch the only Christmas special you need: Mystery Science Theater: Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

For those that may not be a member of the not-so-secret society of MSTies, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a TV show about a guy that is forced to watch bad movies with his robot pals and as they do they make jokes. It's that simple and it is sublime.

• DOES SANTA STOP IN MOS EISLEY? SEE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS SYNCED TO THE STAR WARS THEME

Christmastime is the perfect time to break out a very special episode of the show from the shows third season in 1991. Joel (the guy) and the bots (the robot pals) watch and riff on (make jokes) a 1964 movie about Santa conquering the Martians. Hence the clever title.

Real quick: The movie is about how the kids on Mars are sad, the parents of Mars want to make them happy so they kidnap Santa from Earth so he can be Santa on Mars...as you do. Here are some highlights.

The episode also included the classic Christmas carol Let's Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas!

And Tom Servo's (he's one of the aforementioned bots) Christmas essay: A Child's Christmas in Space.

Ahh Joy!

You can find this episode on DVD and Youtube. Or if you're really hardcore, like me, you can break out ye ol VCR and watch it on VHS (with commercials, of course).

So go ahead and watch the same old same old yuletide specials, I will be rooting for St. Nick to again defeats the evil forces of Mars and bring cheer to all the planets in our solar system. Movie Sign!