Tim Allen Is Promising to Put the ‘Christ’ Back in Christmas

Family comedian and convicted drug trafficker Tim Allen has reunited with Disney to reprise the role of Scott Calvin, also known as Santa Claus from the Santa Clause film series that, much like Allen’s lord and savior, has risen from the dead with the release of the Christmas comedy miniseries The Santa Clauses, which launched yesterday on Disney+. The show has already made headlines in just its first two episodes after Allen’s line “Saying ‘Merry Christmas to all’ has suddenly become problematic” went viral with commenters clowning the outspoken conservative comic with quips like “Santa had the red hat all along and we just ignored it.”

The comedian who once compared being conservative in Hollywood to being a Jewish person in Nazi Germany serves as executive producer on the series as well as its main star, and in an interview with The Wrap, Allen assured audiences that the show will not forget the reason for the season — The Santa Clauses will focus much more on religion than the original film series did. After all, “This is Christmas. It's Christ-mas. It literally is a religious holiday,” said Allen, shortly before he revealed an evidence board with lines of string connecting the two halves of the word.

The Santa Clauses follows Allen’s Santa Claus as he plans his retirement from the whole gift-giving game in order to spend more time with his family. He must find a fitting replacement who can take up the coat and hat that Allen originally picked off the corpse of his predecessor, but finding a new Santa who can handle the responsibilities of the job and not kill Allen is no easy task.

According to Allen, he and the writing team found “a brilliant way” to heavily incorporate religious elements into the fifth and sixth episodes of the show. As executive producer, he pushed back on the more fantastical elements that Disney included in its pitch, explaining, “It originally had a lot of otherworldly characters, and ghosts, and goblins.” Allen didn’t want any sacrilegious supernatural characters distracting from the Christian core of a series based on the premise that whoever kills Santa gets to be the next Santa, as if Kris Kringle is some pirate king.

“If you want to get into Santa Claus, you’re gonna have to go back to history, and it’s all about religion,” Allen lectured — this esoteric fact that the history of Christmas is connected to religion must have been censored by the Biden administration in the same legislation that outlawed the phrase “Merry Christmas to all” and mandated bland red cups at Starbucks.

There is absolutely no shortage of festive Christian media available to religious families looking for faith-oriented films to watch together on Christmas, nor are we lacking new IP’s for more playful, secular-friendly holiday programming — the media blitz for Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds’ Spirited is currently in full swing. This new direction for the Santa Clause franchise feels like an attempt by Allen to push the property into a weird in-between place that combines the morals and piety of Christian movies and TV shows with the entertainment value and watchability of real media. 

If this change in direction pays off, it could pave the way for other beloved holiday film franchises to skew more religious — watch out for Christ Died Hard for Our Sins next Easter.