After season seven seemingly ended nearly three months ago, Futurama aired its Holiday-themed season finale last night.   "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular" could best be compared to The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horrors Halloween specials, but with a Christmas, Channukah and Kwanza theme.

Unlike the Treehouse series, I hope this doesn't become a yearly tradition.  As a one-time special, the episode was incredibly unique and fun fan fare that included plenty of nods to previous episodes.

But as entertained as we were for the half hour, we're not sure we could handle any more robot Santa appearances.  Don't get me wrong.  He was still entertaining, but the clever, uniqueness that is X-Mas is running thin.

Out of the three stories, the middle story about Robanukah won us over.  Maybe it's because it meant more Bender, but the song and jokes at Channukah's expense just seemed the funniest of the three.

The final story had some fun cheap shots at Kwanza and brought back the always lovable space bees from season four, but was definitely the weakest of the three in our opinion.  Even its killing of the crew felt more forced than the previous two parts.

Overall, it was a fun episode and we were thrilled just to be treated to a new episode of Futurama out of nowhere.  Thank you guys for the wonderful X-Mass slash Robanukah slash Kwanza present.

As usual, we'll leave you with our favorite Futurama quotes from the episode:

Professor: Pine trees aren't barking snakes - they won't just turn up in a salad in Olive Garden. | permalink

Fry: You know Santa may have killed Scruffy, but he makes a good point. | permalink

Bender: I thought they were selfish, but in the end, it turns out it was I who thought they were selfish. | permalink

Amy: Oh no! This could be the year without a Kwanza, like every year before 1966. | permalink

Leela: Something's wrong. It's too quiet.
Fry: Like the deadly Prius. | permalink

Eric Hochberger is the programmer of TV Fanatic, so please forgive his mediocre writing. His programming is far better. Follow him on Twitter and/or email him. Just don't request threaded comments. They're coming.