Most Used Sitcom Christmas Special Cliches

Television is a nice little way to help unwind and relax after a long hay of doing...Whatever it is people do at their chosen professions.One of my favorite television formats growing up was the sitcom Whenever the holiday season rolled around, there seemed to be a lot of obvious and unimaginative story lines concocted by writers, mostly to just fill time. Four of the most used cliches are as follows.

Sitcom Christmas Special Cliches: Snowed in.
Picture this: There's an avalanche, no way to communicate with anyone in the outside world, and only 24 minutes or so to invent comedic situations that'll keep bored couch potatoes glues to the boob tube. Artificial snow in television shows has always intrigued me. What is that stuff made of? I think it's they just ground up packing peanuts or something.

Sitcom Christmas Special Cliches:Seasonal Ghosts.
A Christmas Carol is thought by most people to be a classic movie. At the end of the day, it's nothing more than a redundant plot device used in various television genres to fill space during the holiday season. Sitcom television's use of A Christmas Carol's plot is almost as redundant as my use of the word redundant in this paragraph.

The series' residential Scrooge(McDuck) is visited by at least one spirit who's whole existence is based on setting up a series of scenes from previous episodes. It's a glorified clip show for the most part. This is probably why the sitcom format died a horrible death, and is now lurching about, zombified on CBS.

Sitcom Christmas Special Cliches: Last Minute Shopping.
I've never felt the need to put off Christmas shopping till the 24th, but apparently some people do it all the time. It must be a normal occurrence for some people to totally flake on the holiday. I've never met any of these people, but I'm sure they must have existed at some point in time.

The last minute shopping Christmas storyline usually involved some goofy, annoying and stupidly rare kids toy that all parents just have to have for their kids. There are war cries, hair pulling amongst mothers, kicking and even a bit of trampling to help round out a comedic depiction of human de-evolution.

Sitcom Christmas Special Cliches: Sappy Endings.
The sappiest of sappy endings are saved for Christmas specials. These things are often dripping with syrup by the last five minutes of the program. It's either one of three events that tend to close out Christmas Specials.

The cute kid got that overly extensive toy he was begging for earlier in the show. The Attractive couple manage to reunite. Or a halfway decent zinger is executed during a touching moment, which causes everyone to almost laugh hard enough to squirt nog out of their noses.