Star Wars’ Strangest Holiday Grew Into a Beloved Fan Celebration
Christmas is a special time for most fandoms. But in Star Wars’ case, the strangest holiday has since evolved into a beloved fan tradition.
As Star Wars fans go about their business this holiday season, they might hear an unusual salutation: “Happy Life Day!” For anyone who’s never heard of Life Day, it’s a Wookie holiday with a rather mortifying origin. While it’s a holiday set in a galaxy far, far away on the planet of Kashyyyk, it does bear a passing resemblance to a popular Earth holiday as it involves singing, feasting, and gathering around a tree with lights and loved ones.
Life Day was first introduced into the Star Wars universe with the Star Wars Holiday Special, a made-for-television Star Wars variety show that was so unpopular that the one and only time it aired was on November 17, 1978. Few bits of Star Wars lore are as underground as the Holiday Special because having only aired once, it survived mostly in bootlegged copies and the fandom’s deep lore for decades. While the Star Wars Holiday Special is now considered only a part of the Legends canon after the purchase of the Star Wars franchise by Disney, in recent years, there have been some loving efforts to reintroduce Life Day into the Disney-Lucasfilm canon. Despite its awkward origin, Life Day has become a symbol of the best of Star Wars fandom and the potential good gentle retconning can do.
The Star Wars Holiday Special premiered in an era full of Christmastime live-action television specials. In 1977 alone, some of the specials that aired were Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas, The Carpenters as Christmas, The Honeymooners Christmas Special, and Father Knows Best: Home for Christmas. So it’s really no surprise that a large broadcasting network like CBS saw the incredible success of the first Star Wars film the year before, in 1977, and thought that a Star Wars-based holiday special for 1978 would be a great idea. It wasn’t, of course, but it’s understandable why it seemed like a very profitable idea at the time. Unfortunately, between the filming schedule of The Empire Strikes Back and moving the location of Lucasfilm, most of the Star Wars creative team wasn’t involved in the Star Wars Holiday Special to any great extent. Most decisions fell to writers and producers brought on by CBS, who had far more experience with broadcast variety shows than they did with the world of science fiction. This led to an unsettling combination of Star Wars characters and stories caught in the style of televised variety shows, which are by nature very aware of their audience and the purpose of entertaining. The Star Wars Holiday Special ended up airing on November 17, 1978, and, overall, fell spectacularly flat.
The special, in a style not uncommon for variety shows, is a group of song-and-dance or comedy acts loosely strung together by an overarching narrative. In the case of the Star Wars Holiday Special, that narrative is Han Solo helping Chewbacca get home to Kashyyyk so that Chewie might visit his family, evading Imperial stormtroopers who are on the lookout for them, while Chewie’s family prepares for his arrival and the Life Day celebration. While Chewbacca’s wife, Malla, prepares food, his father, Itchy, receives a gift, and his son, Lumpy, watches a cartoon but also makes plans to thwart the Imperial troops on Kashyyyk. A video that is required viewing for Imperial forces features a quick shift to Tatooine for a bit. Video boxes and viewscreens serve as a convenient way to present comedy and singing acts by the likes of Bea Arthur, Harvey Korman, Jefferson Starship, and Diahann Carroll. The special is also the legendary debut of a Mandalorian with the first appearance of Boba Fett on television in the cartoon segment about Han Solo’s adventures which Lumpy watches. (Boba Fett’s very first public appearance was in the Marin County Fair Parade in San Anselmo on September 24, 1978, but at the time, fans had no idea who this mysterious unnamed character was.)
This strange conglomeration of styles and characters resulted in a moment in the Star Wars canon that many Star Wars fans were in a hurry to forget. Mentions of Chewbacca’s family were kept to a minimum, focusing his backstory instead on the Wookie resistance on Kashyyyk during the Clone Wars and his life debt to Han Solo. Boba Fett’s original debut was ignored in favor of his appearance in The Empire Strikes Back, although the cartoon segment, known as “The Faithful Wookie,” is by far the best part of the Star Wars Holiday Special and had the most lasting effect on the Star Wars franchise. Most of all, the holiday Life Day became a sort of Star Wars fandom shorthand for ridiculousness.
Within the Star Wars universe, the history of Life Day is much less fraught. The celebration originated in Wookie culture and emphasized the Wookie values of joy, peace, harmony, and family. Wookie families would journey to the Tree of Life to feast and perform rituals, all dressed in red robes. The Tree of Life represented the beginning of life on Kashyyyk, so crystal orbs would be hung from it to symbolize the spark of life. While the galaxy was always interconnected, when the Empire took over and enslaved the Wookies, Life Day gained even more importance and began to spread beyond Kashyyyk. In a time of oppression and brutality, the celebration of unity and hope was vital to the survival of Wookies and their culture. After the fall of the Empire, Life Day was celebrated throughout the galaxy in a variety of ways according to culture, but the focus always remained on joy and harmony.
Since the premiere of the Star Wars Holiday Special, Life Day has slowly morphed from a cringey joke into a good-natured nod to the tenets at the heart of Star Wars. In recent years, stories like the Star Wars canon novel Aftermath: Empire’s End have expanded on the backstory of Chewbacca’s family and given them full names more accurate to Wookie culture. Lumpy’s full name is Lumpawaroo, shortened to Lumpy or Waroo, and Malla’s full name is Mallatobuck. For the first time since the original airing, the cartoon segment that introduced Boba Fett and resulted in the immensely popular Mandalorians became available in 2011 on the Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-ray set as an Easter egg. In the pilot episode of The Mandalorian, Season 1, “Chapter 1 – The Mandalorian,” which aired on November 12, 2019, Din Djarin captures a Mythrol who wishes to be free to celebrate Life Day. This is the first time that Life Day is mentioned in live-action canon, and it is an intentional nod to the television special segment that contributed so much to the concept of The Mandalorian. A year later, the non-canon LEGO Star Wars Holiday Day Special aired on November 17, 2020. The cartoon portion of the original Holiday Special was released on Disney+ under the name The Story of the Faithful Wookie in April 2021 following the success of The Mandalorian. On November 24, 2021, Marvel Comics published an official Star Wars Life Day one-shot that cemented its relevance in the new Star Wars canon. This isn’t the usual definition of retconning since it doesn’t particularly change anything about Life Day as it was introduced, but it’s also the best kind of retconning. Adding to the lore of Life Day without desperately trying to erase its discrepant inception allows the idea of Life Day to grow along with the Star Wars fandom. Despite its awkward beginnings, the Life Day celebration has retained its original gist and become a science fiction version of the Earth holiday season.
The Star Wars Holiday Special itself was a small disaster, and for a long time, Life Day only served as a reminder of a moment in Star Wars history that almost everyone would prefer to forget. But the lens of nostalgia can be rather rose-colored, and fans have come around to the idea of a Star Wars holiday. In the modern age, where Christmas is so divorced from its original intention but still suffused by its religious origin, the idea of a secular, science-fiction holiday that celebrates the same ideals is enticing. Humans like rituals and pack bonding, and Life Day, as a Star Wars holiday, provides both. The most impressive example of this is the fans who would gather at the Galaxy’s Edge theme park, dressed in red robes, on November 17 to celebrate Life Day. In 2019, this was such a large event that it made the news and propelled Life Day to new levels of mainstream awareness. Like the Running of the Willrow Hoods, these fans took an odd, minor Star Wars detail and turned it into a community event to celebrate a world that they love. Fans are the ones who truly make Life Day and the love of Star Wars come alive. While franchise executives tend to worry that anything kitschy or goofy, like the Star Wars Holiday Special, will ruin marketability, fans continue to prove that it isn’t profitability or top-of-the-line special effects that make a fandom flourish. Instead, it’s the community that is the heart of any fandom.
The harmony and community expressed by the celebrants of Life Day is exactly the kind of ideal that the Wookies themselves would approve of. Rather than let a misguided blip in history sour their love of Star Wars, they embrace the silly aspects of the story along with the epic ones. In that way, Life Day is just as good a holiday to celebrate as any other. George Lucas has always clung fiercely to the ideals behind Life Day, and that’s what has made it last despite everything else. While the clunky story of Han helping Chewbacca visit his family for the holidays has little bearing on the rest of the Star Wars story, the idea that joy, love, and harmony are worth.
