DC’s 2011 Holiday card. Artwork by Sean Galloway.

If you’re in the mood for some Christmas stories this weekend, here’s a little something to compliment Barry’s recent Christmas With The Super-Heroes LP write-up.

Super Friends (2008) 22

Santa isn’t the only one who gets letters for Christmas.

A wheelchair bound little girl is visited by the Super Friends for Christmas Eve and learns handicaps are mainly those of the mind.

“All I Want for Christmas” is a touching story, but the best wishes given for those suffering hard times in 2009 really hit home for me. That year was hard on my son and me, but with the help of good friends and family the end of the first decade of the new millennium dawned bright as the curtain rang down on the year.

Let this be well wishes to everyone, especially my cousins and their children who lost a dear one the beginning of December. It may not get easier, but it does get better.

Millennials will never know a time when information and entertainment weren’t only as far away as their phone.

For us, the children of the 1970s, we had imagination. Suspending belief we moved from panel to panel between the pages of 20- to 50-cent adventure books of wonder where men and women dressed in colorful outfits, flew and busted the jaws of evil doers.

Christmas With the Super Heroes (1977)

Power Records gave voice to those images.

During the 1970s Power Records snapped up licenses from both Marvel and DC comic companies. Stories were sold on 45 RPM singles accompanying a 20-page book reprinting whatever issue or issues were translated to the record. Eventually these were repackaged on LPs to wring every bit of coinage from fanboys.

With no official title we’ll call this offering Christmas With the Super-Heroes. The LP featured “three exciting stories with Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman,” released in 1977 and running 44 minutes.

Superman’s adventure was entitled “Light Up the Tree, Mr. President.” Unless the Man of Steel can stop him, the president will launch missiles when he lights the National Tree.

Wonder Woman became a “Prisoner of Christmas Island” with Santa Claus taken prisoner by Broomhilda.

Batman and Robin solved the “Christmas Carol Caper” through song and slug fests with the likes of Rudy “Rudolph the Red Nosed Hitman” Snow and Sammy the South Side Santa.

The previous year Mark Waid brought us a collection of his favorite holiday stories. In 1989 he returned with a gift wrapped bundle of original tales featuring some of DC’s best known characters as depicted by some of comic book’s best known talent.

It’s hard to pick the best of the bunch, but for me it would probably be the Batman story, “And in the Depths,” written by Dave Gibbons and illustrated by Gray Morrow. For 10 pages readers traverse the life of Batman to the death of Robin.

Christmas With the Super Heroes (1989)

When I was growing up the old Batman stories were reprinted in various forms from the Batman Signet paperbacks to Limited Collector Editions and backup stories in the 100 pagers of the early to mid-1970s. I read ‘em all. Or, as many as I could get my hands on.

I get very nostalgic this time of year for those old tales before Frank Miller Dark Knighted Batman, back when the colors popped and the villains were as goofy as their criminal hijinks.

The second strongest of the lot is a team up with the Barry Allen and Hal Jordan Flash and Green Lantern, respectively, when the JLA’s first satellite headquarters orbited an exact 22,300 miles above Earth.

Flash and Green Lantern, who was a back up in Flash’s comic book for a while, prove Santa Claus does exist – in all of us.

Superman, Wonder Woman, Dead Man and Enemy Ace flesh out the Christmas issue with stories reminding readers the holidays are about giving.

Christmas With the Super-Heroes (C-43)

DC followed its Christmas With the Superheroes 1974 edition with a second stocking stuffer the following season.

Included was maybe DC’s first Christmas special: Superman’s Christmas Adventure cover dated 1940 as well as probably the most cited Batman holiday tale Silent Night of the Batman from Batman 219; a classic Wonder Woman story socking it to the Nazis; a Joe Simon/Jack Kirby collaboration on Sandman and maybe my introduction to the House of Mystery with Night Prowler.

This is another stocking stuffer and the second of my Christmas comic books. Most of what I remember is probably conjecture based on the repetition of my childhood Christmas mornings, but I know I pulled this from my stocking Christmas morning 1975 as America readied itself for the Bicentennial, Watergate began to fade from memory and Saturday Night Live took hold on television and the American landscape.

If I actually took note of any of the above, it was probably the prevalence red, white and blue merchandise that paled beside the four-color holiday treasure I would read over and over.

It would be nice to go back in time and review those moments. Some, maybe most, would be remembered far more fondly than they actually were, but to relive a moment most consider so trivial at the time that proved so profound for the simple fact it has become a cherished memory would be worth almost anything.