In Marvel canon, the Mad Titan Thanos has officially celebrated Christmas. This can be found in the Marvel Holiday Special from 1992 in a short story titled “Yule Memory” by Jim Starlin, Ron Lim, and Terry Austin. The holiday special is pretty jam-packed with pin-ups and eight stories in total from some pretty big names. The book also features stories with Wolverine, New Warriors, Spider-Man, Punisher, Doc Samson, Iron Man, and Daredevil. Other talented and well-known creators on the book include Stan Lee, Fabian Nicieza, Larry Hama, and Peter David among others.
The general premise of the tale is that Thanos is using robots to clear out one of his hideouts. During the cleaning, he stops one of the robots and asks to check a box. Inside Thanos sees a scorched doll that triggers memories of his adopted daughter, Gamora, as a child. Gamora was trained from infancy to become a deadly fighter, but as Thanos puts it, he didn’t just want her to be a “psychopathic assassin.” He wanted a “fighting and killing machine…that could reason with a sound and rational mind.”
To accomplish this, Thanos sought to give Gamora a somewhat normal childhood. The pair celebrates a fake birthday for her and holidays in order to, as Thanos puts it, “perpetrate the illusion of family.” So Thanos got a tree and presents so they could have a mixture of Christmas and Yule. The scorched doll Thanos holds during this recollection is a present he gave to her. It became scorched after Gamora used it to save Thanos from an assassination attempt. He seems touched by the fact that she sacrificed her present to save him, and thanks her by taking her to a lagoon to watch dolphins.
At first, the idea of Thanos celebrating Christmas seems like the start of a bad joke, but the story is surprisingly grounded and touching. While reflecting on this time, Thanos notes that he should’ve known then that Gamora would eventually turn against him. He tosses the doll back into the box and tells his robot to burn all the Christmas stuff in the incinerator. Thanos says that things such as that are only for people capable of caring about the memories they invoke. He believes, “caring is for the weak” and that his “sensitivity has long ago atrophied.”
So although Thanos once partook in Christmas festivities, it was only for practical purposes and not like he is going soft. As he so poetically puts it, “Too much scar tissues lies over any gentler emotions Thanos might once have had.”
