Melissa Gilbert is best known for her long-running role as Laura Ingalls Wilder in the long-running NBC series Little House on the Prairie. The former child star grew up on TV, debuting her role on the beloved historical drama series when she was just nine years old.
But while Little House featured multiple Christmas episodes during its nine-season run, Gilbert’s first TV Christmas appearance was on an entirely unrelated show.
At age four, Gilbert made a cameo on The Dean Martin Christmas Show on NBC. In the uncredited scene about two minutes into the Dec. 19, 1968, broadcast, she played “Girl on Santa’s lap.” In the short scene, she smiled as she sat on Santa's (Bob Newhart) lap while he promised to bring her all of the things on her Christmas list.
The holiday variety special featured appearances by big-name guests such as Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Diahann Carroll, Glen Campbell, and even Gilbert’s future TV dad, Michael Landon.
So how did Gilbert score the coveted cameo? According to NBC, her grandfather, Harry Crane, was a writer for the Dean Martin roast and TV specials, thus landing her a spot on “Uncle Dean’s” Christmas special.
Gilbert previously told Parade that while she “grew up visiting” her grandfather on the set of the NBC specials, she “didn’t know who Uncle Dean was other than he was a guy with a giant dish of candy in his dressing room.”
Gilbert has many more memories of her subsequent Christmas-themed roles on Little House on the Prairie. During the first season of the show, she appeared in the episode “Christmas at Plum Creek.” The episode originally aired on Dec. 25, 1974, on NBC and remains a fan favorite more than 50 years later.
In the episode, the Ingalls family members come up with creative ways to earn money to buy gifts for one another, with Laura outdoing them all in a tearjerker of a final scene.
In the past, Gilbert has reflected on the Little House on the Prairie Christmas episodes and has shared details on filming. In a 2022 Instagram post, she posted a behind-the-scenes photo from one of the episodes, ”The Blizzard,” which showed the production crew making fake snow for a scene.“We shot a special Christmas episode every season, it seemed,” the Little House on the Prairie star wrote. “We would shoot them months before, so, for me, it felt like we were celebrating Christmas in summer. I absolutely loved those episodes. I was a little girl, and the chance to celebrate Christmas twice- once real and once reel was an unimaginable treat for me. For all of us.”
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