Season 11 Episode 8: God Help Ye Merry Bundymen

December 22, 1996

Published 12/22/96

The last Christmas episode the series produced, and it runs four plots at once. Al does not want a tree and the rest of the family does. Marcy is determined to win the neighbourhood decorating contest. Gary hires two young men, Hal and Biff, to help at the shoe store, which ends with Al and Griff out of work and busking in the mall for twenty-five cents a song. And someone has stolen the Mary and Joseph figures from the D’Arcys’ nativity display, Bud and Kelly, who conduct the ransom negotiation in the style of the Mel Gibson thriller that had come out that autumn.

The shoe store material opens the episode strongly, with Al and Griff kneeling in prayer before unlocking the doors and then a horde of customers coming through to “Ride of the Valkyries.” The replacement staff arrive and Al’s assessment of what two eager young men hanging around the pair of them makes them is answered by Griff in two words. By the back half both have mall jobs instead: Al driving the children’s train as the Elfineer, Griff in what he describes as an executive position in the overnight-delivery business, which turns out to mean wearing antlers alongside a reindeer called Prancer.

Peggy’s contribution is the warmest thing in it. Having finished the family gingerbread house she enjoyed herself enough to bake the entire neighbourhood, and the model turns out to be unsparingly accurate: Mr. McGinty is at his telescope watching Kelly’s window, and there are two marshmallows in the Bundys’ own bedroom window representing Al mooning the D’Arcys. One of the contest judges, it emerges, is McGinty’s daughter.