Welcome to Day 6 of Blogmas 2025, where I continue my masochistic tradition of posting holiday-themed content every single day until Christmas. This year’s twist involves AI-generated prompts, because apparently I needed a digital taskmaster to keep me accountable. Today’s prompt asks me to review a lesser-known Christmas movie (like Jingle All the Way, The Christmas Chronicles, or Klaus) and make the case for why it deserves more love.

Friends, we need to talk about One Magic Christmas.

I’ve written about this movie before—back in 2017, I basically eviscerated it, calling it scary, theologically bizarre, and questioning why anyone would let children watch it. Eight years later, with more perspective and probably more accumulated Christmas movie trauma, I’m here to tell you that One Magic Christmas deserves a second look. Not because it’s secretly a masterpiece (it’s not), but because it might be the most audaciously bleak Christmas movie ever released by Disney, and there’s something genuinely fascinating about that.

The Movie That Haunted My VHS Collection

Let me set the scene: When I was a kid, One Magic Christmas lived on a six-hour VHS tape alongside Santa Claus: The Movie (the one with Dudley Moore and John Lithgow, not the Tim Allen one). This tape was in regular rotation every December, not because we particularly loved these movies, but because we had them, and in the pre-streaming era, you watched what you had.

The thing is, One Magic Christmas is permanently etched into my Christmas memories, like a weird cousin who shows up to every family gathering—you’re not sure why they’re there, they make everyone vaguely uncomfortable, but Christmas wouldn’t feel complete without them making things weird.

Released in 1985, this Disney production stars Mary Steenburgen as Ginnie Grainger, a grocery store clerk who hates Christmas. Not in a fun, Grinch-y way where she sneers at decorations and plots to steal presents. No, Ginnie hates Christmas because she’s drowning in financial anxiety, her husband Jack just lost his job, and the holiday season is a stark reminder of everything they can’t afford to give their children.

Already, we’re in territory that feels more like a Ken Loach social realism drama than a Disney Christmas movie.

The Darkness Disney Decided Was Fine for Children

Here’s where One Magic Christmas gets genuinely unhinged, and I mean that as a compliment. When most Christmas movies want to teach someone the true meaning of Christmas, they employ gentle tactics: showing them happy memories, warming their heart with acts of kindness, maybe a musical number or two.

One Magic Christmas says, “What if we killed her husband in a bank robbery and drowned her children in a frozen river?”

I’m not exaggerating. That’s literally what happens.

Jack, trying to be the optimistic contrast to Ginnie’s pessimism, goes to the bank to withdraw their meager savings to buy Christmas presents. A desperate man robs the bank. Jack tries to be a hero. Jack gets shot and dies. The robber steals Jack’s car—with the kids still inside—and crashes it into a frozen river where the children are temporarily believed to have drowned.

This is a DISNEY MOVIE. Released in 1985. Presumably aimed at families.

The whole sequence is shot with horror movie intensity. When the “magic” time-warp stuff kicks in (we’ll get to that), the Christmas lights in the neighborhood don’t just turn off—they extinguish with what sounds like someone taking a sledgehammer to a room full of antique clocks. It’s genuinely unsettling. Five-year-old me somehow wasn’t traumatized by this, which either speaks to the resilience of 80s children or the early onset of my appreciation for unnecessarily dark entertainment.

Harry Dean Stanton: The Angel Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needed

Enter Gideon, played by Harry Dean Stanton, who looks less like a Christmas angel and more like he wandered off the set of Paris, Texas and nobody had the heart to tell him he was in the wrong movie. He wears a brown trench coat and fedora, chain-smokes (okay, maybe not on screen, but you know this angel smokes), and spends most of the movie lurking around talking to children in a way that would absolutely not fly in 2025.

But here’s the thing: Stanton is perfect. His weathered, gravelly presence is exactly what this weird movie needs. He’s not Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life, earning his wings through good deeds. Gideon already has his wings (though we never see them), and he seems deeply tired, like an angel who’s been doing this job too long and has seen too much human misery to maintain any celestial cheerfulness.

When he reveals his backstory—he died saving someone 50 years ago and has been serving as an angel ever since—it adds another layer of melancholy to an already melancholic film. The movie’s theology is completely bonkers (apparently in this universe, when you die, you either go work for Santa or become a Christmas angel), but Stanton sells it with his earnest weariness.

Santa Claus as Middle Management God

The theological implications of One Magic Christmas deserve their own dissertation. In this movie’s cosmology, Santa Claus appears to be God, or at least middle management in the heavenly hierarchy. He gives Gideon his assignments. The North Pole is staffed not by elves but by the souls of the dead (which raises SO many questions). Angels are deceased humans who earned their wings through acts of sacrifice.

At one point, Ginnie’s daughter Abbie travels to the North Pole with Gideon to ask Santa to restore her mother’s Christmas spirit. Santa’s workshop is presented as this ethereal, otherworldly space where the departed continue their work. It’s simultaneously beautiful and deeply unsettling—imagine explaining to your child that all of Santa’s helpers are dead people.

The movie never mentions Jesus, God, or any traditional religious element of Christmas. Santa is the supreme being of this universe, which makes him either the most powerful entity in existence or the world’s most overqualified mailman. The fact that he can apparently resurrect the dead and alter the fabric of reality but chooses to spend most of his time managing toy production is… a choice.

Why This Insanity Actually Works (Or At Least Deserves Respect)

Here’s my controversial take eight years after my previous review: One Magic Christmas deserves more love precisely because it dares to go this dark. While other Christmas movies were content to tread the same saccharine ground, this film said, “What if we made It’s a Wonderful Life but genuinely traumatic?”

The movie understands something that most Christmas films don’t: for many adults, Christmas isn’t magical—it’s stressful. It’s bills you can’t pay, presents you can’t afford, and the pressure to create joy when you’re barely keeping your head above water. Ginnie’s initial hatred of Christmas isn’t because she’s mean-spirited; it’s because she’s drowning in the very real anxieties that many people face during the holiday season.

When she tells her husband they can’t afford Christmas presents and he responds with optimistic platitudes, you can feel her frustration. She’s not being a Scrooge; she’s being realistic. The movie’s willingness to sit with that discomfort, to acknowledge that sometimes optimism feels like delusion when you’re struggling, gives it a weight that other Christmas movies lack.

The Time Loop That Fixes Everything (Sort Of)

The movie’s solution to Ginnie’s crisis is typically Christmas movie magical: none of the horrible things actually happen. It’s all a vision/time loop/magical intervention designed to show Ginnie what she could lose. When she “returns” to Christmas Eve, Jack is alive, the kids are fine, and she has a new appreciation for what she has.

But unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, where George Bailey learns his life has mattered through seeing how others would suffer without him, Ginnie learns to appreciate life by experiencing devastating loss. It’s a darker lesson: stop worrying about money because your family could literally die at any moment, so maybe just enjoy Christmas while everyone’s still breathing.

The movie ends with Ginnie embracing Christmas, the family attending the town tree lighting, and a midnight encounter with Santa. It should feel uplifting, but there’s something hollow about it. The financial problems haven’t been solved. Jack still doesn’t have a job. They’re still poor. But now Ginnie has PTSD from watching her family die, so… Merry Christmas?

The Disney Movie That Disney Wants You to Forget

What makes One Magic Christmas fascinating is that Disney released it at all. This was 1985, peak Reagan-era America, when Disney was trying to rebuild its family-friendly reputation. And someone at the studio read this script—with its death, drowning children, and chain-smoking angel—and said, “Yes, this is perfect for our Christmas slate.”

The movie flopped, of course. Critics were baffled, audiences were disturbed, and it quickly disappeared into the vault of Disney properties they’d rather you not remember. It occasionally popped up on the Disney Channel (which is how it ended up on my family’s VHS tape), but it’s never gotten the nostalgic reevaluation that other 80s movies have received.

Why One Magic Christmas Deserves Your Time

Look, I’m not going to lie to you and say One Magic Christmas is a great movie. It’s not. It’s deeply flawed, occasionally boring, and its message is muddled at best. But it’s also unlike any other Christmas movie you’ll ever see, and in an era of formulaic holiday content, there’s something to be said for a movie that swings this wildly and misses this spectacularly.

It’s a Christmas movie that acknowledges adult fears and anxieties in a way that few others do. It’s willing to go genuinely dark in service of its message, even if that message gets a bit lost in the darkness. It features one of the weirdest performances ever committed to a Christmas film (Harry Dean Stanton, you beautiful weirdo). And it’s a fascinating glimpse into a time when Disney was willing to traumatize children in the name of Christmas spirit.

In our current era of carefully focus-grouped, algorithm-optimized content, there’s something almost refreshing about a movie that feels like nobody involved quite knew what they were making. One Magic Christmas is a beautiful disaster, a well-intentioned catastrophe, a family film that forgot that families include children who probably shouldn’t see their fictional parents die horrible deaths.

The Verdict: Watch It, But Maybe Not With Kids

One Magic Christmas is streaming on Disney+ (hidden deep in the archives where Disney hopes you won’t find it). Should you watch it? Absolutely. Should you watch it with young children? Absolutely not, unless you want to spend the rest of December explaining that Daddy isn’t going to die in a bank robbery and they’re not going to drown in a frozen river.

This is a Christmas movie for adults who’ve gotten a little too comfortable with the Hallmark Channel’s version of Christmas. It’s for people who think they’ve seen every variation of the Christmas Carol formula. It’s for anyone who’s ever wondered what would happen if David Lynch directed a Disney Christmas special but had to keep it PG.

One Magic Christmas deserves more love not because it’s good, but because it’s fearlessly, uncompromisingly weird. In a sea of predictable holiday entertainment, it stands out like Harry Dean Stanton at a shopping mall Santa convention—out of place, vaguely unsettling, but impossible to ignore.

So this December, after you’ve watched It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story and all your comfortable favorites, give One Magic Christmas a shot. It won’t become your new favorite Christmas movie, but I guarantee you’ll never forget it. And sometimes, that’s worth more than love.

Just maybe watch it during the day. With the lights on. And have something cheerful queued up for immediately afterward.

You’re going to need it.