My all-time favorite Christmas special is Opus’n Bill in A Wish For Wings That Work. ALL TIME. I caught it one year completely by accident and I’m pretty sure that’s the only year it was aired. It’s required watching every holiday season. Usually twice. Sometimes three times depending on how busy I am. I regularly give it to unsuspecting friends and family members for Christmas. If you read the Bloom County comic strip, Opus and Bill need no introduction, but if you haven’t, Opus is a bird, a penguin. “An embarrassing accident at birth, for which I do not blame my mother. I prefer to blame Congress.” His main problem with being a penguin is that he is a bird, but he cannot fly. Bill is a cat who Opus rescued from an animal testing lab years ago. Bill is messed up, but his heart is in the right place. Opus is trying to convince Santa to give him wings for Christmas. In the meantime, he is attending group therapy with a kiwi (voiced by Robin Williams) whose wife left him for an albatross and a chicken who thinks she’s a 747. He’s also encountering a trio of ducks who harass him for not being able to fly, a pig who is trying on various identities like water buffalo, a cross dressing cockroach in crisis (voiced by Dustin Hoffman), a caroling Elvis, and of course Bill. On Christmas Eve, while dreaming of flying, Opus is woken up by the duck who tell him that Santa has crashed into a lake and needs help. Beautifully animated and wonderfully told, this story has heart and humor.