Father(s) Christmas
Bonus: Help me figure out why so many Christmas films are about Dads.
Right, I know lots of you think Christmas is over, but let me tell you: we’re still in it. Depending on your liturgical predilections you can pocket between a few more days or a whole other month, and given what we know about January and February, let’s string it out a bit, shall we?1
Also, I was not supposed to be writing but I need your help. Like many of of us, I’ve been watching a lot of Christmas films. I have small kids, so mainly family ones, but aren’t all Christmas films family films, in the sense of suitable for all ages? (Except Die Hard).
Because I am fascinated by stories and narrative logic (and also have seen them all before so needed something to occupy my mind), we got thinking about the themes.
There is lots of interesting stuff in there about what we goodness is (nice vs naughty?) but I became obsessed with something I had never noticed. Almost every modern Christmas film (or at least the ones I know) is about fathers. Absent fathers, distracted fathers, dead fathers. Mums feature, sometimes, but not with any narrative purpose. They are scenery, providing occasional cookies and coziness. Home Alone is the only exception I can think of. (Honestly, I was a bit appalled by how few Christmas films feature a female protagonist. I don’t include the Netflix/Hallmark subgenre of Christmas specials, which are just romances plus holly. Feel free to disagree). Dads though, and mainly Dads with a redemption arc, are the source of the psychodrama.
Canonical modern Christmas films
Elf: Absent/bad Dad
Arthur Christmas: Distracted Dad (and dysfunctional Grandad)
Hook: Distracted Dad (if you don’t think Hook is a Christmas film it is because you have forgotton the beginning and the end).
Die Hard: Absent Dad (who carries a picture of his kids with the message “we miss you Daddy”).
The Santa Clause: Divorced and misunderstood Dad
The Grinch: Dead Dad (and mum, to be fair. This one is a stretch)
Recent additions:
The Christmas Chronicles: Dead Dad
Red One: Bad Dad
That Christmas: Absent Dad
Once you start looking, it’s everywhere. Older Christmas films like White Christmas or It’s a Wonderful Life don’t seem to share the obsession with Dads. It’s come from somewhere. What is driving me bonkers is: why?
I have three possible theories. I’d love you to tell me what you think, or suggest alternatives.
A) Just statistics
As any good psychotherapist can tell you, our relationship with our parents is our most formative one, and finds its way into many of the stories we enact. The dominance of father stories (and especially father/son stories) is just an outcome of an over-representation of male directors and writers in Hollywood. When (if?) female storytellers are in positions of influence more mother stories will start to show up.
B) Outworking of father wounds
This is not to beat up on Dads, but my guess is more people carry father wounds than mother wounds. In previous generations, the scripts for fathering were mainly focused on provision and discipline, so it’s no surprise that cross and workaholic Dads show up a lot. There have been wonderful Dads in every generation, and I see many of the Dads in mine parenting beautifully, but still, the catharsis and wish fulfilment of a Bad-Dad-comes-good story (or a Dead-Dad-is-Proud story) has an enduring psychological appeal.
C) Something deeper
Larkin was right when we said our parents mess us up, but it should be both. Neither more male directors nor more deadbeat dads can quite account for this phenomenon, so are the Dads standing in for something else? Given that mainstream secular Christmas films attempt to inject something mythological, moral and symbolic into what is otherwise just an orgy of consumerism maybe we should look there. Perhaps the longing for a good, strong present father is just a proxy for our metaphysical yearnings. These films are in fact, under all the tinsel, playing out a religious impulse.
Of course, the other Father in many of these films is also a strange proposition. Santa Claus is the better candidate for an embodiment of human longing for the divine - wise, just, powerful, omniscient (in a creepy way), omnipresent (sort of, for one night only), reliable. Not big on grace ( though does he actually ever bring coal?) but still. The annual, big budget enacting of the strange bastard child of Coca-Cola marketing and the St Nicholas story must be doing something other than selling toys.
Or maybe not.
It’s a puzzle. What do you think? Please put your answer in the comments, or propose further research.
Not sure it's entirely relevant since it isn't a film, but talking about Father Christmas ... are you familiar with La Befana, from Italy, who's a deeply embedded folkloric Mother Christmas figure, and associated especially with Epiphany? If you don't know her, this is an extract from my newsletter last January. If you do, apologies for intruding :-)
"La Befana is an old woman who delivers gifts to children on Epiphany Eve, just as Father Christmas does on Christmas Eve in other parts of Europe. She’s usually depicted as a hag riding a broomstick; like Father Christmas, our glorious Grandmother Epiphany is covered in soot, because she slips down the chimney of a house to enter it and leave her presents. Some folklore describes her sweeping the floors with her broom before she leaves the house, and in so doing she sweeps away the troubles of the past year. In other traditions, it’s said that she sweeps away the troubles of the past year for the entire country, as she flies through the air on her broomstick.
"The Christian story of her origins which links her with Epiphany tells us that La Befana was sweeping her floor when she noticed a bright star in the night sky. Soon afterwards the Three Kings paid her a visit; they were lost and asked her for directions. They told her that they were following the star to bring gifts honouring a baby who would be found in Bethlehem. La Befana didn’t go with them on their journey, because she felt that she couldn’t leave her work unfinished (and don’t we all know that feeling ...). But after they’d left, she was sorry and changed her mind. She ran after them with her broom and a basket of gifts for the holy baby, but she couldn’t catch up with them. It’s said that La Befana is still looking for that baby today.
"Apparently La Befana is celebrated in several festivals throughout Italy at Epiphany, and I just love the prominence of an old woman at such an important time."
I have had these exact same thoughts this year and I’m going with C. It’s come home to me this year in the very different (and ever more elaborate) ways I’ve seen parents enact the whole Santa thing for their kids, and how absolutely devastated kids are these days when they get the news that he doesn’t actually exist. Santa has become huge, and the magic ever more protected…leading to a real end of innocence experience for kids when he, and the possibility of magic, just disappears. Perhaps because it’s the only time our society - pretty much universally and in unison - gets metaphysical nowadays. Once a year, we collectively believe in a benevolent, individually interested Other, and his accompanying mystical ways.
The way my parents ’did’ Santa for me and my siblings, and the way I do it for our kids (my MiL couldn’t bear to lie to her kids so my husband grew up without Santa) was both much more, and much less limited. We knew the presents under the tree came from our loving family, but Santa left surprises in our stockings. We knew he was kind and forgiving and would never leave us coal, no matter how ‘naughty’ we’d been. We left him letters and provisions and - most exciting of all - he would write back.
His letter would be full of funny Scandinavianish spellings and grammar, and a warm, loving tone. He knew what we’d been up to during the year and he congratulated, encouraged and commiserated with us. He always spoke about what was going on in the world, and particularly of those who were suffering - he gave us details from his night’s journey across the skies. And he would always remind us that the baby Jesus was real and loved us. He would describe listening in awe to the joyful singing of the angels among the stars, who are still amazed at the wonder of that night.
I have realised that Father Christmas was to me, and I hope can be for my kids, a small picture of a loving, interested, gracious, mysterious, exciting, giving God.