IGNO Christmas Stories had been one of our community's oldest traditions, and as such, stretched back to the early days of the forums before any real semblance of canon began to take shape. In fact, the Christmas Stories themselves were some of the first examples of canon to begin with. So when the decision was made in 2015 to retcon all the old, outdated, and wildly convoluted old history...all those old stories lost their place in our canon, as well.
Now, on one hand, this was great - many of those stories clashed thematically, if not outright contradicted one another. The oldest stories involved actual anime characters and embarrassing-in-hindsight pop-culture references. Even when they shifted towards focusing only on our IGNO cast, there was not yet a very firm foundation of canon, and later changes to the worldbuilding conflicted with the ideas put forth in those stories (for example, The Rainbow actually being a place we could physically travel to, rather than its current depiction as a more spiritual existence). To read all those stories in order and expect them to flow naturally would have been impossible. Thus, the stories had long been counted as 'only canon starting with #5'. This in itself was rather silly because #5 was never finished, but the events that were supposed to take place in it were later referenced and considered to be canon anyways. That only served to muddle things further. In short, exiling these stories from canon let us clean up a lot of otherwise incredibly messy loose ends.
On the other hand...the Christmas Story tradition has always followed a fairly standard formula and a lot of running gags. Krampus endangers Christmas, so SG2 and friends split into teams and go to stop him. SG2 forgets who Krampus actually is despite fighting him every year. At some point, Krampus' ice tower is destroyed. In the final battle, Krampus will usually grow to a giant size, and SG2 will pull some bullshit power out of her ass and deliver the finishing blow, saving the day. In the end there's a happy epilogue where Santa rewards us and we all remember the true meaning of Christmas and enjoy spending time with our IGNO family. Removing the older stories from canon means that those callbacks and references suddenly seem to come from nowhere, because you lose the links that made them 'tradition'. Not to mention the fact that Krampus and the IGNO Crew are known enemies who apparently butt heads 'every year', but now all those past incidents are things that happened offscreen. What was once the 6th story in a series now becomes the first item in a trilogy, and many references to previous events make you feel like you missed an episode of your favorite TV show - or perhaps an entire season.
But it worked for Dragonball Z when it came to the US and won itself millions of fans who had never seen the original Dragonball, right? Sure, you have the odd reference to something that apparently happened in the past, but you're ultimately able to pick up the important bits of it from the surrounding context. So the IGNOites fought Krampus many times before...just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it didn't happen. I decided that this was preferable to scrapping all the stories, especially since both A Crossmas Carol and Have Yourself A Dozen Little Christmases began to have much more complex storylines (though it was Holly Jolly Chaos that was originally to introduce more serious plotlines into the stories, had it been finished).
TL;DR - this page is an archive for the stories that no longer have a place in IGNOLand canon. They exist here purely for nostalgia purposes, or for those truly curious about the meta behind how the Christmas Story tradition began. The numbering system used here is the original - beginning with A Very Chibi Christmas (#1) and ending with Holly Jolly Chaos (#5). A Crossmas Carol and Have Yourself A Dozen Little Christmases - originally numbered #6 and #7 respectively - have been adjusted to be considered #1 and #2 of the new canon. Confused yet? Don't worry too much about it as anything other than a means to track the total number of IGNO Christmas Stories that exist. It's mostly for my own referential purposes, anyways.
The pages here are archived AS-IS - in other words, exactly as I had written them when they were still considered canon. This includes the older stories which I (poorly) attempted to 'adjust' to fit the then-current canon. It's probably best to just disregard those 'summaries' and read the embarrassing old stories themselves - I mean, if you're browsing an archive already, you may as well.
