Basic Premise: A popular, widely celebrated holiday is somehow threatened by an Evil Force (demon, dragon, heartless CEO, etc.) and the heroes must stop said Evil Force to save the holiday! The result of this causes/allows the people involved (including the Evil Force) to discover/rediscover the 'true meaning' of the holiday.
Just a bit of silliness because of the way Christmas always seems to need to be saved somehow. I was curious if anyone has ever done anything similar in a campaign or, if not, what it might look like.
I have done something or this sort twice in the past when I ran a game and a session fell close to this day. The players got some laughs out of it, but I kind fo think they were humouring me. :)
In each instance I painted a customer Santa figurine. The first was a war hammer orc whose clothes were painted red and white. It was a jungle adventure, and there was a traveller named Seantu Negolas who brought supplies and things for the kids to remote, struggling villages. This demon-worshiping orc kidnapped him and put on his outfit. This was a brief encounter that served as a prequel/lead in to the adventure. He also made a brief appearance in the final session after his demon lord resurrected him.
The other one was a war hammer dwarf with a musket (painted red and white of course), and the players were exploring Lolth’s domain. They travelled through a portal there to a world where dwarves were enslaved by drow. When there, they met a dwarf-like outsider armed with an strange artifact weapon (musket/wand of flaming burst). He asked their help in delivering much needed assistance and glad tidings to the dwarves people on this world. They agreed and headed out. Things went downhill soon after this, due to the poor interpersonal relationships of the non-good PCs (which was all of them) and some accidents that occurred during a combat. An invisible martial PC got caught point blank in an AoE spell the wizard cast, and the PC responded by sneak attacking the wizard. The barbarian had acquired a demonic sword that had forged by dwarves and then tempered in their blood. At this moment he lost it and attacked the dwarf outsider. The archer joined him. Party infighting, all while drow warriors are closing in and attacking all of them. Santa landed a devastating crit on the barbarian, tumbled out of the fray, and escaped. The wounded party has to put aside their differences and flee back to the portal on foot. They failed to save Christmas, but the stories were retold for years after that.
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We had regular games on Halloweeen for a few years. Once one player would secretly be the monster, another time everyone was monsters facing a threat to monster-dom, and in yet another (in no way totally ripped off of an episode of Buffy called Band Candy) a bunch of people got turned into the monsters their costumes represented, and the party had to keep things from devolving into chaos.
Saving Halloween seems like the most fun option, because you can have real monsters (or the spirits of the dead) coming out to play, and the civilians will generally be clueless when it's all over (assuming the PCs manage to keep things from going completely off the rails...).
"You know, I haven't seen Bobby since Halloween, when those fake zombies dragged him away..."
"Now that you mention it, I haven't either. Wow, those zombies had some great makeup, 'though!"