Every day of December counting down to Christmas Day, Popverse is hijacking the grand tradition of the Advent Calendar to share a moment from a holiday comic of yore. What else could you want from a classic combination of comic books and the yuletide gaze? Today, it’s the turn of 1977’s Amazing Spider-Man #166, in a tale that has the appropriately festive title, “War of the Reptile-Men!”

Look, it’s early days in this yuletide season, and we could all use a little reminder just why we’re all in this December holiday mood together. Thankfully, none other than New York City’s friendly neighborhood Spider-Man Peter Parker is here with just such a life-lesson, courtesy of the epilogue to a classic '70s issue of Amazing Spider-Man by Len Wein, Ross Andru, and Mike Esposito that was otherwise concerned with the hero dealing with not one, but two, different reptile-inspired supervillains. (One of them was the little-seen Stegron the Dinosaur Man, which is a holiday gift in itself.)

Having dispatched with both of said creature-men, Peter swings by the apartment of Doctor Curt Connors to check in on him, and his long-suffering family — he’d earlier visited and picked up a Christmas tree that had been knocked over, because apparently it takes someone with the proportional strength of a spider to achieve such a feat — only to be so overwhelmed by the joys of the season that he forgets his traditional griping from just one panel earlier. It’s a holiday miracle, for real!

“Sharing… giving… that’s what it’s all really about, isn’t it?” he asks himself rhetorically, before webbing up a gift for the family outside their window in the hope that they notice it outside before (a) the weather destroys it, or (b) the webbing dissolves and it crashes to the ground, destroyed. Sure, his internal monologue was so on point, but his actions still demonstrate the precise level of lack of forethought that killed Uncle Ben all those years ago. Can we chalk that up to the Ol’ Parker Luck…?

Want more? You can read the entire story in The Amazing Spider-Man #166, available via Comixology and Marvel Unlimited.

Check out the rest of the month’s Advent goodness TK.