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The Night Before Christmas (1968)
Favorite of mine
I love this little piece of animation and it's a favorite of our family. I show it to my kids every year on Christmas Eve as it's become a family tradition.
Technically, the music is fun and memorable, the colors are great, and yes, the animation does suffer from a limited budget, but not by much. Anyone familiar with any amount of animation knowledge would easily be able to peg when it was made. But that doesn't take away from the enjoyment of it at all.
The story of how Clement Moore wrote this poem is fictionalized, but it's still a nice, heartwarming story. However, my kids and my wife always look forward to the actual reading, er, singing of the The Night Before Christmas/A Visit from St. Nicholas itself. It's told and portrayed the way it should - I remember it fondly from my childhood and my children now have those same childhood memories of what it's like the night before Christmas.
And yes Virginia, it is out on DVD. I've gotten 2 copies of it, the superior one put out by the studio in 1996 (you can find these at ebay or Amazon). The other is put out by EastWestDVD.com that's packaged with Santa and the Three Bears.