"Do They Know It's Christmas?"

[EDIT: It turns out the first half of this post is now moot - and per the next post there will be a Christmas episode - no worries.  Sorry about that.]

An interesting press release was issued by ABC listing  some of their holiday programming coming up in a few weeks. (I didn't find this one myself, BTW - credit to a poster named sannozz94 on IMDb's board who did.) What's interesting is on the night (December 9th) that the rest of their Wednesday comedy lineup has their Christmas episodes, there's no mention of anything for Modern Family.



Does that mean they're breaking the odd-seasoned pattern and having no Christmas episode this year?  Not necessarily.  It's possible that the details about the episode aren't known yet (maybe filming hasn't been completed), and/or the episode won't air until the following week (they are an episode behind because of the Halloween repeat).

On the other hand, as I mentioned yesterday, the upcoming "Phil's Sexy, Sexy House" revolves partially around Thanksgiving, which break a pattern for that holiday (so far they've only done Thanksgiving episodes every third year) - they may just be thinking outside the box for the other end-of-year holidays as well.

My best guess is there's nothing unusual happening and we'll get that Christmas episode as expected, but one never knows. [EDIT: We do now.]

Speaking of potential Christmas episodes (and because I haven't said anything about Alex yet), something dawned on me about Episode 10, "Spread Your Wings" - earlier I thought if that would be the Christmas episode then its title might portend a Scrooge-like episode for somebody.  Actually there's a more closely-related reference that I totally missed: It's A Wonderful Life.  While the three most likely candidates for a "pulled from the brink of ending it all by a guardian angel" story would be Phil (e.g. he gets ousted from the real estate partnership), Jay (e.g. his closet business takes a turn for the worse), or even Mitch (still looking for a job), don't discount Alex's chances of getting this story.

If things do go badly for Alex next week, I really could see her ready to throw in the towel on everything (especially if Sanjay returns and reaffirms he doesn't want to see her again), only to be saved by that angel showing her how life would be worse without her.

Hokey, yes, and possibly shark-jumping as well, but...