What The Hell Is Going On With The Parents In Christmas Movies?
by Boobie
The defining Christmas movie of the millennial generation is Elf. That’s not to say it’s the best, but its whimsy, the pure wattage of Will Ferrell (as Buddy) at the height of his powers, and the fact that the actual myths of Christmas (Santa Claus, flying reindeer, elves, etc.) are important plot points that make it enjoyable for both kids and adults nudge it ahead of the vague Christmas season “magic” of Love, Actually and the cynicism of Bad Santa as far as broad appeal.
The central conflict of Elf lies in the fact that Buddy’s biological father, James Caan’s workaholic Walter, believes that Buddy, rather than having been raised as one of Santa’s worker elves, is simply an unhinged lunatic. Understandable. Buddy, then, must work to inspire his father’s believe in him, in Christmas spirit, and ultimately in family, a quest that becomes all the more crucial when Santa’s sleigh (which runs on Christmas spirit) falls from the sky in Central Park. It’s heartwarming stuff, which makes it easy to overlook how fundamentally flawed this premise is, and how flawed similar premises are for literally every Christmas movie involving Santa Claus and presents: where the hell do these parents think the presents are coming from?
We’re lead to believe Santa traditionally gives presents to everyone, not just the kids who are in households where everyone believes in him (we’ll ignore the whole “other religions that’s don’t celebrate Christmas” thing here, as do most movies). That means, at the very least, that Walter’s son Michael has been getting unexplained gifts for over a decade. Where does Walter think these gifts are coming from? Does he think his wife, Emily, is buying them for Michael behind his back? If so, that would explain why Walter doesn’t seem like her really cares about his family: he can’t trust his wife. That would also explain why, for example, Tim Allen’s Scott and his wife are divorced in The Santa Clause: having your partner spend recklessly and hide it from you would definitely cause a lot of tension, even more so when you think they’re lying to your face about it over and over again by saying that it was actually Santa Claus who brought the gifts.
Taking that idea further, if Walter, Scott, and any other nonbeliever in a universe where Santa exists and delivers presents have access to a joint bank account with their partner, they can easily see that the money for presents isn’t coming out of it. This means that, in all likelihood, every single spouse in one of these worlds must harbor a suspicion that their significant other is some sort of small-scale Walter White, selling drugs, or sex, or whatever else — maybe a secret Etsy shop, which would imply they have a passion for crafting they aren’t willing to share, which might be a worse red flag for a relationship than illicit drug dealing — to finance their Christmas present-giving.
This begs the question: how is anyone who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus married? The best this kind of world could possibly hope for is a series of short-term relationships that decay over a couple years as mistrust grows, not only between individuals but between men and women in general (Christmas movies don’t really tend to have a lot of gay/trans/non-binary characters), leading to constant tension and early grade school-style self-segregation. The worst but more likely scenario is all-out war between the sexes, leading to long-term single-sex platonic families that ALSO EVENTUALLY BREAK APART BECAUSE WAR HAS NEVER STOPPED SANTA BEFORE, eventually ending in a generation of Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic individualism before the human race dies out completely for want of children and families to take care of them.
This means that the stakes of movies like Elf and The Year Without A Santa Claus are even more dire than the films lead us to believe. While it seems like Elf’s Buddy and TYWASC’s Jingle, Jangle and Iggy are simply on a mission to restore Christmas cheer and add a little happiness to the world, they’re actually (whether they know it or not) working toward the salvation of the human race. Given that Santa exists, only through belief in him can humanity hold together at the seams and continue to live and work side by side as we do now, which basically makes Santa God and Christmas a religion.
In this scenario, despite his largesse (which costs him nothing but one night of work per year), is Santa Claus actually a force for good? Religion, on a wide scale, doesn’t seem to have been one for world history; why would this be any different? Should the world’s governments (who must surely be aware of Claus’s existence, just as they’re more aware of UFO sightings than they let on and know about magic in the Harry Potter series) come together to form an Expendables/Suicide Squad-style task force to take him out, for the good of the world? (Note: I’d go with some combination of Michael B. Jordan, Liam Neeson, Iko Uwais from The Raid, Keanu Reeves, Emily Blunt, Lupita Nyong’o, Riz Ahmend and Diego Luna for a movie about this).
Alternatively, could accept that Santa is real given the almost ridiculous amount of available evidence pointing to that fact, but where’s the fun in that?
