Here in Los Angeles, local mall the Beverly Center used to host a “Hunky Santa” photo op every year around the holidays. There would be a contest, viewable by the public, to select the year’s guy, and local fashion students would be employed to design the modern Santa suit. It was a way to put the fun and flirt back into Christmas, even if some of the family of the holidays was left on the sidelines. The Beverly Center no longer hosts a Hunky Santa, but that’s okay, because ABC Family has stepped in with their brand new original 25 Days of Christmas movie, Desperately Seeking Santa.
Desperately Seeking Santa sees a young marketing executive named Jennifer (the adorable and too-kind-to-truly-dislike-Christmas Laura Vandervoort) at a Boston Mall turning the holiday on its head by starting her own hot Santa competition. Determined to raise revenue, and turn her mall into the hotspot of the town, let alone the most talked about one in the line, so she will receive a promotion that brings her up to corporate, she puts guys through an initial interview process, as well as a “looks” and “choreography” competition. Because it isn’t enough that the guy sit on a throne and pose with little kids (or their moms); they also have to put on a nightly show where they dance with elves and a Mrs. Claus. It may not be the most revolutionary idea, but it certainly gets people talking in this part of town.
The movie doesn’t spend a lot of time on the competition, instead choosing to focus on a holiday film formula that seems quite common but still manages to tug at the heartstrings (What can we say? We’re saps for this season!). After Jennifer “meets cute” with med-student and pizza-slinger David (a subdued and slightly downtrodden Nick Zano) on the street, they meet again inside the mall when he auditions. Immediately David will strike you as the kind of guy who would never enter such a competition; he’s cute, sure, but he’s so quiet, almost meek, and so wrapped up in his family, you can more easily picture him sitting in front of a fire with a dusty old book and an even older dog at his feet. But according to the people in David’s life, he does “wild” things like this all the time. And David has an ulterior motive for wanting to win the prize of playing Santa for the year: he needs the money to help save his family restaurant.
Desperately Seeking Santa is fun to watch with a cup of hot cocoa and a stack of Christmas cookies. Just be careful not to eat too many or you will surely overdose from sweetness, as the movie itself coats it on pretty thick. Look, it’s the holidays, so even the obstacles in Desperately Seeking Santa-- either the seemingly steely heart that Jennifer uses as a defense mechanism to hide her true sadness around the holidays or the “twist” as to who’s really behind David’s family restaurant being bought out by a larger corporation-- have a glossy veneer that don’t allow you for one second to think the movie will end without a big bow on every problem, fixed just in the (St.) nick of time. That’s just how holiday movies work, and you know what? That’s okay; we're not going to nitpick it apart. It’s the time of year when we desperately want to believe in good and that everyone will get their happy ending.
In truth some of the best parts of Desperately Seeking Santa are right in the middle, when Jennifer and David have gotten to know each other in a professional setting enough that he knows just what to do to needle her. It’s not one of those films where the spirit of the holiday is going to sweep these two people into each others’ arms. Instead, David calculatedly spends a lot of effort to do the opposite of the orders Jennifer barks at him (spend less than a minute with each kid who want to read Santa their wishlist just so the parents can get out of the line and back into stores to spend their hard-earned money? Yeah, right, Mrs. Scrooge!). And when she doesn’t yell or threaten to fire him, you start to see him win her over and turn her back to the soft-hearted young woman she once was-- before her greedy desire to go corporate took over.
It’s kind of ironic that the message of Desperately Seeking Santa is so anti-corporations, considering they are what rule the season in our very real modern day life, but it is that very attitude that ingratiated the story to us.
Desperately Seeking Santa will premiere on ABC Family on Sunday, November 27th at 8pm.
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