Angelica Pickles

Performer(s)	Cheryl Chase
Appeared in	Rugrats

Angelica Charlotte Pickles is one of the main characters from the Nickelodeon animated series Rugrats and its spin-off All Grown Up!. She is Drew and Charlotte's daughter, Stu and Didi's niece and Lou Pickles' granddaughter and is a bossy spoiled brat who always wants to get her way and constantly bullies her cousins Tommy and Dil and his friends through deceit and trickery, though her parents began to spoil her less in later seasons and act more strict with her. As the regular antagonist to the babies, her personality and desire for the things she wants are prominently featured in subplots of the show's Christmas episodes.

Appearances in Christmas specials

Rugrats

Angelica visiting the department store Santa in "The Santa Experience".

In the series' first Christmas episode, "The Santa Experience", Angelica goes to see Santa at a department store and lists the things she wants him to bring her. When he voices doubt in Santa being able to bring her all that, she realizes this is not the real Santa Claus she's addressing and furiously reveals him as a fake. To shut her up, the mall manager gives her a big box of toys, but she is not pleased with the toys when she opens it, among them a box of crayons and a space helmet for a Reptar toy. In a twist on the Gift of the Magi situation, she exchanges the crayons to Phil for his Reptar toy so he can give the crayons as a Christmas gift for Lil, and then exchanges the space helmet to Lil for her coloring book so she can give the helmet as a gift for Phil. At first, Angelica takes pleasure from the fact that the twins' gifts for each other will be useless as a result of her having Lil's coloring book and Phil's Reptar doll. But she begins to regret her action when she learns that Santa brings coal to bad kids like her, and after having a nightmare of this scenario, she realizes that she should give Phil and Lil's things back to them. During the family's trip to a pets-welcome mountain cabin for Christmas, she attempts several times to tell the twins that she's returning their things, but to no avail. In the end, though, her attempts to do a good deed for the twins results in the real Santa bringing her the Deluxe Cynthia Beach House that she wanted (with only a small lump of coal). After this, she succeeds in giving Lil's coloring book and Phil's Reptar toy back to them.

Angelica was absent from the show's second Christmas episode, "Let It Snow", but she again had a prominent role in the show's third Christmas episode, "Babies in Toyland". This hour-length special marks the first Christmas to be experienced by Tommy's little brother Dil, but Angelica deceives the babies into believing that he'll never celebrate Christmas again if Santa doesn't deliver any presents, all the while insisting that she will get the most because she claims to have been good all year ("she must've been good all the times we wasn't lookin'", says Phil). At the Christmasland park that her uncle Stu has designed for her mother's company, Angelica, upon receiving a plush reindeer called Prancy, frustrates the hired Santa so much that he quits, much to the babies' devastation. When the babies decide to look for Santa's workshop to find the presents that Santa left behind, Angelica gets the same idea and tricks them into going in the wrong direction. She then heads off to find the workshop, snatching some cookies and scaring some carolers with her terrible singing along the way. When she does break into "Santa's workshop", she enters a fantasy sequence where she is in the actual workshop and is chastised about her meanness by an elf named Hermey (no relation) and a living version of Prancy. The pair eventually manage to instill the Christmas spirit in Angelica (through song), so she promises to be good (at least until the next episode). Upon returning to find the babies, she presents them all with gifts, including giving Prancy to Dil.

Ironically, Angelica does not appear in "The Finster Who Stole Christmas", the Christmas episode of All Grown Up! It is mentioned by Susie at the beginning of the episode that she is spending the holidays in Aspen, Colorado.

As with the other Rugrats characters, Angelica appears prominently in the songs on the album Rugrats: Holiday Classics.

Other Christmas productions

Angelica also made a few appearances in the Merry Nickmas interstitial shorts. Her most prominent role in these is as Grinchelica in "How the You-Know-Who Stole You-Know-What!" (which parodies How the Grinch Stole Christmas). In this short, Angelica/Grinchelica, out of spite for Nickmas and believing that she should have all the chocolate candy, sneaks into Toonville with her cat Fluffy and steals everything made of chocolate. She succeeds in her task, in spite of a slight distraction from the littlest Toon, Plankton Lou Who. When she returns to her mountain cave home, she briefly reconsiders the feelings of the Nicktoon characters who will probably be disappointed in having no candy tomorrow, but ultimately decides she doesn't care about that and feasts on the candy until her stomach is three hundred times bigger. Angelica also prominently appears in the Charlie Brown Christmas parody, "A Chuckie Finster Christmas, Channukah, Kwaanza, Winter Solstice", where she portrays the Lucy van Pelt role and balks at Tommy's recitation of the titular holidays' origins, claiming that it's all about the presents, which the babies decide to agree on.

External links

• Rugrats Wiki: Angelica Pickles