Why Jingle All The Way Is My Favorite Christmas Movie

A very happy holiday to all of you at home! This constitutes a little bit of a holiday gift for you all. Usually on this blog, we run radio silent from Halloween to New Year because I do November words and by the end of that I'm wiped out. This year's Non-Specific November Writing Month was actually not that taxing, and the words flowed like wine, so I'm not completely burnt out. That and I've had a few weeks of rest. 2026 is going to be bumpin' with content, hopefully. There were two big things I wanted to write about and then just didn't get to. Maybe if there's time I will revisit them and do it again, they're very heady pieces. For now, here's a gift to you. Something I've threatened for a long time and am now finally doing at long last. It's time to talk about my favorite Christmas movie. Surely you have one as well that you hold near and dear to your heart. A beloved nostalgia classic like It's A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story? A comedy classic like National Lampoon? One of those buckwild ones that merge the holiday with horror and action, like Die Hard or Gremlins? Here, then, is mine.

Jingle All The Way is my favorite Christmas movie, and I'm about to justify that.

On the face of it, 1997's Jingle All The Way is completely absurd. It is an all-ages family Christmas comedy in which 80's action star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bumbles about a series of hijinks in order to get his son a cool new action figure for Christmas. It is corny, it is ridiculous, and the entire film operates on live-action cartoon logic in some nonsensical version of reality where bombs leave you covered in cartoon soot and functional jetpack technology is used to entertain children at a goddamned Minnesotan holiday parade. It is all of these flawed things and more. Nevertheless, I love this movie. I love it not in spite of what it is, or even because of what it is. I love it because of what readings get opened up by this movie being absolutely stupid as all fuck. I understand that I am going full Death Of The Author here, but it's Christmas. The curtains may have been fucking blue here, but let me cook. What is the purpose of the madness on display here, beyond providing seasonal slapstick that the whole family can enjoy yearly? What is this movie actually about, under the hood?

It is about the hyperexcess of Christmas capitalist consumerism, and with the right lens it utterly skewers this by drowning the proceedings in the aesthetic of a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, dragging it right down into the briny depths of anticapitalist critique. Jingle All The Way is stupid as fuck, but by portraying the commercialization of Christmas it makes that look stupid as fuck as well. There's a lot going on here, and this is not meant to be a play by play of every scene in the film. Rather, I want to highlight some interesting things it does in key scenes and character arcs, just get in there and really analyze it. A basic primer of the inciting incident is in order, though, just in case you have not been blessed enough to have this fucking thing in your holiday cinema rotation. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Howard Langston, a workaholic husband and father who frequently misses key events in his family's life due to overworking. This is apparent from the opening which shows him working through the office Christmas party, a barrage of calls where he always claims that the person on the phone is his #1 customer, before reflexively saying the same to his wife when she calls to remind him of their son's karate class, which Arnold will miss. He misses this due to trying to drive through a traffic jam and getting pulled over by a cop, who forcibly detains him when Arnold mentions he's in a hurry. This cop, played by Robert Conrad, is a recurring nemesis for Arnold throughout the film. Every other time Arnold is in the wrong, but here it's interesting; yes, Arnold is in the wrong for speeding, but the cop is blatantly abusing his authority by being offended that Arnold would sass him and thus forcing him to do tests for drunk driving. Structures of authority abusing their power to screw over the little guy? We won't be seeing that in the film again, will we?

Arnold (and I have never in my life called this character "Howard Langston", he is just Arnold to me) comes home to try and make it up to his boy. If I may tangent, his child is played by... Jake Lloyd. You know, who was in that other thing two years later. You know, the kid whose life was fucking ruined because a legion of ghoulish motherfuckers made him out to be the Antichrist for hammy acting when he was fucking nine. Sure, there were a lot more factors at play that we can't get into, but that can't have fucking helped. Cesspool fandom. The crux of the film is thus, however: Arnold wants to make it up to his son, and so the boy excitedly asks for the hottest new toy of the holiday season: Turbo Man. The film actually opens with the Turbo Man TV show, which looks like a cross between Power Rangers and a 90's Marvel production. Arnold vows to get the toy, but it is now Christmas fucking Eve and the thing is sold out everywhere. Hijinks ensue, and a character arc is begun. Over the course of 90 minutes Arnold is going to learn how bullshit the capitalist chase is, and how to better be a family man. Put a pin in the family man stuff when we get to talk about the late Phil Hartman's role in this picture, but we should probably get into some of that lampooning of commercialism at Christmas.

This comes with Arnold waiting outside a toy store with other last-minute parent shoppers, the store clerk behind the glass abusing his authority and not opening until it's 9 on the dot, taunting Arnold and the parents and dangling his pocket watch and keys in front of them. It is here we also meet Arnold's costar for the film: a mailman named Myron Larabee played by the comedian Sinbad. (Like Arnold, I only ever refer to this guy as Sinbad. He is just Sinbad.) Sinbad is such an interesting character in this film. Like Arnold, he is also searching for a Turbo Man toy last minute for his son. He seems friendly enough, and yet there is an edge festering underneath him. Within two minutes of meeting Arnold he is ranting about how the rich and powerful toy cartels use subliminal messaging to brainwash children and make fathers like them suffer trying to get some hunk of plastic. It's played off as a joke from a raving lunatic, but everything Sinbad is saying here is based and correct. When the store opens, everything goes fucking haywire. Store clerks are trampled, people are shoved into shelves as toys fall over everywhere, and it is absolute pandemonium. In the midst of this (and getting laughed at by the entire store for not knowing that Turbo Man is the hottest Christmas toy of all), Sinbad and Arnold slip into competition with each other, knocking each other to the ground in order to get to a layaway Turbo Man first. This will be a running trend over the movie: these two alternate between being civil to each other, and at each other's throats when an opportunity to get Turbo Man arises.

It's worth noting how art reflects life here. The supposed inspiration for the mania that grips not just these two, but every adult willing to beat the shit out of someone for a plastic jetpack man, is the Cabbage Patch Kid craze of the 1980s. (Who should appear as one of the mascot characters in the final act's holiday parade but... a Cabbage Patch Kid?) In a bit of shocking synchronistic prescience, however, this movie came out in 1996. The same year saw the release of Tickle Me Elmo, a little Elmo plush that giggled when you tickled it. Parents went absolutely fucking berserk trying to get this little red shit. Scalpers made bank, stores were scoured, rampages and riots ran rampant, and people actually died over this shit. This sort of manic madness over things never went away, either: nowadays we have Black Friday, where adults try to kill each other over cheap plasma TVs. This is a very real thing that grips us as a capitalist society, and here's fucking Jingle All The Way turning it into cheap slapstick. Clerks with boot marks on their faces, Arnold getting slapped with Sinbad's mail bag, Arnold retaliating by making Sinbad slip and fall on a remote control car. It's silly! It's stupid! SO IS BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF EACH OTHER FOR GREAT VALUE CAPTAIN AMERICA HERE! This is what I see whenever I watch the shenanigans between Arnold, Sinbad, and any number of other folks in the film. It's dumb as fuck, but so is the entire system which predicates these people hurting each other for our entertainment.

There's a duet of scenes near the middle of the movie which crystallize this reading near perfectly. The first is set in, of all places, the Mall Of America. The largest mall in the USA. There is no more perfect place to set such an accidental satire of capitalism then in its very heart. So much shit happens in this scene. A toy store has a small shipment of Turbo Mans, and plans to use a lottery system based around colorful bouncy balls to decide who gets a toy. The manager, speaking into a goddamn Speak And Spell as a PA, smugly announces that due to supply and demand, the price for the dolls just doubled. ABUSE OF AUTHORITY AGAIN, HAHA FUCK YOU, GIMME MORE MONEY! And, of course, rather than turn on the system itself and beat the shit out of this guy, the customers all turn on themselves when the balls are let loose. People slammed into the grounds, hands being bitten, folks throttling the life out of each other for a goddamn chance to get the Turbo Man. Arnold and Sinbad are not immune, Sinbad fucking macing Arnold and stealing the ball he managed to grab. That's when Arnold succumbs to these same forces, weaponizing the pandemonium against Sinbad in a genius way.

He yells that Sinbad got two of the balls. It's fucking crab bucket mentality as revenge, and it works in getting everyone to want to GET THAT FUCKING MAILMAN HE'S GOT MORE THAN HIS FAIR SHARE! The real enemy, the capitalist excess of this toy store owner, is never challenged. We don't even see who got the toy as Arnold then chases down the runaway ball in the movie's worst sequence. Sure, the owner gets tackled in all the madness and it's funny because man fall down, but presumably there's no comeuppance to this. Someone paid out the ass for the things, they made money hand over fist exploiting these poor shoppers who just want to make their kids happy for Christmas, and there are going to be a hell of a lot of hospital bills for the people who got the shit kicked out of them in a fracas for a fucking rubber ball. Arnold is unsuccessful in getting the ball, in a scene I don't want to talk about, but then the movie goes for broke. We've already showed how corrupt capitalism can be, so why don't we have it corrupt the secular icon of the holiday itself? That's right, kids, the putrefaction has come for none other than motherfucking Santa. (Copyright Kat.) 

Shenaningans lead Arnold to a fucking Santa-themed counterfeit toy ring led by Jim Belushi as a shitty mall Santa. As always, it is simultaneously absolutely ridiculous and fucking genius. The level of themed coordination for this scheme would never happen in reality and is like something out of Adam West Batman. I mean that as a compliment, as it's a perfect lampooning of what Christmas has become under capitalism's thumb. Santa, the altruistic joyous man in red who just gives gifts to all the children of the world every year, now shaking Arnold down by 300 bucks for a shitty disassembled Turbo Man that speaks Spanish. I'm not even reading that hard into it this time! This is text! Jim Belushi goes on and on about the noble service they provide for the innocent children of the world who deserve joy and toys at this time of the year, and then turns on a dime with the whole "Well why can't we make a profit off of it too?". As always, this results in incredible violence between Arnold and a bunch of fucking themed mall Santas. 

It is worth noting the nature of Arnold's competence at incredible violence in this movie. In the 1980s, an Arnold Schwarzenegger-portrayed character was an unstoppable bastion of incredible violence: think the Terminator, John Matrix, or Dutch McDick or whatever he was called in Predator. In the 90's, putting this man in comedies like Kindergarten Cop, Twins, Junior, or this? The very nature of the casting of Arnold is itself a joke, and Arnold gets to use that physicality in interesting ways in the movie. Every time, it does not go the way you would expect it to compared to 80s Arnold characters. So here, when a giant wrestler Santa played by The Big Show promises to deck Arnold's halls, you know he is not going to be the best at incredible violence. Every aspect of this is heightened reality slapstick, right down to the casting. In any normal world, Arnold could beat the living shit out of Sinbad. In this movie's cartoon logic, they are both equally effective foils at making the other fall down.

Speaking of Sinbad, some brief thoughts on the most genuine moment of sincerity to be had from his character in the film. We're firmly in the second act low point of the three act structure, and Arnold has tried to reach home but has yelled at his son who has answered the phone because he keeps going on and on about Turbo Man instead of getting his mom. You know, like an excited little kid would. As Arnold sadly muses to Sinbad while they drink spiked coffee in a diner, not getting the toy doesn't make him a bad dad but yelling at him over nothing does. Sinbad then shares a story of his childhood, where his dad let him down and didn't get him some 1970s toy gun for Christmas. His neighbor did, and that led him to become a billionaire. It's here the movie gets dangerously close to swallowing its own poison, as the thought that Arnold will ruin his son's life if he doesn't get a jetpack action figure makes him panic. As is the notion that Sinbad is a loser and his neighbor a billionaire because of toy guns and how good a father each had, rather than all the other circumstance. You don't just become a billionaire solely by your bootstraps, Sinbad. He is wrong here, of course... but maybe we can salvage this. This scene, and some ensuing hijinks at a radio station that we don't need to cover, are the last we see of Sinbad until the climax. By the climax, Sinbad is fully in antagonist mode. It is here that Arnold and Sinbad diverge, but what drives Arnold towards the path of being not such a shitty dad? What drives him back to being present in his family?

Now we get to talk about the other antagonist of the movie, Ted. Ted is Arnold's neighbor, played by the late Phil Hartman in what may well be his last truly great role. Ted is a divorcee single parent lavishing material wealth towards his son, not only getting him Turbo Man but also a pet reindeer for the holidays. (The reindeer hates Arnold and, predictably, leads to more shenanigans later.) Ted is also a major womanizer and every housewife around absolutely wants to fuck him. This is an all-ages Christmas movie where people fall down trying to get a toy, so they don't say that, but you can feel it. (The film never goes into the circumstances of Ted's divorce, but given his ulterior motives of fucking all the women in this movie, I can hazard some guesses as to whose fault it was.) Now, with Arnold being such an absent father, it's Ted who is slowly slipping his shoes into that role. Consider one of the funniest scenes of the whole movie, where Arnold calls home only to find Ted on the other end, and Phil Hartman absolutely mugging while eating freshly baked cookies. If you have not had the pleasure of witnessing this scene, I can only describe it as Phil Hartman practically orgasming on screen over how good they are while Arnold yells at him to PUT THAT COOKIE DOWN NOW. The allusions almost write themselves. Arnold is absent, and in that absence this fuckboy of a man is in his house, eating his goddamn fucking cookies. 

So Ted sucks, but also Arnold absolutely sucks too, because the true second act low point is Arnold attempting to steal Ted's son's Turbo Man from their house, getting caught due to shenanigans involving the reindeer and fire, and now his wife is pissed at him. Ted gets a killer line in the form of "You can't benchpress your way out of this one" and then takes Arnold's wife to the parade, where the first chance he gets alone with her he comes on to her. It doesn't work because, from the first scenes of the movie, Rita Wilson just has this look of being polite but extremely over Ted's bullshit. So she beans him over the head with a Thermos of eggnog, as you do when you're fucking married and your neighbor starts coming on to you because he took you asking for a recipe one time as an invitation to fuck. Back to Arnold, though. This is the diverging point between him and Sinbad: not wanting to steal from a child for Christmas. Arnold almost gets away with it but then has a moment of conscience, and this is what sets off the aforementioned reindeer shenanigans. In his wallowing, he decides to step up and finally be a good dad, and this is what gets us to the climax.

Holy fuck, the climax to this movie. The Minneapolis Holiday Wintertainment Parade is like the second coming of fucking Christ. Jingle Bells blasts at you from a full marching band, every costumed character the movie could afford is roaming around, and the parade is going to end with an elaborate live-action tokusatsu float devoted to Turbo Man. I thought most Christmas parades usually ended with Santa, but the capitalist excess has taken full sway here. Santa's nothing but a sleazy con man, remember, and it's Turbo Man who's the true hero. The capitalist product, that which Sinbad correctly read as focus-tested bullshit from the toy cartels to make shitloads of money from every parent whose child gets suckered into watching this shit. That swirling vortex of pure capitalism has had Arnold and Sinbad in its sway the entire movie, as they've repeatedly slapped each other around over Turbo Man. Now they finally fall into the dark maw of the capitalist machine and become the product. Through further shenanigans, Arnold is assumed to be the parade float actor for Turbo Man and suited up. Before he can give the ceremonial limited edition parade float edition of the Turbo Man action figure (which he holds with absolute triumph after all the shit he's been through), Sinbad shows up as Turbo Man's archnemesis Dementor. Forget action figures. These deadbeat desperate dads have become the toys. Their parade float fight is even a direct mirror of the actual Turbo Man show footage which opens the movie. Arnold has won the war against himself. He now loves Turbo Man.

Okay, that's not quite what's happening, given how the movie ends, but I couldn't resist. No, let's get back to the diverging point between Arnold and Sinbad. What happens to make Arnold more heroic and Sinbad more of an antagonist here? Simply put, it's the willingness to steal from children. Arnold refused to, in the end, but Sinbad has dressed himself up as a tokusatsu villain specifically to steal Jake Lloyd's Turbo Man doll from him, going so far as to chase him up a tall building and onto a Christmas light display which leaves them dangling for dear life above the street. He has officially gone too far with this shit, and remember also that Arnold accidentally lucked into the parade float thing, whereas Sinbad actually accosted and stripped down the awaiting villain suit actor. This is where jetpack shenanigans ensue (how many fucking times have I said "shenanigans" in this piece?) and incredible film scholars of our modern arge will point out how implausible it is that functioning jetpack technology is being used for a fucking American Kamen Rider at a Minnesota Christmas parade, and how as scientists they're very offended by this. Ding. Alright, that's catty of me, but let's do a little reach. 

In a movie that's had that undercurrent of authority abusing its power at the expense of the ordinary citizen, like with Robert Conrad's cop or the toy store managers or the counterfeit Santas, I fully buy that the use of jetpack technology in this movie, which could change the world, is solely used for the purposes of entertaining little kids at a parade. Also the jetpack doesn't even work right, as the guy Arnold is replacing is fucking brain dead due to a freak accident. Still, in Arnold's hands it leads to silly shenanigans followed by saving his son just like Turbo Man saves a kid in the show from falling off Vasquez Rocks. And now, having seen the absolute capitalist excess of this movie... we at last get a rejection of it. Now, that rejection is in favor of the nuclear family unit, so let's not go crazy and call this movie a full-on middle finger to Ronald Reagan or anything. With all the Turbo Man stuff done, little Jake Lloyd is bummed because his dad couldn't see it. He's not thinking of his hero. He's thinking of his dad. Of course, both are one and the same now, and the family is together again. Jake Lloyd even gives away his Turbo Man, the source of all this fucking strife, to Sinbad as he's being carted away in cuffs. Something to bring a little bit of joy to another kid. 

The exchange that follows is memed on a little, mostly because of Arnold's delivery, but it's the key to the film. When Arnold protests because the Turbo Man is what the kid wanted most, he responds that he doesn't need the doll: he's got the real Turbo Man at home. Awww, it was about being a good dad all along. Or a less shit one. Maybe this will lead to Arnold being a better dad next year. Maybe it won't. I choose to be optimistic, though. When we started this movie, Arnold was all about that capitalist grind. Having spent an entire movie being beaten, broken, and buffered by the absolute hell that capitalist excess can throw at him? Yeah, ease off on the work and hang out with your wife and kid. Playing Turbo Man is a lot easier than going out and finding the toy one. That, then, is Jingle All The Way. It contains multitudes. Yes, it's dumb, but poking around at it a little you can use how silly this slapstick of a movie is as a strength and not a weakness. Maybe I reached a little here and there, but I would like to think that at the end of this massive rambling that I have delivered something resembling a coherent thought. Something that says that the movie about beating the shit out of each other for a plastic doll has something to say about the systems which lead stressed fathers to trying to kill each other on Christmas Eve over said plastic doll. Something that says that maybe you should chill out and just be present in your kid's life instead of trying to buy back his forgiveness with a dorky action figure.

And really, isn't that what the holiday's all about? Celebrating the love and affection you have for those closest to you as another year draws to a close? Yes, part of showing that is with material goods, but another part of it is just being there for them, showing you thought of and think of them, spending time with them as we head off to another year. I wish that for you all here during the holiday. Whatever you celebrate, I hope it's good, and I hope you get to be cozy with those you love and do things that spark joy. Who knows, maybe it might be sitting down with a 90's comedy where men fall down fighting over a toy. If you do, you might just have a new appreciation for it thanks to me. I'd love that. Okay, I'm out, happy holiday all.