The origins of Christmas, at least when it comes to the English versions of Santa and the reindeers and such – to be fair, the Bible has a pretty good lock on the religious side of proceedings – are as many and varied as those who choose to tell the story.
Granted, many of the variables are the same – a man in red delivering presents, magical beings helping him accomplish his mission, a home at the North Pole, presents under the tree, peppermint and sugar plums to name just some – but how they came to be part of the festive story are wildly different and unique to the situation in which they are told.
Just how divergent they can be is evident in the festive delight that is Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas which takes us tens of thousands of years back in time at a time when, we can fairly safely say, Jesus was but a twinkle in the eye of the Nativity.
Yes, the creators of the popular Ice Age series, which features a wholly unusual found family of a mammoth named Manny (Ray Romano), wife Ellie (Queen Latifah), daughter Peaches (Ciara Bravo), pals Sid the Sloth and Diego the saber-toothed tiger (John Leguizamo and Denis Leary respectively) and Crash and Eddie (Sean William Scott and Josh Peck respectively, would have us believe that Christmas existed way before the reputed reason for the season was ever born.
It’s ludicrous … it’s ludicrous … and it’s done with so much effortless charm and joie de vivre that you’ll buy every thing Yule-y element of the narrative they are selling.
In this Christmas before Christmas, Santa is around but he’s compelled to visit you, if you’re mammoth at least, by your display of a giant granite boulder called, appropriately enough, a “Christmas Rock”, its positioning at your home proof that you are ready for all the delights of the most wonderful time of the year to come your way.
When events conspire to smash the rock into decidedly unfestive pieces – if you know the franchise, you can likely guess who’s responsible but let’s just leave that in the region of unadmitted spoilers, shall we? – and Manny makes up on the spot that Santa has a “Naughty List” and no one’s sure the new Christmas tree they create with a pine tree, beetles, worms and spider webs will prove a suitable replacement, Peaches, Sid and Crash & Eddie head off to the North Pole to find Santa and ensure that Christmas doesn’t pass the big Christmas Rock-less family of strange but loving souls by.
Somewhere along they way they meet a flying reindeer called Prancer, because of course they do and reaching the North Pole in record time, they find a place filled with red-and-white peppermint bark trees, sugar plums growing on bushes and Santa getting read to haul a huge sack of presents to boys and girls around the world. (Again, you need to go with the considerable creative license taken by Ice Age here, and just accept that the geographically disparate and scattered ancient human populations even know what Christmas is, or for that matter, care.)
It’s magical and snowy and wonderful until Santa’s elves, at that stage just his protective “santourage”, scare the North Pole seeking troop, and Manny, Ellie and Diego in hot pursuit, and an avalanche happens and Santa’s HQ is smashed to pieces.
Christmas is not going to happen is it?
Well, Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas isn’t not going to entertain that for a second, except as an effective plot device to spur everyone on to make Christmas happen, in the process coming with the sleigh, the reindeer who collectively pull it through the sky, presents and a whole host of other markers of the season.
Quite how it all comes together is best left to the watching of this wholly silly but gorgeously delightful and festively funny special which provides one of the most out there explanations for how Christmas celebrations arrived at their modern (well, ancient) form, which you will lap up with alacrity because it just feels so happily wonderful and warmly inclusive.
The message in the end is that this strange polyglot of Ice Age animals have each other, all year round but especially at Christmas, and that helping others celebrate and find their purpose, when you’ve come so close to taking it away from them, is the best and only way to celebrate the season (that last word is the source of a corker of a joke as Crash asks Eddie what a “season” is; a pertinent question given they don’t have them in a land of perpetual snow and ice; which brings us to the fact that when Sid says they can’t go and find the North Pole because of all the dangerous snow and ice, which is a convincing argument for a nanosecond until Peaches points out where they live).
Sure, it’s silly and goofy and utterly illogical but Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas works because in amongst all of the visual references to a way too early Christmas, it has a huge heart that speaks to the real reason Christmas means so much to so many people which is togetherness and belonging … and honestly if that all seems a bit twee and earnest, and it’s not, it’s really not, then you may want to think to simply watch poor old Scrat (Chris Wedge) find and lose countless acorns, including highly amusingly in Santa’s sleigh, and just lose yourself in the hilarity of one character not quite getting what he wants for Christmas.
Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas is currently available to stream on Disney+