10 Holiday TV Specials You Can't Hide From

(TheStreet) -- No amount of Blu-ray discs, digital downloads or on-demand streaming services can save viewers from the annual flood of holiday specials, and ignoring them won't make them go away. While strong segments of the population applaud seasonally appropriate showings of Meet Me In St. Louis on Time Warner's TWX TCM, White Christmas on Cablevision's CVC AMC and even Disney DIS/Pixar favorites such as Wall-E and Toy Story on ABC Family, there's a small segment that wants to jump into a fallout shelter the first time someone mentions a Red Ryder air rifle or notes that every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. Call them grinches if you'd like, but these same folks have been dealing with 2010 holiday specials since NBC ran the DreamWorks Animation DWA doubleheader Merry Madagascar and Kung-Fu Panda Holiday Special the night before Thanksgiving. These poor souls likely have children, which means they'll have to watch these specials until they're woven into their brain tissue like a month of sleep-based subliminal language lessons. Much as some folks learn to speak French just by leaving the iPod on during their daily tasks, so, too, are whole generations of parents fluent in Linus' biblical description of what Christmas is all about. So why not just turn them off? Pretend the little stop-motion reindeer, elves and abominable snowmen don't exist? Because they can't be killed. It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown slipped to third in the ratings for ABC last year, getting the football pulled out from under it by NBC's The Biggest Loser and a repeat of CBS'CBS NCIS. This year, like a zombie rising from the pumpkin patch, Great Pumpkin finished second to CBS' Medium but smashed the recently canceled procedural crime drama among viewers 18 to 49. Continue reading the article.