A 2014 Film Teaches: That’s OK, Because Hot Cocoa
Kirk Cameron’s film ‘Saving Christmas’ (2014)
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In May 2022, Kirk Cameron went on a racist, transphobic rant about public schools. “It’s sad to say they’re doing more for grooming, for sexual chaos and the progressive left than any real educating,” he said. Certain people are “rotting out the minds and souls of America’s children” and “spreading a terminal disease, not education.” Certain things are “destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying love for our great country: critical race theory, teaching kids to pick their pronouns and decide whether they want to be a boy or a girl, The 1619 Project.”
In November 2024, he’s trying to crowdfund over a million dollars to produce a new Christian children’s show called “Adventures of Iggy and Mr. Kirk” so kids can learn from a Christian iguana. “Parents,” he says, are “not looking for gay dinosaurs and trans ducks to teach their children morality.”
About ‘Saving Christmas’
Ten years ago, Kirk Cameron came out with the film “Saving Christmas”.
I knew him as the actor who played Mike Seaver on the sitcom Growing Pains that aired from when I was five until I was twelve. In real life, he’s ten years older than me, and he played a cool teenager I looked up to. While he was an actor on Growing Pains, he became a born-again Christian, though I had been unaware of this.
Because I was curious (from my own atheistic perspective) about some popular evangelical arguments, I’d heard a year earlier that he had released the film Unstoppable about questions about faith.
In 2014, I went to see “Saving Christmas” in a theater in Massachusetts. It showed in 400 theaters for only two weeks that November.
The film is a dramatized dialogue between Cameron and a depressed family member who doesn’t see the meaning and joy of Christmas.
Reviewers said it was “one of the least artful holiday films ever made” (Chicago Sun-Times), “thrown together” (Los Angeles Times) with “absurd logic” (Arizona Republic) that “seems to flat-out endorse materialism, greed and outright gluttony” (RogerEbert.com). It arrives “determined to win any perceived war on Christmas through brute force” (New York Times) and “will hold little interest for anyone not already a believer” (Austin Chronicle).
Rotten Tomatoes fans at home didn’t care for it either.
Don’t Listen to Wet Blankets
So the movie opens with Kirk Cameron sitting by a living room classically screaming CHRISTMAS! There’s a tinsel-bombed tree and a roaring fire with stockings and wrapped gifts.
At this time of year, he explains to the audience, people “want to be more generous. Donations go up all around the world!” Globally, you see, lest we mistakenly believe these donations have to do with U.S. tax deadlines.
The Christmas story is very special, he says. Theologically, this means that “something big happened, and because of it, everything is going to be OK. And I love hot chocolate.”
“Wet blankets,” to use his term, try to dampen Christmas. He’s vague about who these grinches are. They say that Christmas celebration is “all bad” and should be “thrown out,” or, more mildly, they consider it “private stuff” and “don’t want us to love Christmas so much and celebrate it the way we do.”
What will they try to pull next, he wonders? Will they claim that “Druids invented hot chocolate?”
Fear not, because: “Maybe someone like Santa Claus is actually on the team.”
I don’t know what that means.
Anyway, the film that follows — presented in partnership with Liberty University, a Christian institution — isn’t a battle cry in response to the alleged War on Christmas (though the term “War on Christmas” is uttered once). It doesn’t directly indict the many pluralistic criticisms of public Christian religious displays. It’s a little more subtle.
In this film, Kirk’s fictional brother-in-law, conveniently named Christian, is a serious Christian in distress after being exposed to some “War on Christmas” ideas on Wikipedia. He’s heard that Christmas trees are imitations of trees that pagans once used to worship “the gods.” When challenged, he can’t name these gods and suggests a mashup of the Norse “Thor” and the Egyptian “Osiris” — what, no Attis? Yet what he does understand, limited though it may be, is already ruining his day.
He has a flat, depressive affect and is unresponsive to the people around him. He looks at the abundant delirium of festivity that his wife has organized in their beautiful home yet sees nothing but “phony smiles and spoiled, bratty kids,” “perverted symbols with hidden meanings,” “needless spending,” and “materialism, paganism, elf worship,” all of which is “a big slap in the face to the true meaning of Christmas” and “cannot be what God wants.” To bolster his own self-righteousness and escape the terrible tinsel, he sneaks away to hide in a car in his own driveway. This is where Kirk Cameron spends the rest of the movie, ministering to him. Kirk begins with, “You’re all wrong…You drank the Kool-Aid.”
Christian challenges Kirk: “Explain to me how that Christmas party honors and glorifies Jesus.” Kirk begins by describing a time when Herod’s soldiers were killing babies. At the nativity scene, where Joseph is “surely amazed at what just happened,” people bring swaddling cloth and spices to the infant Jesus, gifts that presage his eventual burial. Christian declares, “That stuff blows my mind!” and is now in favor of nativity scenes.
Kirk endorses the winter solstice as a good time to mark Jesus’ birth, since it’s a time when the world turns from darkness to light.
He endorses Christmas trees, saying they recall how Adam couldn’t return the forbidden fruit to the tree after he ate it.
He says they also symbolize how Jesus consented to have his body hung from the “tree” of the cross. “When you walk onto a Christmas tree lot,” he counsels, “I want you to see hundreds of crosses that will never be used because of Jesus’s finished work.” This symbolism is a hard sell, since people have indeed executed and martyred each other over the past 2,000 years and continue to do so.
What about Santa Claus? Oh, he’s based on a real-life Nicholas who defended the divinity of Christ at the Council of Nicaea by whacking a fellow Christian in the face to make his point heard. The violent act is dramatized in the “Saving Christmas” film.
Was it good for Nicholas to do this? Kirk Cameron thinks it was bad-ass awesome.
“These were difficult and desperate times. Truth was on the line, and it was not the time for this pastor to stay quiet,” Kirk apologizes, nor was it the time for him to be “politically correct.”
In case his brother-in-law has missed the point, Kirk explains that Santa Claus “is actually the defender of the faith you want to be!” Santa represents someone who isn’t afraid to whack someone in the face with a stick for disagreeing with him about Jesus. That is super cool. Christian agrees and rejoins his family party with true joy.
Quite fine that the party is full of food, gifts and decorations, since, Kirk editorializes, the holiday celebrates God taking on a material body. It’s great to celebrate. We only need “to rearrange our lives and our homes so that every single thing points to Jesus.”
That’s OK, Because Hot Cocoa
The arguments and historical claims from the “pagan” or secular side are not presented coherently, to say the least, nor are they directly refuted; they’re merely replaced with Liberty University’s preferred symbolic interpretations.
Argument: That’s OK, because hot cocoa.
Innocuous, on the surface.
The film tries to cheer up people whom it assumes are joyless. Relatedly, when I checked some years ago, Niche.com ranked Liberty University’s party scene a C-minus, with one junior commenting: “It’s against school rules to go to parties.” Today I see it’s been upgraded to a C.
And the film encourages people to take interest in their own faith tradition’s holidays. Brother Christian is already essentially a Christian, of course.
However, that he became sad after reading Wikipedia is the last thing I would have assumed. The film doesn’t suggest he may be suffering from his own misdirected zeal, a personal problem, or a chemical imbalance.
A yet more bothersome implication is that Saint Nick needs to hunt down and smack those politically correct pagans with a birchwood cane (remember, truth was on the line) so all the kids can get their photos taken with Santa, their hero.
The film was not a toxic cultural irritant on the level of Bill O’Reilly’s contemporary “War on Christmas” rants. This cocoa was not hot enough to scald.
But Cameron’s more recent opposition to “gay dinosaurs and trans ducks” is something that does feel more toxic to me.
