I've been watching Season 2 and 3 on DVD. I can't beleive I had forgotten so much from those seasons. Its great to see the seeds of later seasons being sown while the series was still young. On the only Christmas episode, you see Angel being attacked by The First--Buffy's big enemy on the last season---so that he kills Buffy because The First knows that Buffy will try to destoy it in the future. You can see how Willow got into witchcraft in the third season too.
The characters, the writing on this show was so brilliant.

I agree with this completely.

It's a shame a lot of people have passed Buffy up thinking it must be stupid because of it's name, or they think it's probably a teen series because they were in high school the first 3 seasons.

I wasn't too wild about seasons 1 or 7, but even those seasons have their share of great episodes.