How I Met Your Mother – “How Lily Stole Christmas”
Nothing ruins Christmas quite like bringing up the past, especially when it has to do with you bad-mouthing your best friend’s longtime girlfriend. Ted gets himself into some hot water on this season 2 episode of How I Met Your Mother after Lily overhears a message he never meant her to hear.
The apartment is fully decorated like a winter wonderland, just waiting for Marshall to get home from the library where he’s working on a law report. He can’t wait to see the wonderland that Lily created for him, but Ted does something to mess it up. Lily finds an old answering machine in the apartment that had messages from years ago, and when they listen to one of them, Lily is furious.
The message was from Ted, for Marshall, trying to comfort his friend after Lily had left him: “Hey, Marshall, are you lying on the couch right now moping about Lily? You are, aren’t you? Well, stop it! She’s not worth it. You gotta get over that grinch!” That doesn’t sound so bad, but as Narrator Ted points out, he didn’t really say “grinch,” he said something much, much worse (use your imagination). Lily doesn’t accept any of the excuses Ted gives her, and takes all of the decorations and stashes them in her apartment.
On the phone, Lily lets Ted hear it, saying if one of her students used language like that, she’d call their parents, so she did call Ted’s mom and told her the horrible thing he called her (some fans speculate it might have been a certain c-word). When the two finally get together to talk it out in person, Lily feels like Ted’s apology is fake, and he ends up calling her a “grinch” again, so he leaves the apartment to let her go and decorate for Marshall without him there.
When Marshall gets home, he’s none the wiser. When he gives Lily her present — an Easy-Bake Oven — Lily is surprised, because she never told Marshall how much she wanted one as a kid. That’s when he tells her it was Ted’s idea, because she mentioned it once back in college. Lily feels guilty for making Ted spend Christmas without them, so the whole gang go and meet him in Staten Island to bring him back home. Don’t you just love a happy ending on Christmas?