This Sunday, Comedy Central will be airing Stephen Colbert’s “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All,” which should be as heart-warming as a hot toddy spiked with mescaline. From previews, the hour-long show looks to be following more in the tradition of Bing Crosby than the 1978 “Star Wars Holiday Special,” which was scarier than the Sarlacc.

But that is not to say that “A Colbert Christmas” is not hilariously off-kilter (eagle eyes will notice that Colbert wears a woman’s cardigan, making him into a sort of Mr. Rogers in drag). The special includes a country-western defense of Christmas against “atheists and judges who are trying to take it away” as well as a seductive R&B ballad dedicated to nutmeg (I hope it alludes to Malcolm X’s getting high on the spice in prison). All of the original songs were composed by Adam Schlesinger, which might end up adding to the long list of Christmas favorites scored by Jews. It will be interesting to see how Colbert, a practicing Catholic and former Sunday-school teacher, affectionately makes fun of Christmas—he said that he specifically wanted to avoid mocking the holiday. Will he put the χ back in Xmas?

Despite the incessant satire of The Colbert Report, the show has in fact taken religion seriously. Its guests have included the likes of Reverend Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, and William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League. And the regular segment “This Week in God” can be interpreted as mocking not religious belief but the news media’s treatment of religion as just another phenomenon to be reported, the equal to sports scores and the latest presidential press conference. If memory serves, it was the great Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton who said he’d rather be an eternalist than a journalist. (The latter derives from the word for “daily,” as in ephemeral.) And I imagine that the bibulous Chesterton would have liked “A Colbert Christmas,” especially since it appears to advocate good spirits of every kind.