Sex merchants have hijacked Christmas. Does Santa really need to be ‘weirdly hot’?

As Mariah Carey once again defrosts to bring All I Want for Christmas is You into every shopping centre, there’s something else that’s warming up. Netflix is trying to bring sexy back to Christmas with not one but two Hallmark-style films featuring shirtless, buff men, including one snowman and a troupe of strippers. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed: “Holiday fare is headed in a shirtless new direction,” The New York Times said.

“Holiday movies are hornier than ever,” Vox exclaimed.

Dustin Milligan as Jack Snowman in Hot Frosty.Credit: Netflix

The first, pornographically titled Hot Frosty, follows an Adonis-like snowman (Dustin Milligan) who comes to life when a lonely widow (played by Lacey Chabert, whose list of Christmas film credits is longer than the line at Kmart’s checkout on Christmas Eve) puts a magical red scarf around his neck.

He can’t wear many clothes, otherwise he’ll melt (duh), so he cavorts around in the snow with his finely sculpted pecs like a walking protein shake.

The Merry Gentlemen is your typical “big-city girl returns to small town, meets boy who’s fixing her plumbing (literally, not euphemistically); girl decides to save her parents’ business by enlisting the local handymen (who all happen to look like they’ve stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad) to perform a festive, Hallmark-approved striptease (pants on)”.

You know, The Full Monty meets Miracle on 34th Street. Maybe it’s a novelty to the American crowd, who spend Christmas rugged up, while to us Aussies, shirtless, cavorting Calvin Klein-esque men are as common on Bondi Beach as sunburn is to a British tourist.

Unexpected buffness has also appeared in Target’s American Christmas ad campaign featuring a Santa called Kris K, who’s “weirdly hot” and possibly using Ozempic. He’s doing bicep curls with a small Christmas tree (“tree-cep” curls) and drives a Ford Bronco, leading some to speculate whether lumberjack “MAGA Chad Santa”, as one X user puts it, is an attempt to make Target “unwoke” in light of the recent election results.

Another X user asks Target if Santa can do tours so mums can sit on his lap, I guess so that they can admit they’ve been naughty and have a few cobwebs to clean out in places other than the dusty tinsel in the cupboard.

If “weirdly hot” Santa broke into my house on Christmas night while I was nursing a food coma and asked if I’d been a good girl, I would call the police to report a sexual predator. Santa’s not meant to be hot; he’s a kindly, rotund old man, a mystical figure living in old folk tales, unlike us mere mortals hankering after some hanky-panky.

I’m no prude; I know there’s always been an element of sexiness in Christmas, ever since Nicolette Scorsese flicked her red swimmers in Chevy Chase’s National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation fantasy or Eartha Kitt’s sultry Santa Baby.

But they at least pretend to be innocent. Even the song I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, with all its monogamous, heteronormative undertones, is told through the eyes of a naive child. We’re yet to reach “I Saw Santa on OnlyFans”, but I’m sure it’s not far off.

I wouldn’t say Christmas is the unsexiest time of the year, but it’s probably up there with Anzac Day, bank holidays and COVID lockdowns. When I hear “Christmas”, the first words that comes to mind are “stress”, “debt” or, if I’m feeling optimistically festive, “joy” and “celebration”, not “shirtless man hunks” and “weirdly hot” Santas. I’m aware that our culture’s first commandment, “sex sells”, infiltrates almost every facet of our lives, but can we leave Christmas alone?

Maybe I’m being unreasonable, and we’ve reached peak stress post-COVID, and like Jack in Hot Frosty, we’re all just letting off some steam. But there are so few things left in the world that are truly innocent. While we’re gorging our base instincts for gluttony around the Christmas table, can we at least try to put our instinct for the horizontal happy hour on ice? At least until Boxing Day, when off-duty lumberjack Santa is no longer tracking whether you’re being naughty or nice.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.

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