Holiday 2025 Collab: The Christmas Spirit
Above image Provided by Xaya Emeris
I spoke a little bit about it in my last Advent Calendar post, but the general vibe of Santa / Christmas is something I've always been really fond of. Just something about the general vibe of the winter / Christmas time, makes me really happy. Landscapes of snow, with mountains off in the distance. Bundled up inside around a fireplace. Absolutely immaculate. I wanted to spend this post sort of talking about some of the things I love about the season.
Santa
I think Santa is a really cool character from a design perspective. Having a character that is extremely powerful, but for a very limited time frame, is really interesting to me. In Santa's case, while of course he has a team of elves working year round, to me Santa's "powers" really kick in on Christmas Eve, delivering presents to everyone. Being able to, somehow, travel fast enough to deliver presents to all the kids, all over the world.
The design of extreme power, but in a super limited amount of time, reminds me a bit of the character Escanor, from Seven Deadly Sins. For those who don't know, his power is he gets stronger the closer it is to Noon, and then weaker the closer it gets to Midnight. This sort of dynamic just seems like a really cool way to balance a character to me. Giving the character the ability to be super strong, or super weak, depending on timing, and needing to work around that, adds inherent... well dynamics to a story. It's another dimension added to any interaction that character has, which I think can help with story telling.
Aside from just the idea of having power be very specificly tied to time, I think it's also really interesting to create an entity that judges you based on how you've acted over the past year (or, at least, that's my understanding of how Santa makes the Naughty and Nice list). I like this because it's different than other systems where if you do a bad thing that's just it and you're evil forever. No, Santa instead gives you the chance to be a better person, every year.
Santa in Media
One thing that's interesting to me too is seeing how Santa is portrayed in different pieces of media. A few months ago I watched the movie Klaus:
Klaus
In Klaus, the Santa like character (Klaus) I'd say is more spiritual than magical. He loves woodworking, but we see him have this sort of connection with nature or the snow around him. I couldn't find the specific scene I wanted, but you can see it there, sort of swirling behind the main character Jesper.
Elf
In Elf, the scene with Santa and the Central Park Rangers has always stuck with me for some reason. In that movie, Santa's magic is reliant on people believing in him, which includes the magic needed for him to fly. I see this sort of interpretation more often in Santa movies.
Rise of the Guardians
Okay so, I've not watched Rise of the Guradians recently enough to go into the Santa character in depth, but I remember when watching the movie really liking his design.
The Santa Clause
I still use this gif from The Santa Clause with Tim Allen very frequently whenever something makes me feel old. That movie was interesting of course too since it's about what happens if a random person became Santa.
The Christmas Chronicles
Speaking of something that makes me feel old, I was trying to remember what the name of this movie was (The Christmas Chronicles) thinking "I know it just came out not too long ago"... It was released in 2018... 7 years ago at this point...
Santa Girl
Alright, I just wanted to mention this one quick. Santa Girl is an okay movie, featuring Jennifer Stone from Wizards of Waverly Place, and Devon Werkheiser from Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. I want to say I heard about it from this Ned's Declassified Podcast Survival Guide episode. Image instead of gif because it's not a very well known movie, so couldn't grab something.
But what intrigued me was the fact that on the podcast Ned tells a story (if it's not that episode, it's one of them) about being on that shoot with Jennifer. He hadn't realized it was basically a student film beforehand, and in one of the scenes his character gets punched. Given the people he was working with were new, Devon kept telling the person "Listen, you have to be really careful, to not actually punch me", repeatedly, as he did not want to get actually hit. They film the scene, it goes great. Then, it's Devon's characters turn to punch back, and he accidentally actually punches the kid. He apologized immediately, and mentioned how bad he felt given he had given the other kid such a hard time about making sure to not actually punch him. Luckily, I believe everyone was fine.
Anyways, this movie focuses on Santa's Daughter (Jennifer Stone) wanting to live a normal life. Santa in this movie is more portrayed as a busy man running a business, not really able to be with his daughter too much if I remember correctly. Again, it's an okay movie all around. It's also way better than anything I could've made as a film project.
The Christmas Spirit
Aside from Santa, the general vibe put out for Christmas or the winter holiday season is a general sense of being good to each other - donating food to food pantries, helping your neighbors get through the cold winter months, etc.
A Christmas Carol is a famous example of someone being scared straight basically during the holiday season. And the thing is it's not only movies or songs that instill this spirit, but humans do genuinely seem to try and emulate it as well.
As annoying as it is that this video is from a Sainsbury advertisement, it's the one that comes to mind when I think of The Christmas Truce. The Christmas Truce was was a real historical thing from the First World War, where troops simply stopped fighting for a bit, and hung out with each other.
I find this sort of sentiment one of the things that makes Christmas time really great - the part where people are trying to help out each other. Of course, there are some downsides and hypocrisies. Some people will point out that, while it's great to donate to food pantries this time of year, people really need food during the rest of the year too, and it'd be better if some of the food drives were more spread out. Another one that comes up is people point out how we'll have Thanksgiving, a day to give thanks for all that you have, followed by Black Friday, where people literally trample each other to get "good" deals for Christmas presents.
The intro to the movie Krampus sums it up better than I think I've seen anywhere else. I still think about the opening to this movie whenever I hear that song come on.
Wrap Up
I feel like I've rambled on enough, but I basically just wanted to get across I love the vibes of Christmas and the season.
About this blog post
This post is for the Grizzly Gazette Advent Calendar. There's a different post everyday for the month of December, written by different folks who are apart of the Bear Blog Carnival discord.
Where to find me:
The best place to find me is on my website. You can see other posts I've made, some tech tutorials, and a bunch of other stuff!
Thanks for reading,
- Moose