Television: HOLIDAY CHEER

Lucy and Desi will light up the tree for young Ricky's Christmas, George and Grade will spend Christmas in jail, and the rest of TV's regulars will deck their corn with holly for the holidays. There will also be a spate of special programs, promising, in all, a two-week cascade of goodies and not-so-goodies. Some of the most promising promises:

ABC's Omnibus (Dec. 16, 9 p.m., E.S.T.) will stage a play by William Saroyan, The Christmas Tie, with Helen Hayes as a refined shoplifter.

Disneyland (Dec. 19, 7:30 p.m., ABC) takes Donald Duck into Latin America and TViewers to the traditional Mexican children's celebrations, the posadas.

Grade Fields, 58, returns for a live repeat of last year's popular success, James M. Barrie's The Old Lady Shows Her Medals, adapted by Robert Anderson for the U.S. Steel Hour (Dec. 19, 10 p.m., CBS).

Playhouse 90, U.S. TV's biggest drama mill (Dec. 20. 9:30 p.m., CBS), offers free-lancing Nanette Fabray and Lew Ayres in The Family Nobody Wanted, the true story of a preacher who adopted twelve orphans, each from a different country.

Lux Video Theater's Hollywood Holiday Musical Revue (Dec. 20, 10 p.m., NBC) will reclaim hit tunes from top movies over the past 25 years, with Shirley Jones, Gordon MacRae and Phil Harris, all in color.

Perry Como, in two holiday colorcasts (Dec. 22 and 29, 8 p.m., NBC), will engage, among others, Bishop Fulton Sheen, Rosemary Clooney, Teresa Brewer. Red Buttons, Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong.

Holiday on Ice (Dec. 22, 9 p.m., NBC) will glisten for 90 minutes, featuring 44-year-old Sonja Henie as the Sugarplum Fairy in the Nutcracker Suite, and Olympic Figure-Skating Champion Hayes Alan Jenkins.

The Stingiest Man in Town (Dec. 23, 9 p.m., NBC) will be Alcoa Hour's first 90-minute musicolorcast. Basil Rathbone as a syncopated Scrooge, plus Singers Vic Damone, Patrice Munsel, Martyn Green, Robert Weede and other un-Dickensian characters.

Robert Montgomery Presents (Dec. 24, 9:30 p.m., NBC) departs from its straight drama format to present the prize plum of the Christmas pudding—Gian Carlo Menotti's stirring Amahl and the Night Visitors (in color). The tele-opera gets for its seventh TV performance a new Amahl, ten-year-old Kirk Jordan.

Studio One offers Paul Crabtree's A Christmas Surprise (Dec. 24, 10 p.m., CBS), with Robert Q. Lewis and Orson Bean in a comedy about a TV show's disruptive visit to a family on Christmas Eve.

Church services will come on screen via ABC, which schedules a Christmas Eve service (n p.m.) from Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Midnight Mass at Washington, D.C.'s Church of the Sacred Heart, and NBC, which plans to telecast Midnight Mass from Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral and a Christmas Day (n a.m.) service inside the Washington (D.C.) Cathedral.

The Bob Hope Chevy Show (Dec. 28, 9 p.m., NBC), on film, will show Hope, Ginger Rogers, Mickey Mantle, Peggy King, Jerry Colonna and the Purdue Glee Club entertaining U.S. troops in Alaska.

At Year's End (Dec. 30, 3 p.m.) will be CBS's sign-off to 1956. In a three-hour stretch, commentators will sum up the science, social and political stories of the year.