Do Star Trek Characters Celebrate Christmas? A /Film Investigation
There have been, as of this writing, approximately 900 "Star Trek" episodes and 13 "Star Trek" motion pictures. That is, and forgive me for getting technical about this, a whole heck of a lot of "Star Trek."
Indeed, there has been so much gosh-darned "Star Trek" that the various writers have probably cycled through just about every possible type of story there is. This is the type of franchise where the exact same characters could do a "Bad News Bears" episode, a heart-wrenching drama about overcoming PTSD, and an "Ocean's Eleven" episode over just a couple of months, and nobody in the audience ever batted an eye or thought that was weird. Heck, it's one of the main reasons why people now argue that "Deep Space Nine" is the best "Trek" show ever."
And yet throughout what's getting close to 1,000 episodes, there is one type of story that "Star Trek" has never done, and indeed has only even alluded to less than a dozen times. One incredibly prolific subgenre of storytelling that has never been tackled in space, the so-called final frontier. It's been almost 60 years, and "Star Trek" has never produced a Christmas episode. Come to think of it, do any of the characters on "Star Trek" even celebrate Christmas? Is Christmas still a thing in the future Gene Roddenberry created?
Let's take a look...
The Christmas Past of Star Trek
Let's get the basics out of the way first: "Star Trek" takes place in the distant future. Depending on the series, it could be hundreds or even a thousand years from what we call "the present day." But even though the franchise has occasionally rebooted itself, and traveled to alternate realities, and even rewritten the fictional history of humanity from the late 20th century onward, everything that happened before the creation of "Star Trek" in 1966 actually happened. So Christmas definitely does exist in the history of the "Star Trek" universe. Hardly anybody still talks about it several centuries from now, but the concept is at least in their reference books. Christmas did exist for a while.
The "Star Trek: Voyager" episode "11:59" takes place in two timelines: star date 52840 (April 22, 2375 according to our calendar), and December 27-31 in the year 2000. Those dates are obviously after Christmas, but in flashback scenes that tell the story of Captain Janeway's ancestors — Shannon O'Donnel (Kate Mulgrew) and Henry Janeway (Kevin Tighe) — the small town of Portage Creek, Indiana is still covered in Christmas decorations, because no one takes down Christmas decorations until after New Year's, even in "Star Trek."
What's intriguing is that "11:59" is a New Year's Eve episode and in many ways an anti-Christmas episode. A lot of Christmas stories tell the tale of small towns standing up against outsiders from big cities, struggling to maintain their values and preserve a sense of historic and/or seasonal nostalgia. But "11:59" is about how Shannon O'Donnel has to convince her future husband that his efforts to undermine progress by not giving up his independent bookstore are wrong and that they should embrace progress instead. Sure, he's going to open a bookstore inside the new tech-forward monstrosity opening in Portage Creek, but you'd never see that plot point in most Hallmark Christmas movies, right?
Christmas Presents of Star Trek
Jumping ahead to the events that take place in the future for us but in the present for "Star Trek," mentions of Christmas are few and far between. Especially as an event, celebration, or holiday that is contemporarily celebrated.
There's only one episode of any "Star Trek" series that unambiguously references the characters celebrating Christmas in any way, and that's "Dagger of the Mind." In this first season episode of "Star Trek: The Original Series," Captain Kirk investigates the inventor of a new machine that allegedly rehabilitates violent criminals, but is actually a dangerous brainwashing machine.
To assist Kirk on his mission, McCoy assigns a psychologist to the away team. Kirk is uncomfortable working with Dr. Helen Noel (Marianna Hill) because they nearly hooked up at last year's "science lab Christmas party." They try to be professional about it but later in the episode, Kirk asks Dr. Noel to test the brainwashing machine on him to determine if it can alter the way he thinks. When he asks her to give him a prompt so specific he'll know it was planted there, she tells him that at the end of the Christmas party, instead of going their separate ways, he swept her off her feet and they had an affair.
This is, of course, all kinds of messed up on many levels. It was inappropriate for Kirk to even flirt with another crew member on his ship, and it's also super creepy to implant memories in Kirk's mind of a sexual encounter that never happened. The 1960s were a weird time and Gene Roddenberry's series had sometimes inconsistent and unhealthy attitudes about sexual politics and sexual activity. It seems likely that the episode is less about Christmas and more about the bizarre and outdated tradition of office Christmas parties, which according to shows like "Mad Men" were sometimes little more than drunken orgies.
Star Trek's Christmas maybe
Most of the other major references to Christmas in "Star Trek" are more nebulous than "Dagger of the Mind." Some arguably didn't happen at all.
The most prominent display of Christmas festivities in the history of the franchise comes in the 1994 film "Star Trek Generations." Towards the end of the film Picard is absorbed by an energy thingy called the Nexus (let's not pretend it's real science, it's just a thingy) and gets to live out his ideal life in a fantasy realm that feels real to him. Picard, who long ago chose career over family and was currently mourning the sudden death of his brother and nephew, imagines himself celebrating Christmas with a wife, several children, and even his nephew René. (It's worth noting that in Picard's ideal life, René is alive but his brother is still absent. They always did kind of hate each other.)
It stands to reason that Picard is imagining Christmas because he celebrates Christmas, and perhaps he does, but the Nexus creates a Christmas celebration right out of a storybook, or even a yuletide-themed coffee commercial. Everyone's wearing anachronistically old-fashioned clothing, which suggests that Picard associates Christmas with a bygone era. Something he cannot access anymore, and that perhaps he never really celebrated in the first place.
Then of course there was the time when an omnipotent being tried to hide the starship Voyager as an ornament on a Christmas tree in the episode "Death Wish." It was an amusing image but it's unclear which Christmas tree they were attached to, or even whether it was in the same era as the rest of the series, since the Q can travel through time at will. (Q found them right away anyhow.)
Christmas Carols
Aside from a few allusions to Christmas as a concept, like La'an Noonien-Singh describing being alone on the Enterprise as "like Christmas morning" in the "Strange New Worlds" episode "Spock Amok," the only tangible references to Christmas in the rest of "Star Trek" are usually literary allusions. Christmas may or may not have been celebrated by the time "The Next Generation" came around, but Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" is still a culturally relevant work of literature.
In the "Next Generation" episode "Devil's Due," the story opens with Data dressed up like Ebenezer Scrooge, acting out the iconic Jacob Marley scene in an attempt to learn about emotions by impersonating them through stage performance. And in the pilot of "Star Trek: Voyager," Tom Paris quipped that the ghosts of "three dead officers came to me in the middle of the night and taught me the true meaning of Christmas," as he tried to explain why he confessed to a deadly pilot error which cost those officers their lives.
You can also travel back in time to the events of "Enterprise," in which Captain Archer joked about reciting "The Night Before Christmas," even though the poem is actually called "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (a mistake some of the nerdier captains in "Star Trek" surely wouldn't have made). And when Dr. Bashir starred in a spy-themed holonovel in the "Deep Space Nine" episode "Our Man Bashir," he mentions getting one of the other characters a pair of exploding earrings for Christmas. (Then again, that holonovel was a period piece set in the 1960s.)
Star Trek's Christmas future
So do people in the future in "Star Trek" celebrate Christmas? Perhaps. The traditions and conceptualizations of Christmas are still common knowledge, and its cultural imprint in various literary works is deep and clear. But if they do it's clearly no longer a major annual event. In the present day, Christmas isn't just a religious celebration but a driving economic force: stores rely on the mass influx of purchases that come every gift-giving season. Religion still exists in "Star Trek" but society as a whole is largely secular. And as far as humanity is concerned capitalism is a relic of more ignorant times.
Then again, perhaps some people in "Star Trek" still actively celebrate Christmas in a way we don't recognize. After all, these stories all take place at least hundreds of years in the future. The way people celebrate Christmas in the early 21st century is vastly different from the way people celebrated Christmas just 100 years ago. Surely the conventions would have changed at least somewhat by the time the Enterprise is flying around the galaxy. All we know for sure is that the ill-advised and uncomfortably flirty office Christmas party still existed in the year 2265 when Kirk and Dr. Noel (get it? her name is "Noel") had one awkward encounter. Maybe the events of "Dagger of the Mind" are part of why that last tradition got phased out.
So while there's no definitive statement on whether any of the characters in "Star Trek" still celebrate Christmas, what's clear is that over the course of about 900 episodes and 13 movies, it's never been important enough to any of the characters we've met to actually tell a story that takes place on the holiday or involves its traditions.
So if anyone in "Star Trek" is having a merry Christmas, they're having themselves a merry little Christmas.