The X-Files is not known for having special holiday episodes. You won’t see a very special Thanksgiving episode, you won’t see a heart-warming Valentine’s Day episode, and you won’t even see a Halloween-centered episode. There are, however, three episodes over the course of the entire series that take place around Christmas. The first one, “Beyond the Sea,” is set at some unspecified time afterward, only noted because of a comment Scully makes to her father about keeping her Christmas tree up “all year long.” The second, “Christmas Carol,” does happen on Christmas, as Scully visits her brother in San Diego — although her holiday is soon turned upside-down when she discovers that a child has been born from one of her stolen ovum. (It's a long story.)

The third, however, is as Christmassy as The X-Files could ever possibly get. It is fun, it is silly, and it has a happy ending – all things the previous two installments never possessed. “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” was written and directed by series creator Chris Carter and guest-starred Lily Tomlin and Ed Asner as the eponymous ghosts. In the episode, Mulder – forever without holiday plans – convinces Scully to join him on a Christmas Eve ghost hunt.

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What Is "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" About?

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As the story goes that Mulder (David Duchovny) tells Scully (Gillian Anderson), Maurice and Lyda were star-crossed lovers who couldn’t stand to spend a single day apart. So, on Christmas Eve, they made a lover’s pact and killed themselves in a spooky old house so that they would never be alone again. Ghost hunters claim that their spirits haunt the house every year on Christmas.

While Mulder and Scully aren’t exactly “star-crossed lovers,” and won’t officially be lovers for another season and a half, they are… something, so when they go into the house, the pair discover corpses that look suspiciously like themselves under the floorboards before they are separated for pop-psychology sessions with Maurice (Asner) and Lyda (Tomlin). Maurice starts off with Mulder, telling him he is “prone to obsessive compulsiveness workaholism” and “antisocialism,” while Lyda is with Scully, telling her that she is seeking “intimacy through co-dependency.”

What Are the Motives of the Ghosts?

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What is perhaps most interesting about this episode is how much the ghosts try to get Mulder and Scully to give up – to kill themselves — yet their attempts only bring Mulder and Scully closer together. Lyda literally gives Mulder his gun and tells him, “Think of it as the last Christmas you’ll ever spend alone.” Maurice, meanwhile, tries to convince Scully that Mulder is “crazy” and “disturbed,” finally telling her that “the man is acting out an unconscious yearning. The deep-seated terror of being alone.” In other words, Mulder brought her here to kill her so he would never be alone on Christmas again.

Ultimately, Maurice and Lyda take on the visages of Mulder and Scully so that it will look like the partners shot each other — but the one time that Mulder and Scully actually talk to one another saves their lives. (Never mind the fact that so many other problems could have been solved if they actually talked to one another… like realizing that they loved one another earlier than seven years into their relationship.) As they are crawling towards the door of the mansion, bleeding to death and saying they aren’t going to make it, they start accusing one another of shooting first, and Mulder realizes that this is all a hoax. Neither one shot first; therefore, neither one is actually shot. Rather than taking their anger and frustration out on one another with more gunshots – shots that would have proven deadly – they bicker and figure out that it is all fake.

What Sets "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" Apart From Other 'X-Files Christmas Episodes?x-files-HowTheGhostsStoleChristmasBR779

What makes “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas” a sweet, perfect, wholesome slice of Christmas pie is the fact that the other two Christmas-adjacent episodes are about separation, parting people from their loved ones. In “Beyond the Sea,” Scully’s father dies. In “Christmas Carol,” Scully learns she has a biological daughter – after being told she was infertile – and watches her die a painful death after discovering that the little girl, Emily, had been created in a lab as part of an experiment.

But in “How the Ghosts Stole Christmas,” there is not just a happy ending; it brings Mulder and Scully closer together, despite the ghosts’ best efforts. The pair believe that they shot each other, but when Mulder realizes they've been manipulated, the illusion is broken, and he and Scully walk out of the haunted house, alive and well. Later, Scully shows up at his apartment. Both are confused and confounded about the events of the night, but they brighten in each other’s presence and give each other gifts, despite having promised not to at an earlier point. Neither has any explanation for what happened to them that night — not the believer, who went in hoping to find ghosts, nor the skeptic who went in not believing ghosts existed in the first place.

The episode's dénouement suggests that they both learned something from their impromptu psychology sessions: Scully insists that proving Mulder wrong isn’t her only joy, while Mulder acknowledges that he is being self-righteous and narcissistic. It isn't merely that they've both taken something away from their individual experiences; they both wanted only to share it with each other. More than merely being one of the best Christmas episodes, "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas" is one of the few, truly happy endings in The X-Files itself.