'Santa Claus: the Movie' is THE Best Christmas Movie

Just don't bother watching it with kids these days.

This is the festive hill on which I will die. Santa Claus: The Movie, the 1985 film starring John Lithgow as the bad guy, Dudley Moore as the (slightly creepy / weird?) elf and David Huddleston as the world’s most convincing Santa Claus (see above) is unparalleled in its Christmas greatness.

It is the GOAT of Christmas movies. It is the shining example of festive film success and it will never be beaten.

Before streaming; before Blu-ray; before DVDs; before uTorrent (no, I wouldn’t steal a car – but I would, apparently, steal a movie); before Sky Movies; before, even, VHS, there was Betamax. And the Mac Cabe family, a family whose patriarch worked for IBM and therefore refused to allow any rival brands into the house – no Nintendo for us, nor SEGA – was, among other things, a Betamax family.

As a Betamax family, we were dedicated to using the Betamax for its intended purpose: to record TV shows and movies off the television and rewatch them, over and over, on demand, a novel concept at the time.

Of course we had two channels back then – RTÉ One and Network 2, as it was called – and so had very few opportunities to capture any semi-decent films.

Not to mention the fact that most of the films we did own also included each and every ad break, unless the person recording had the wherewithal to stop and start the recording as the ads began, in which case we’d have the beginning and end of each ad break. Quite often, we’d have the beginning of the ad break and suddenly be plonked back into the action of the movie when the responsible party returned from making the cup of tea that took longer than they thought it would.

We had Die Hard on Betamax, although I wasn’t allowed to watch it – “too violent” – and, somehow, the BBC’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (thus beginning my childhood obsession with Turkish delight), which I suspect a relative had recorded for us, as we most certainly did not have the BBC – and, of course, Santa Claus: the Movie.

I must have watched it 100 times a year for about five years, between the ages of four and nine – and probably beyond. I memorised the script. I knew exactly what was coming next, and still I watched with rapt attention, each and every time (a time when I was unable to watch TV while playing Tetris on my phone; just yesterday, I watched Encanto without my phone, possibly for the first time, and was shocked by the sheer number of scenes that were entirely new to me).

The plot of Santa Claus: the Movie isn’t really the point. The general gist, though, is that capitalism and modern technology are wrong, and that we should all be carving our toys out of wood and painting them with the narrow ends of our beards (yes, really).

There’s a touch of class warfare and a little child abuse (yes, really) and a blatant ad for Coca-Cola that left me with the distinct impression that a cold can of Coke, set out in the snow, was the ultimate American indulgence. (We bought our Coke in two-litre bottles, like a sensible, frugal Irish family, and drank it only on special occasions, ignoring the fact that, after that first glorious gulp, it would be as flat as a pancake and taste a little drinking watered-down molasses.)

There are animatronic reindeer which, until last year, I thought were real reindeer, trained to wrinkle up their little reindeer noses and flap their little reindeer ears over their eyes in a show of terror (yes, really – last year; readers, I was 36). There is a bed in the shape of a wooden race car, with a kind of wooden shutter that rolls up under Dudley Moore’s chin and which I thought (possibly also until last year) looked incredibly comfy.

Santa and Mrs Claus (she doesn’t get a name; as all good women should be, she is defined solely by her existence in relation to her more important husband) sleep in a bedroom that’s kind of tucked up into the wall; they open a little door and there’s their little wooden box, like a bed you might concoct for a doll, or a much-beloved teddy-bear.

Oh, how I dreamed of a bedroom like that.

When, years later, I would go on a glamping trip in Northern Ireland, I would find myself over the moon to discover our little cabin had a similar bed in its wall. It didn’t matter that it was incredibly hot and felt a little claustrophobic – finally, all of my childhood dreams had come true.

Last year, I paid good money – probably about $5 – to rent Santa Claus: the Movie on Amazon Prime. I watched it with my stepsons and their baby brother, who was sleeping, and I thought to myself, this is the start of a Christmas tradition I could never have dreamed would come to pass. I may have wept a tiny, nostalgic tear at the full-circleness of it all (I was still entirely batshit from the birth and the sleeplessness and the sheer overwhelm of it all, let me tell you for nothing).

I waited for the magic to creep into the eyes and ears and heads of my little charges, watching out of the corner of my eye as my favourite moments happened: the can of Coke, pressed firmly into the snow; the reindeer, scoffing glittery chow from Dudley Moore’s outstretched palm; Santa doing a loop-the-loop to save Dudley Moore from his glittery exploding flying car (yes, really).

But… nothing happened. They were nonplussed. I would even go so far as to say they were disinterested, these same children who will watch the one episode of Bluey on repeat for days, unable to see or hear anything beyond the TV screen.

At one stage, Finn, who was seven at the time, began to build Legos instead. William (9) knelt down in front of the coffee table and began to draw Five Nights at Freddy’s characters with, I later realised as I tried to scrub it off the veneer, Sharpie.

As the reindeer snuffed at their food, Finn said, “those reindeer are fake”, and I looked up from the baby, whose face I was staring at while trying not to cry (I did a lot of that during those first few months), and realised he was right. The reindeer were fake all along!

I don’t think we turned it off – I’m too stubborn for that – but I promised myself, then and there, that we would never again watch it as a family. In fact, I vowed never to try to bring them into the world of anything else I loved, lest they ruin it for me as they ruined those reindeer. No Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe fun for them; no Buffy for these children; no Dawson’s Creek; I won’t ever encourage them to read Judy Blume or Robert Cormier or even Philip Pullman.

Some things I want to keep. And while it’s too late for me to hold on to those (granted, very unrealistic and wooden) reindeer, it’s not too late for me to keep my crush on Mr Tumnus to myself.