Mark Reviews Movies: DEAR SANTA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 3, 2020

A slight but thoroughly heartwarming documentary about people helping others for the holidays, Dear Santa is about the United States Postal Service's program "Operation Santa," which organizes its employees, companies, non-profit organizations, and ordinary people to respond to people's letters to Santa Claus. Santa needs help, a lot of the film's subjects say, so they've been enlisted as volunteer elves to make sure that kids and even adults receive what they request from the jolly man.

During the early sections of Dana Nachman's film, one might feel patronized enough to become a bit cynical about its status as a documentary. It's for kids, too, obviously, so certain matters of decorum about Santa have to be maintained.

The film starts with kids, explaining their understanding of Santa and telling the camera what they want for Christmas. We meet a few others in more personal settings around the country. One wants a limo ride around New York City for himself and his family. Another, an aspiring veterinarian, wants ten rabbits. Some kids whose families lost their homes in the wildfire in Paradise, California, just want things to seem normal again.

Nachman is trying to tug at our heartstrings, of course. As skeptical as we might be about the documentary's initial presentation of Operation Santa as an officially licensed program from the North Pole (and all of these people as "adoptive elves"), the film gradually moves away from that early insistence. It's the people giving and organizing small or massive gift-giving missions out of kindness and compassion, not some mystical man with flying reindeer, that really matter here.

We meet them—postal employees and union workers and a classroom of kids and people running not-for-profit groups out of their own homes—and are taken aback by their decency and selflessness. It is quite touching.

Then, the gifts start being delivered to all of the kids and adults in need whom we have met over the course of the film, and Dear Santa just embraces the joy of unexpected and much-appreciated generosity. The film is simple, a bit too long (even at 80 minutes or so without the credits, featuring more hijinks from the kids), and undeniably manipulative, but witnessing so many people working with such dedication to help complete strangers tugs quite hard and very effectively at the heartstrings of even the most skeptical.

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