It’s that time of the year again. People going crazy over the color of coffee cups, others go insane spending money on family, and some people just want to cuddle up on the couch with their loved one. In short, it’s the end-of-the-year Holiday season. Like most media companies, Marvel isn’t one to shirk the possibility of putting out a Holiday Special comic either. This year? The Merry X-Men Holiday Special.

This special is more than a little different, however. Each page of this story, save the final chapter, are told in real-time with each page being a different day in December. This allows for over a dozen different stories, each with a different creative crew! Luckily, Travis Lanham put the letters on the page for all of these stories.

The main story of this collection focuses on Jubilee and her son Shogo, as told by Chris Sims and Chad Bowers. Marco Failla provides the art for these chapters, while Israel Silva does the colors. Jubilee tries to take her son to Hawaii for the Holidays, but is SFLANGed up by a familiar offscreen garbage truck. What results is an incredibly hilarious series of events featuring robots and explosions galore throughout the month of December.

X-Men creators of all sorts gather to help tell the rest of the stories, featuring Chris Claremont, Charles Soule, Cullen Bunn, Kelly Thompson, and so many others pooling their talent to put up a page or three showing their chosen X-Men celebrating their chosen Holiday. Combine that with some of the best artists of today, like Terry & Rachel Dodson, Chris Sotomayor, Carlos Lopez, and David Lopez among the dozens working together, and you have a package filled with charm and wit, as well as just a hint of pathos (which is a requirement for those Merry Mutants).

Each Holiday has some form of representation here, and there are enough character moments and X-Men in-jokes to please even the most jaded comic fan. This could be an awesome stocking stuffer for the X-Men fan in your life, or something to break out each year for a re-read. Take some of that extra Christmas cash, if you have it, and make sure to check this book out. You won’t regret it.

Grade: A