As purveyors of entertainment media, we know it can be a hustle to churn out timely, holiday-related content around the end of the year. Finding content that has to do with Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, or even peoples’ contempt for the holidays can be tough especially when we’re working abbreviated schedules. It’s only natural that some well-meaning people would manage to muck this up, and it seems that one television news channel has won 2022’s award for «Best Seasonal Fail of the Year».

Twitter user @revrrlewis shared the grisly gaffe with their followers on Christmas. Seems the news channel wanted to share the names of US towns that have Christmas spirit and included Donner Lake, California on their list. While the name certainly sounds like one of Santa’s reindeer (who is actually named Donder, or Dunder), it’s actually a reference to the Donner Party, a group of American pioneers who were stuck in the snowy Sierra Nevadas for an entire winter. Their earlier mishaps led to tragedy, with some of the pioneers resorting to cannibalism to survive the brutal conditions. 

Needless to say, the error was well-received by the gleeful know-it-alls of Twitter, who had a bit of a field day with the image. We’ve put together some entertaining responses, but there are loads more where these came from.