Samantha's second trip to the North Pole to visit Santa Claus. In the first trip she took a non-believing orphan played by Bill Mumy.
Character actor Charles Lane (who plays Jesse Mortimer in this episode) was stereotyped playing crotchety, Scrooge-like skinflints. Just three years before this 1967 Christmas episode of "Bewitched" aired, Mr. Lane appeared in a Christmas episode of the sitcom "Petticoat Junction" titled "Cannonball Christmas", in which his Scrooge-like character (Homer Bedloe) tries to ruin Christmas for the residents of Hooterville (before winding up in a Santa Claus suit for the inevitable happy ending). Mr. Lane appeared in eight episodes of "Bewitched", but always as a different curmudgeonly character. Despite being significantly older than most of the regular cast members of "Bewitched", he outlived every one of them (with the exception of the child actress who played Tabatha), living to the ripe old age of 102.
The episode was filmed on October 5, 1967 and aired four days before Christmas.
The title references "Humbug" the term that Ebenezer Scrooge keeps muttering in Charles Dickens' classic "A Christmas Carol" every time time someone mentions some aspect of Christmas. The term is interchangeable with "poppycock" or "balderdash" of the period.
The $500,000 advertising contract is worth more than $4.4 million in 2022.