Comicon Advent Calendar 2024 Day 19: ‘The Night Before X-Mas’

A slight but fun Christmas story featuring the X-Men, “The Night Before X-Mas” is writer (and colorist) Karl Bollers riff on the classic poem “A Visit From Saint Nicholas” (aka “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas”), in which he repurposes the lines to feature X-Men relevant content while still maintaining the meter, verse and general vibe of the original. Because it was published in Marvel’s 1994 holiday special, this means it serves as an often-hilarious snapshot of the X-books in the early ’90s. 

“A Visit From Saint Nicholas” is one of the main sources of a lot of the modern iconography and mythology surrounding Santa Claus. Written by Clement Clarke Moore (or maybe not) and first published in 1823, it also played a role in establishing Christmas Eve as a day of celebration in its own right. In doing so, it helped shift American society towards Christmas and away from New Year’s Day as the preferred family holiday of the season. It chronicles the visit of Santa Claus to a home on Christmas Eve to deliver presents, and of a shared moment of conspiratorial mirth between Santa and the poem’s narrator, the family’s father. In Bollers’ X-Men-based spin on the poem — drawn by Marvel mainstay Sal Buscema — the X-Men are awoken by a strange noise on the lawn and rush into battle, only to discover their nocturnal intruder to be none other than the space-faring Starjammers and Professor Xavier’s alien-bird-empress girlfriend, Lilandra. 

Bollers is clearly having a blast replacing the lines but maintaining the meter of the verse, such as when he rhymes “bamfin'” with “mansion” in “And all through the mansion/not a mutant was stirring/No snikts and no bamfin.'” He also does us all the great service of providing possibly the only rhyming X-Men roll call in comics history as the combined Blue and Gold teams spring into action in response to Professor X’s telepathic cry.

Buscema — inking himself with a heavier line akin to his then-contemporaneous work on Spectacular Spider-Man — gets in on the fun as well. In my favorite panel of the story, we see that the X-Men’s “stockings” (hung near Cerebro with care, of course) are one each of their respective boots, including Rogue’s knee-high number and Gambit’s weird metal footwear. Buscema also renders a rare comic book “suiting up” scene, as the sleeping X-Men awaken and pull on their superhero togs. 

That “The Night Before X-Mas” ends not with a big superhero battle but a Christmas party (in which Ch’od of the Starjammers appears to get an action figure of himself) is fittingly-low stakes given its setting and placement in a holiday anthology. Besides, the story doesn’t really need a big fight to be memorable. Not when it already manages to work a reference to the Phalanx — the hot X-villains of 1994, coming off their linewide “Phalanx Covenant” crossover event — into a line which also rhymes Cable’s sharply-armored clone Stryfe with “life”.

That’s a gift that keeps on giving the whole year.