God
damn I loved this one.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but Pony Christmas Carol I was not.
What I really appreciated, though, was the rather unusual, even novel texture of it. It's talky, it's grown-up, it's subtle, and there's hardly any of the
comedy we've come to expect from even the heaviest-feeling episodes. Despite the exotic new concepts like the cloud nightmare and the dreamscape and Sapphire Shores' Canterlot studio, it felt like this was one of the most down-to-earth, character-driven slices-of-life I've ever seen the show do.
The fact that it was not even a "CMC episode" so much as a
Sweetie Belle episode was really what put it into that category. Up till now we've never really had an episode that put quite so much individual focus on any one of the CMCs, except perhaps Somepony to Watch Over Me. And the sheer amount of material that Sweetie got to deliver, all the new sides of her she got to showcase, all the backstory and villainy and hopes-and-dreams it revealed about her, have for the first time elevated her to the level of "main cast", and quite unexpectedly ahead of her two compatriots. I feel like even Scootaloo's part in Sleepless wasn't quite as overtly "we are promoting this character to the headliner short-list" as this one was.
But it's part of the same continuing narrative. Certainly they're consciously adding to the Luna arc that Sleepless began. Somepony gave us a similar level of focus on Apple Bloom, but it still felt like a slapsticky comedy episode about misunderstandings and sisterly hijinks rather than a serious character study. This one felt like a deeply emotional conflict between two real people, both full of pride and both image-conscious to a fault in a way that impedes their ability to communicate the way they wish they could. It's icing on the cake that we got to see Sweetie Belle using her magic—as foreshadowed nicely in Twilight Time—in the same kind of offhand, not-drawing-attention-to-itself way that other unicorns do. The show's sending a loud-and-clear message that these kids are growing up, and they're not going to try to hide Claire Corlett's voice change—they're going to embrace it and write around it. And the result is a Sweetie Belle who's as complex and as worthy of exploration as any of the grown-ups.
(At the same time, they're continuing to be coy about Scootaloo's flying—she
almost made it to the windowsill!)
It cracked me up that the chase after the box at the end was almost silent.

Rarity wasn't yelling for her sister and her hellion friends to stop or come back or anything—she was just fucking
gunning for them.
So many wonderful little bits of writing, like the "showtunes" thing, the song titles, Sapphire Shores' vamping (so great that she's back and with more lines than ever before! —And it's amazing to see her
out of costume and in her no-nonsense backstage persona rather than all dolled up in jewels. Who knew it would take until Season 4 for that to happen?), the "class" thing, the whole little "She
has known about this for weeks,
right? 
" conversation. As much as people are extolling the animation, I really think this is one of the most strongly-written episodes I've seen out of the show in a long, long time. And so much of that is down to the texture, the grown-up feel of it—and the abrupt ending which didn't
feel abrupt relative to, say, episodes of some random sitcom. It's only abrupt in the context of FiM, where you always expect there to be at least some form of friendship-lesson lip service. This one ended in the middle of a conversation with an
aaww and a hug. And that's a fun new thing for them to try, in an episode full of fun new things that they tried. And pulled off admirably.