What makes a good Christmas story?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, for obvious reasons — look at the calendar, after all. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, as any number of singers will tell you if you listen to the radio long enough, and that means that I’ve been watching more than my fair share of holiday movies and reading just as many (if not more) holiday comic books. I even made the mistake of watching Red One, the “Chris Evans is a dirtbag and Dwayne Johnson is a giant security elf and I guess they’re a buddy comedy team now?” movie from this year, and…. oh boy.
The problem with Red One is the problem with Spirited, a very similar holiday movie starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds from last year; both are comedies in which a real-world cynic comes to accept the magic of the holidays while paired with a secretly-disillusioned magical being who also comes to believe in the holidays all anew, and everyone lives happily ever after, and both make the mistake of thinking that the way to do this is by replacing magic with a mixture of special effects and “hilarious” real-world elements. Santa’s treated like the President with a special security detail, get it? The North Pole is an efficiently-run bureaucracy, understand? It’s so relatable.
Except, of course, it’s not. It’s restrictive and boring and makes everything feel more generic; there’s, if anything, a purposeful lack of magic, as whimsy and wonder get replaced by cynicism and formula.
My contrast, I’ve been re-reading Will Eisner’s The Christmas Spirit throughout the month, which collects the various holiday-themed installments of his 1940s newspaper strip The Spirit. Every single story in there feels like a model of what works for a good Christmas story, because every single one is based around a very simple idea: at some point, someone will be moved to make a kinder choice than they normally would, and everything changes for the better as a result. It’s a formula that doesn’t require gimmicks, winks at the audience while referencing Santa, magic, or snowmen, or anything other than the belief that the holidays are really about trying to be kind and good… and seeing what happens as a result.
There’s a lesson there for… well, basically everyone who’s thinking that Vin Diesel should play Santa’s half-brother through adoption who has to save the holidays in a big budget streaming special this time next year. But then, seeing what Eisner did and trying to learn from it has never really been a bad idea.