Best Christmas (Firestone Giveaway, November 1945) is not a good story and is notable mostly for setting up the absolutely amazing Silent Night, one of the very few Barks stories that Western Publishing censored and went unseen until the 1980s. The conjunction of the two makes Best Christmas seem like a forced act of repression, an indulgence in saccharine Christmas cheer that pushed Barks to the breaking point and caused its demonic twin Silent Night to emerge. But we’ll see that later.
Donald and the kids take a sleighride to Grandma Duck’s house. They get stuck behind a seemingly Amish farmer in a hay truck, where Donald’s worst character comes out and he throws a snowball at the farmer.
They then get caught in a snowstorm and Donald gets soaked in ice and nearly freezes to death:
There’s certainly darkness here, but as soon as the more-humanoid-than-usual family appears to help them, the story turns sickly-sweet, with the nephews donating all their food to the poor family and Donald heading around to go home, where—surprise!—Grandma is there having made a whole meal for them. How did she even know they were going to be there?
Well, no matter. The story certainly reads like a throwaway taken on as extra work on an already-busy schedule, possibly written to spec. The few pages of violence and misery are wiped away so abruptly by the Christmas message that they don’t stick in the memory, and there’s no logical arc to Donald’s path from mild ambition to anger to suffering to smugness. It hits the required notes, does a bit of chaos, and leaves. It would be inconsequential, if not for what came next.
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