“Whoever invented Christmas trees should be drug out into the street and shot.”

Justin’s rating: Jon forgot he only had one brother? What a loser.

Justin’s review: Growing up in the ’80s, it was quite hard to escape the gravitational pull of the Garfield phenomenon. This orange tabby was everywhere — comic pages, books, a Saturday morning cartoon series, tons of merch, and 12 (!) animated TV specials that ran from 1982 to 1991. As is well-known, this was a deliberate campaign by Jim Davis to manufacture a best-selling product rather than create art or promote humor. Despite that, for better or for worse, Garfield entered the pop culture lexicon and refused to budge.

I wasn’t a fan of Garfield so much as someone who might partake in his lazy foolishness if there wasn’t anything better to do. And if that meant subjecting myself to the occasional holiday special, so be it.

Coming to this, I couldn’t recall if I ever saw A Garfield Christmas Special, but his Halloween special scared the crap out of me. Maybe the same will happen when I head over to the Arbuckles for the holidays?

After a dream sequence with breakfast lasagnas and a terrifying robotic Santa throne, Jon, Odie, and Garfield head to the Arbuckle farm for some Christmas Eve sentimentality. Jon is practically wetting his pants in excitement over all of the traditions and family bonding, Odie is wetting things on general principle, and Garfield couldn’t care less.

At the farm we meet Jon’s mom, his dad, his balding brother Doc Boy, and especially his depressed and cranky grandmother. Garfield not-so-surprisingly bonds with the old coot, while Jon gets back into the farm life for a half-day. Folowing that, the family eats dinner, everyone decorates a tree, and a story about a creepy clown is read. They also pray together because this was 1987 and you could do that on network television.

During all of this cheeriness, there’s a shadow of darkness. Grandma deals with some lingering grief over the loss of her husband while Garfield learns a minor lesson that “giving is better than getting.” Eventually we get to Christmas morning and one final present is given to the person who needs it the most.

One thing I did genuinely like about the Garfield animated stuff was Lorenzo Music’s iconic drawl of the cat’s mind-thoughts. It’s never very clear if anyone — Jon, Odie, etc. — could understand him, but no matter, he wouldn’t shut up anyway. Actually, his nonstop snarking is probably the only real draw here, a grumpy cat being grumpy against an uncooperative world and optimistic doofuses.

There really isn’t that much story to fill up the 23 minutes of this special, so to fill up the extra space, we get six (!) songs crammed into this. And it was the second one, “Can’t Wait Till Christmas,” that unlocked my memory vault and reassured me that, yeah, I did watch this at some point in my youth. The songs are generally fine, but I really did appreciate the continuous Christmas score that’s all kinds of holly, jolly, and full of personality.

Reportedly, CBS aired this special each and every Christmas season from 1987 to 2000, so I guess it became somewhat of a staple of chubby Americana. I genuinely liked it for what is was, especially with an unhinged grandma bringing a touch of chaos and a whole lot of seasonal sentimentality smothering the proceedings.