Courteney Cox was flattered by Kyle's dad's lines in the Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel song ("Courtney Cox, I love you, you're so hot, on that show) and thanked Trey Parker and Matt Stone for making the song about her at a dinner party, however they had forgotten making the episode and didn't know what she was talking about.
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is the only unaltered song and is sung by the entire cast in a tribute to Mary Kay Bergman. During the lyric "Happy golden days of yore," clips of most of the characters that Bergman voiced (Wendy Testaburger, Sheila Broflovski, Mayor McDaniels, Mrs. Crabtree, and Liane Cartman) are shown in a white haze. They also appear with Sharon & Shelly Marsh, Mrs. McCormick, Nurse Gollum & Principal Victoria alongside Stan and Kyle.
The pianist in the Jesus & Santa song segment is a caricature of Marc Shaiman who wrote the music for this episode with Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They previously worked together on South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) and this caricature appears in that too as the pianist for Big Gay Al's "I'm Super!" musical number.
Despite being one of the most musical characters and voiced by a professional musician, Chef neither sings nor appears.
Before and after every commercial break, a live-action segment featuring a news anchor is shown, saying "Fighting the frizzies, at eleven." This is a reference to a bootleg tape of The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) which is the source for most of the bootlegs currently available online. The original tape featured a brief clip at the end from WCBS-TV featuring newscaster Rolland Smith informing viewers, "Fighting the frizzies, at eleven." As a novelty, those who reproduce the tape for others have customarily left this unusual clip intact, rather than editing it out. However, while the original news ad was apparently referring to "frizzy" hair, the ending credits of this episode features the news anchor boxing a man in a giant fuzzy suit.