The REAL Santa

The name's The. Noah, The.

Hi! This is my blog, Noahbody Cares, where I write things nobody cares about and then nobody reads it.

While you're here nobody, you're just who I wanted to talk to, because despite Netflix relentlessly pushing their original Christmas content, nobody watched The Christmas Chronicles... Almost nobody... anyway Dad said he heard good reviews for it, so I watched the whole thing and it is BIZARRE. It's targeted more at kids and families with young kids, which Dad would have seen if he'd read any reviews for it! Regardless, I want to talk about some of the things I found really interesting about the movie.

The movie is set in 2018. (Yes, I'm doing a movie review for a Netflix Original now. It's my blog; I can write about whatever I want. Yes, that was an appropriate placement of a semicolon. Now stop interrupting me)

Also, minor spoilers ahead but it's a freaking Netflix original Christmas movie I'm not going to ruin anything.

remember to put page break here:

All I Want for Christmas
is an underrated classic

The movie is set in 2018. I know because it's brought up 3 times in the first 5 minutes. We follow the Gen Z versions of the siblings from All I Want for Christmas as the attempt to capture Santa on video. They stumble into the plot of the second half of Elf (Santa crashed his sleigh, now they must save Christmas by singing yatayata) with a little help from portals, tech/magic devices borrowed from The Santa Clause Trilogy, and the elves made from 2016's Trolls crossbreeding with these eyesores:

Don't care to look up what this movie was called.

This movie did more borrowing from other currently popular Christmas movies, than I've ever seen in a Christmas movie. That might sound like a complaint, but it's really not. It was just shocking to me because this movie was borrowing from MY holiday classics to hopefully become a classic for a new "generation" (I know that word doesn't mean anything and I'm way too young to call current 9-year-olds a different generation). Remember that movies like Elf didn't invent a new creative Santa either. They basically plagiarized their North Pole from Rudolph the Red Nosed 
Reindeer and their sleigh is a toned down version of the one from The Santa Clause. 

From left to right: Father Christmas/Santa,
St. Nick/Santa,
 Santa in another language probably,
regular Santa for reference.
Fun little history lesson for you.

Not to mention how everyone in America is borrowing their Santa's from a Coca Cola ad campaign that started before I was born. Santa is a public domain legend that's been part of our collective mithos for so long he's got like 50 names (none of which are Scott Calvin) and a thousand variations.

What's weird about The Christmas Chronicles isn't THAT it borrowed its  from many popular stories, it's WHAT it borrowed. There isn't a scene where Santa sits down and explains that his sleigh is rocket powered and can teleport between continents to save time. They just mention the engine in passing in a few lines. The references to the literal list of the naughty and the nice and the meter that measures Christmas cheer are as casual as the statement that Santa put a tracking device on his reindeer. This isn't exposition, it's stated like when a character in a Marvel movie suggests calling the Avengers: with the expectation that we are all familiar with the basic concepts even though they aren't set up in this movie. 

These things... For reference

You see, when I was little, my perception of what Santa, his sleigh, the North Pole looked like was shaped primarily by the mold of The Santa Clause. That movie contained, for me, the most accurate description of the real Santa I had. The real Santa's Sleigh was rocket powered because how else could it go so fast. The real Santa could slide down fake fireplaces like mine because he turned to jelly and the fireplace just magically appeared. The real Elves looked like children and talked like experienced Black-Ops into the mic hidden in the real Santa's hat... because of course the Effective Liberating Flight Squad did!

What interests me is that the lore of who Santa is is starting to evolving for a new group of kids (still sounds weird. I'm just gonna go back to using "generation") who are growing up with technology and magic kind of intertwined with the lore of Mr. Claus. From his bag that's bigger on the inside to his glowing reindeer tracker, every item on this generation's Santa is both a magical device, and a piece of technology. He directly challenges his traditional jolly Coca Cola image (he literally plows through a Coke Santa billboard and refuses to say Ho-Ho-Ho throughout the film). 


Idk. I think it's interesting to think about the kids in the next few years who when you say Santa, they'll picture a thin, snarky, grey-haired Kurt Russel with a dozen gadgets, tiny animated elves, and a hi-octane sleigh.

Um. Merry Christmas!
~ The Noah