One of the most beloved holiday traditions that doesn’t involve gift-giving is “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The 1965 animated special, depicting the trials of the titular sad sack and a crew of kids wearied beyond their years by commercialism, has inspired repeat viewings and countless appraisals, including in The New York Times. But the genre of Christmas specials it inspired, including “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” and “Frosty the Snowman,” largely leaned away from Charlie’s melancholy and toward a wholesome belief in the righteous power of the holiday spirit.

Almost 60 years ago, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” dared to ask: What’s more Christmas-y than acknowledging the weight of the holiday? Four decades later, “A Huey Freeman Christmas,” a standout episode from the first season of “The Boondocks,” did the same.

“The Boondocks,” Aaron McGruder’s satire about an aspiring young Black revolutionary and his rapscallion brother, was a comic strip I read every morning in junior high. It offered me a two-minute solace from the estrangement I felt from the rituals of Catholic school, the mainstream tastes of my classmates and the bits of mid-2000s culture that I was told I should like. I remember coming to believe that social and political critique was a way to understand that distance, and “The Boondocks” television series, which aired from 2005 to 2014 (with some long breaks between seasons), was just lowbrow hilarious enough for a 12-year-old loner to start giving form to that malaise.

The chaotic satire that had captivated me also coursed through the show, so I dutifully tuned in when the Christmas episode debuted. It starts out like a sendup of “Charlie Brown”: Huey, a 10-year-old with outsize activist ambitions, tries his hand at directing a school play. When he finds his cast dancing instead of rehearsing, as Charlie Brown did, he immediately fires them with the backing of his teacher, a white man whose enthusiasm for Kwanzaa is a punchline. In another plot thread, Riley, Huey’s brother, writes a letter to Santa Claus. But it’s a threat: He didn’t get the car rims he had asked for, and the debt is due.

None of the characters have a Bible passage memorized to sort them out when things inevitably get out of hand. Riley spends most of the episode waging a one-boy war against mall Santas with an airsoft gun, and Huey leverages the contract he finagled from his teacher to nab the services of Quincy Jones (voiced by Jones himself), Denzel Washington and Angela Bassett for his play, titled “The Adventures of Black Jesus.”

But as with the Charlie Brown special, the trick is finding grace within that gap between holiday expectations and real life. I’ve kept returning to “A Huey Freeman Christmas” because it’s a quilt woven with thwarted ambition, unsettled grievances and Black love that still fits my adult frame. It’s itchy, but mainly warm. The boys’ grandfather, a lover of earnest specials, yells at Huey for boring him with a more accurate history of Christmas. Yet he kindly carries him to bed after finding him asleep at his writing desk.

And miracles do happen, despite a deficiency of holiday spirit. The show makes it to stage, albeit in front of a very small audience and for a grand total of one performance. “Just as well — I hate looking at my old work,” Huey says, with the gift of contentment.

Despite decades of repetition, apparently the message in “Charlie Brown” didn’t take: In a 2022 Ipsos poll, 75% of Americans agreed that people had forgotten the “real meaning” of Christmas. “The Boondocks” takes a more skeptical viewpoint. If anything, Christmas presses us to consider what exactly makes us whole. That may not mean bullying Santa, but for me, it’s the lesson that stuck.