When Maureen McCormick and Barry Williams attended the the HGTV premiere for their hit reality series A Very Brady Renovation, it was suggested that there could be more Brady Bunch reunions on the horizon. What we weren’t expecting is that one had already been shot and will be coming our way for Christmas.

A Very Brady Christmas Special (our title, not HGTV’s) will be arriving soon, likely for the holidays, and serves as a continuing reminder of just how much that particular bunch continues to pervade pop culture. Kimberly Potts, author of this December’s The Way We All Became the Brady Bunch: How the Canceled Sitcom Became the Beloved Pop Culture Icon We Are Still Talking About Today, muses in an exclusive interview, “I think you can sort of see when they’re being interviewed, even when they were recently on the Today show, and during the first episode of the renovation series, that they’re a little bit surprised by just how many people seem to not just be interested in the show, but really loved the show. They’re sort of getting to see again that the show does have a place in pop culture and TV history, which isn’t always the feeling they’ve gotten from fans.”

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Grand Central Publishing

It’s Kim’s hope that most people already know what Barry, Maureen, Eve Plumb, Christopher Knight, Susan Olsen and Mike Lookinland have done throughout the years, though she’s confident the book will provide a little more enlightenment on that front. “That backstory,” she says, “I think makes it extra fun to watch the renovation series and some other things that they’re going to be doing. For instance, the Christmas special of the renovation series, which I think is airing in December.

“The enthusiasm everyone has for them makes it extra special,” Kim notes, “because, again, they’re around 50 years later, they look good, they seem to be having fun and they seem to be embracing it and are appreciating the feelings people have for it. I think the Christmas special is really going to be fun, too. The idea is we’re going to celebrate Christmas inside the Brady house with them, although they filmed it recently — I saw some photos on Instagram people had snapped as they were passing by that had reindeer on the roof.”

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Paramount/Moviestore/Shutterstock

In the writing of her book, and over the course of conducting interviews for it, she was particularly delighted in the way the cast has embraced their Brady legacy, which wasn’t always an easy road to travel. “They’ve all had such varying thoughts and feelings about the show, its place in their lives and their characters across 50 years,” she observes. “All of them have had points where they’ve been bitter about it, where they thought it was going to lead a lot more work and it didn’t. Susan Olsen told me, and it’s a story she’s told before, about how, just a few years after the show, they would be called in for auditions and think, ‘Wow, this is cool. I’m going to get this good role and it’s going to allow me to break out of being Cindy.’ But then she would get there and find that these executives or casting people just wanted to tell their friends that they met Cindy Brady. They had no interest whatsoever in casting them whatsoever. At the same time, it’s pretty obvious that whatever negative feelings they’ve had, have gone away at this point and they’re embracing all of it.”

And you can embrace A Very Brady Renovation on HGTV and look forward to the Christmas special.

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