What Was the First TV Christmas Special?

If you grew up watching holiday specials like 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer each year, it might surprise you to learn that the tradition of animated Christmas special didn’t begin with either of those classics. Rather, it started a few years earlier, with the first-ever animated Christmas special created specifically for television: Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol, which premiered on NBC on December 18, 1962. It arrived as a one-hour musical production, a rarity for early television, and it set the template for many holiday specials to come. So, how did we get that first special, which led to so many others?