PBS’ Arthur: Every Holiday Episode, Ranked

For 25 years, the long-running PBS animated series Arthur has been one of the most beloved children’s series on television. The series provides wholesome and comforting entertainment for viewers of all ages and has shaped the development of many generations of children.

The residents of Elwood City go through a lot over the course of the series’ 25 seasons, but they always come together and celebrate together too. Even though the series has been airing for 25 years, there aren’t that many holiday episodes or specials in Arthur. However, the holiday episodes that the series has produced, whether for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s Eve, remain some of its most entertaining and comforting to date.

8 “Hic Or Treat”

“Hic or Treat” is an episode in Arthur‘s 11th season that couples a story set at Halloween with a hilarious Arthur and D.W. storyline. D.W. might be Arthur‘s sassiest character, but in “Hic or Treat,” the snarky toddler finds herself saddled with a seemingly endless case of the hiccups as Arthur and his friends prepare for Halloween.

The episode makes the most of the Halloween setting, with hilarious costumes like Candy Boy (a boy who wants candy and gets angry when he doesn’t get it) for Buster, but it truly capitalizes on the spook factor through Arthur’s endeavors to scare the hiccups out of D.W.

7 “Arthur And The Haunted Treehouse”

“Arthur and the Haunted Tree House” is a completely Halloween-focused special that aired as part of Arthur‘s run in 2017. While Arthur frequently incorporates tongue-in-cheek references to familiar pieces of popular culture, this special goes all-in when it comes to featuring some decidedly not kid-friendly references to horror, including The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Arthur, Buster, Binky, Francine, and more all come together to take part in Halloween festivities, but each member of the gang has a decidedly different experience. Undoubtedly the special’s best storyline features the kids exploring Mr. Ratburn’s Edgar Allen Poe inspired haunted house – because of course Mr. Ratburn would turn even Halloween into a learning experience.

6 “Francine’s Pilfered Paper”

One of Arthur‘s only Thanksgiving episodes is an example of an episode that really exists to teach a lesson and uses the holiday as a calendar setting more than anything else. “Francine’s Pilfered Paper” is a season 11 episode that teaches the important lesson kids need to learn about plagiarism, when Francine plagiarizes a paper she has been assigned to write about what pilgrims ate during the first Thanksgiving.

Although much of the episode deals with Francine’s guilt over stealing a paper, there are nevertheless fun Thanksgiving-themed details sprinkled throughout, from the kids’ paper topics, to Buster’s pilgrim costume, to the focus on the Frensky family watching football and all coming together for a big meal.

5 “An Arthur Thanksgiving”

In 2020, PBS aired Arthur‘s first hour-long Thanksgiving special in its over two-decade-long run, “An Arthur Thanksgiving.” The special includes many familiar hallmarks of the Thanksgiving experience, including Elwood City’s own take on a Thanksgiving day parade.

But arguably the special’s most significant storyline is one that doesn’t actually touch on Thanksgiving at all. Pal gets lost during the chaos of the parade, leading the entire Elwood City community to come together not just for the holiday dinner at the Read house, but to seek out and save Arthur’s beloved puppy.

4 “The Fright Stuff”

“The Fright Stuff” is the earliest Halloween-themed episode in Arthur‘s tenure, airing as part of the series’ 4th season. This is another episode that doesn’t shy away from leaning into some spookier elements, as the students of Lakewood Elementary school keep experiencing scarier and scarier pranks, from fake spiders to friends playfully jumping them from behind to attack them.

As a prank war escalates among the kids, the boys and the girls wind up on opposite sides. But things take a particularly spooky and shocking turn when Arthur encounters someone he believes is Binky in a pumpkin-headed ghost costume at a Halloween party, only to realize that the masked stranger is floating off the ground and may be a real ghost after all.

3 “The Long, Dull Winter”

“The Long, Dull Winter” is an episode all about the holiday season, even though no major holidays take place during it. The season 3 episode finds the kids from Lakewood Elementary struggling with how slow winter seems to go by, now that all of the major holidays have gone by and they don’t have any holiday frame of reference for the months ahead.

Over the course of the episode, Arthur and friends come up with their own unique ideas for holidays, such as Pony Day, Give Me Candy Day, and There’s Nothing to Do Today Day. Along the way, the episode also includes funny parodies of holiday specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas, with its own briefly glimpsed special The Kid Who Got Clothes for Christmas.

2 “Arthur’s New Year’s Eve”

“Arthur’s New Year’s Eve” is one of the series’ earliest episodes, but it also might just be one of the best episodes of Arthur. This season 1 episode finds Grandma Thora, one of Arthur‘s best characters by far, babysitting Arthur and D.W. on New Year’s Eve. Since they are in the care of their much more mischievous grandmother for the night, Arthur and D.W. both resolve to stay up until midnight.

The episode also explores other characters’ New Year’s Eve traditions, including the Frensky family’s habit of throwing old calendars out right as the year changes. But the heart of the episode finds the Read siblings competing with each other, only for big brother Arthur to fall asleep and miss out on the festivities that D.W. greatly exaggerates to torment him afterward.

1 Arthur’s Perfect Christmas

Simply put, Arthur’s Perfect Christmas might be one of the best animated Christmas television specials, as well as one of the most underrated of them all. The one-hour Christmas special first aired on PBS back in 2000 and finds Arthur and his friends preparing for the holiday season. But even though the special focuses on Christmas in its title, it goes far beyond focusing on only Christmas as the main winter holiday.

The episode also explores other holidays in loving detail, including the Frensky family’s Hanukkah celebration, the Powers family’s Kwanzaa traditions, the Lundgren’s family celebration of St. Lucia Day, and Buster and his mother Bitzi celebrating their own new holiday, Baxter Day. It’s also a rare musical special within the Arthur franchise, which makes it significant in yet another way.

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