It's the most wonderful time of year, and we at Defector are proud to bring back our series discussing some of the most, uh, available holiday movies.
Sabrina Imbler: Thanks so much Kelsey and Alex for trudging through this “film” with me.
Alex Sujong Laughlin: I am so excited to be here to talk about one man’s sexual tension with Santa.
Kelsey McKinney: Hello. I am here to discuss the queer film My Secret Santa, is this the correct place?
Sabrina: You are in the right place! Before we dive into the movie, I have to ask. Have either of you ever cross-dressed to commit workplace fraud?
Alex: I really had to sit for a moment and think about it but I’m gonna lean toward no for now.
Kelsey: NOT YET! I’m hoping to in the future.
Sabrina: 2026 goals! I did not realize when I chose this film that My Secret Santa is essentially a remake of Mrs. Doubtfire except it’s Santa.
Kelsey: It also has shades of She’s the Man/Twelfth Night! All the classics of the cross-dressing for employment genre!
Sabrina: My Secret Santa opens with our intrepid hero, Taylor Jacobson, getting fired from her job, Fantine-style, which leaves her in dire financial straits. Not only does she need to pay her overdue rent, she also "needs" to pay for presumably a very expensive snowboarding school for her daughter Zoey. This was when the movie first fell apart for me. I thought about that dril tweet where someone is like “can someone help me budget, my family is dying” and it’s like $200 on groceries, $500 on rent, $5,000 on candles. Here, private snowboarding school is candles.
Kelsey: One thing I love about movies of this caliber is that you never know what is going to be important. The opening scene of this movie is her very carefully checking decorated cookies for flaws and pulling out the other ones. It’s implied that she’s pretty good at the cookie job and also that she likes it. But guess what? Cookies are not relevant to this movie at all! We never hear about the cookies again! It was all just a job she could lose.
Alex: As the movie went on I couldn’t stop thinking about the very first moment in the movie where she picks a Santa cookie out of the lineup and is like, “He’s depressed!!” That’s called foreshadowing.
Kelsey: Also, that Santa cookie looks identical to all the other ones. It’s also called projection.
Sabrina: I got where Taylor was coming from, because it seems no one in this small Christmas town has ever seen a therapist, at least one that was not Santa.
Kelsey: Don’t be silly, Sabs. You do not need therapy when you have Christmas Spirit.
Sabrina: Soooooo true babe. Luckily Taylor has a plan to make some money. She goes to a used record store and tries to sell her collection of vinyl—she only makes $150, which would probably pay for approximately one hour of elite snowboarding school—where she runs into what we are supposed to believe is an alluring eligible bachelor: local hotel heir Matthew Layne.
Alex: It’s moments like these when I fully grasp the width of the chasm between my opinion of a “hot man” and Christmas Movie Hot Man. He is fine. The best part about him I think is that he is a huge fan of Screaming Kittens, which turns out to be ... Taylor’s old band?!
Kelsey: At this point, the movie has been on for like 15 minutes and there are already so many things happening: old band, potential love interest, snowboarding school, rent problems, fired from job, and also the approach of Christmas, obviously.
Alex: I have this in my notes: "'You can’t really be a rock star and a mom at the same time' HELL YEAH.” I think I was excited to have the thesis statement spelled out so quickly. I was hoping for a musical performance at some point and I was not disappointed.
Sabrina: Matthew asks Taylor out on the traditional adult Christmas date—drinking hot chocolate while leaving room for Jesus—and she cruelly rebuffs him because she cannot be a rock star and a mom and a girlfriend at the same time, obviously.
Alex: Hot chocolate does not exist in the world except for in Christmas movies, but because of this movie I have been craving hot chocolate constantly and I’ve already had it three times.
Kelsey: Now, the movie gives us even more plot! The ski resort where Taylor’s daughter has to go to ski school in order to become an Olympic snowboarder(??) even though she is already 16, is a ski resort that is owned by the love interest’s dad. And his dad is mad at him because he already spent so much money crashing his car into a building in Italy(??). So his dad names him the General Manager of the resort, usurping poor Tia Mowry who was in line for the job.
Alex: THRILLING Tia Mowry appearance! This led me down a rabbit hole to confirm that it appears she and Tamara have reconciled in some way so nobody panic.
Sabrina: Oh my god, that’s a real Christmas miracle! Twitches lives!! I was pissed off by how this movie treated Tia’s character. She is the only person in this world who got her job without the influence of nepotism, and she seems to be really good at it. Because of this the movie has decided she is an evil careerist mom and therefore the closest this movie comes to a villain.
Taylor learns from her gay brother (more on that later) that the snowboarding tuition is half-off for Sun Peaks employees, so she goes to the hotel to try and get a job. But Tia informs her that the only job they are hiring for is Santa. Alas, Taylor is too beautiful and too female to play Santa!
Alex: It’s at this point that I’m like ... why are you only considering this right now, seemingly two days before this camp starts? If your daughter is this snowboarding savant and you live in this ski town, would this not have come up sooner?? But these movies are not for airtight storytelling. They are the product of someone putting a bunch of nouns and verbs into a hat and covering their eyes as they draw three.
Kelsey: I also just do not believe for a second that being Santa at $2000 a week is going to cover half of a snowboarding camp and your rent backlog. Mountain sports are for rich people! And Taylor cannot even pay her rent or get her daughter a new snowboard. Maybe let’s cool it on the snowboarding camp. Or, we as the audience should be given more context about how good Taylor’s daughter is at snowboarding because the way it’s presented in the movie, it seems like she just thinks it’s cool. And unfortunately only rich kids get to do everything they think is cool!
Sabrina: Kelsey I was so confused by that. How has her daughter been snowboarding for so long? Has Taylor just been spending 80 percent of her income on snowboarding? Zoey seemed too well-adjusted to be a pro athlete. But fortunately Taylor’s gay brother has a plan: he and his husband will create an elaborate Santa drag disguise for her. This also made no sense financially. The level of detail of the prosthetic Santa mask, the rich velvet of the costume, all of this money could have simply gone to snowboarding school. Or, frankly, to a financial planner for Taylor, to give her the cold hard truth!
Alex: Just to note that I believe Taylor is 100 percent someone who refers to her brother as “my gay brother” so that is how I’ll be referring to him. Anyway, somehow her gay brother has all the supplies and technology to make professional-level prosthetics for the face and body.
Sabrina: When you’re gay they teach you that in gay school, I think.
Kelsey: I did really like the Mission: Impossible sequence where they scanned her head with a 3-D scanner and then printed a new face for her as Santa which the gay brother and gay brother-in-law then painted to look realistic. They filled the Santa belly with lentils. Iconique.
Alex: The mask they make is absolutely terrifying. The final product is … kind of convincing? Through the screen? But I have a hard time believing it wouldn’t feel uncanny valley up close, so that was in the back of my mind the rest of the movie whenever she was in Santa—or rather, Hugh Mann—costume.
Sabrina: The mask clearly works on Hotel Heir Matthew and General Manager Tia, because they hire Taylor as Santa. She tells them her name is Hugh … Mann. This raised many questions for me. How did she not think ahead to come up with a fake name? What on earth does her W2 look like?
Kelsey: What kind of passport did she submit!! The Santa job should be cash under the table anyway, in my opinion.
Alex: Mr. Mann!!! It feels like a drag performance at this point. And the gender excitement just keeps going because then she takes a call in the women’s bathroom thinking it’s empty, but of course a toilet flushes and an old lady comes out. The tone is very Ha ha! It’s a man in the women’s bathroom! Isn’t that silly?!
Sabrina: Yeah I refuse to engage with or even imagine this movie’s perspective on trans politics. But the next bathroom Taylor finds herself in is a steamy one. She is led by Chief Elf Jimmy to the men’s locker room to change into her Santa fit, where she runs into a nude Matthew Layne. What proceeds is maybe the most homoerotic scene of the movie’s many homoerotic scenes. Midway through dressing, Matthew asks Taylor-as-Hugh to tie his tie for him. I genuinely thought they were going to bone, or something close to it.
Alex: When Matthew Layne is gazing into Hugh Mann’s eyes and saying he just feels like he can talk to him … wow, it was a truly romantic moment.
Kelsey: To me, it is beautiful that the sexual chemistry between Matthew and Taylor exists even when she is dressed in a giant Santa suit. I love love. What I do not love is that one of the clues the movie plants that Hugh Mann is Taylor is a kind of chapstick that has a unicorn head on the top of it that we are supposed to believe Taylor uses all the time.
Sabrina: Honestly I felt like the only times Matthew and Taylor had chemistry is when she was in character as Hugh Mann. Maybe it has to do with the way “straight” men are able to be intimate in a “family-friendly” way in these movies that a heterosexual couple simply cannot. But I was genuinely titillated by the Daddy-Son dynamic between them, and I couldn’t help but fantasize about another Christmas movie where the real Santa finds love in a locker room.
Kelsey: No, you’re totally right. There was almost no chemistry when Taylor was dressed as herself. I think part of that is because her character description was mainly “uptight” and “scared.”
Alex: And also when she is Hugh Mann, she is also daddy, which is what Matthew desperately needs.
Sabrina: Holy shit. Yes. Yes!!!
Kelsey: WOW! Freud! It all makes sense. He just wants to get a drink with his dad and be loved by him.
Sabrina: I’m reeling.
Alex: I’m gonna be honest, this is the point in the movie where I wrote “it’s giving mulan” and my notes ended because I was hootin and hollerin at the TV. Speeding through the plot though, Hugh becomes the resort’s Santa and is really bad at it at first because she’s too practical, and then she has a heart to heart with Matthew at a bar.
Kelsey: My notes at this point say FLAMING CANDY CANES. Because I was very excited by the drink that is brought out to Matthew and Hugh Mann that has crushed candy canes on the side of it and some kind of floating flammable topper shot. No one drinks these because they light Hugh Mann’s beard on fire, but I liked seeing them.
Sabrina: After Taylor tries to give a pep talk to her daughter (while dressed as Santa), Zoey tells Santa that all she wants for Christmas is for her mom to get a boyfriend. This changes Taylor’s whole approach to being Santa from being uptight and practical to becoming a kind of therapist to the many children who wish for something less material than presents.
Kelsey: More good evidence in my opinion that we should not be risking our life’s savings on snowboarding school!! Your Christmas wish is for your mom to have a boyfriend?
Alex: Also, just a small note on the topic of Taylor’s financial literacy: I’m pretty sure she’s wearing a Canada Goose coat in one scene?!? Those are like $1000???
Sabrina: And I feel like that’s still less expensive than this Santa drag getup! Which, by the way, has already been repaired twice after the fire incident, and another incident when an overzealous child bursts Hugh Mann’s belly leading him to gush lentils like a burst artery. This was a fun bit of body horror for me, imagining a kind of man who is made of lentils. But soon we come to what was, for me, the absolute worst part of the movie. A young girl who stutters comes up to Hugh Mann and says her Christmas wish is to not stutter anymore, and then Hugh Mann tells her that stuttering can be fixed with the power of song, and then they all sing “Jingle Bells” together (in my opinion the worst Christmas song!) and the girl doesn’t stutter and her mom tells her she’s proud of her and the moment goes viral on the internet and this is all used as evidence that Matthew has now become good at general managing a hotel.
Kelsey: I hated this part, to be honest. Although, it did lead me to googling whether or not singing helps stuttering and apparently it does help. Also the website it goes viral on is called "HAPPENED." We see it on a computer screen.
Sabrina: That reminds me of when Tia Mowry is doing investigative journalism on Hugh Mann and looks him up on a search engine called “Look Path” and then again on a website called “Jobization.” I had fun imagining what terrible tech billionaires ruled over this world of Christmas.
Alex: I could tell we were on the path toward a zany party scene where both Taylor and Hugh are invited and expected to make appearances, and I was impatient to get there.
Sabrina: The party where Hugh and Taylor both have to be there is a good bit of fun. She has to run back and forth to the bathroom to change in and out of Santa drag with the help of her gay brother, who is also really hungry for some reason? Why didn’t he eat before this?
Kelsey: I was dying at the hunger subplot. Why are you so hungry? Why do you want your sister-in-law who is clearly in crisis to bring you weird catered food from upstairs! Just wait!
Alex: And this is where we get an explicitly implied gay sex scene in the bathroom because Matthew walks in and hears Taylor and gay brother grunting and banging on walls as they tried to get her fat suit on, and then Hugh walks out and it’s like…👁️👄👁️
Sabrina: I was pleasantly surprised by Matthew’s reaction to hearing what could only have been gay sex in the bathroom of his hotel lobby. He reacted like an ally! Or even a man who might be interested in trying some of that himself!
Alex: I have to imagine that Matthew was at least a little bit curious!!! Given everything he’s going through!!!
Kelsey: And also when it was revealed to be his man-crush Hugh Mann who was in there making these sounds, he was very professional and kind. Matthew is an ally.
Alex: By this point, Tia has figured out a connection between Hugh and Taylor because she realized that Hugh had filled out his paperwork with her Social Security number, and she’s like “checkmate to my nemesis.” She wants to be the general manager of the resort and she thinks exposing Hugh will make Matthew look bad and secure the promotion for her. Which is incredibly misguided because when does sabotaging someone over an opportunity you were already passed over for work out in your favor? Also, these people think and talk about general managers so much more than anyone, ever.
Sabrina: After Tia accuses Taylor in front of the party, Taylor is feeling cornered. I thought she was going to do a Mission: Impossible unmasking, ripping off her Santa face and spraying the room with lentils, but then a hotel employee runs in asking for Taylor, because her daughter Zoey had a snowboarding accident. This stressed me out so much because presumably Sun Peaks is not offering their seasonal employee Hugh Mann health insurance??
Kelsey: God I wish the lentils had made a comeback!
Alex: I do not ski for many reasons but chief among them is the risk of catastrophic injury, and when Zoey is on a stretcher with her neck in a neck brace I thought it was going to be so much worse than what turned out to be a sprained arm?
Sabrina: Yeah they really bait-and-switched us! When I saw the neck brace I was prepared for a worst-case scenario, and then like two scenes later she just is wearing a sling.
Kelsey: Insane that there was no concern about health insurance when she took a part-time job to pay for snowboarding school! I did really enjoy the scene though where Taylor forgets she is dressed as Santa and is comforting her injured daughter who is … so confused about why Santa is there.
Sabrina: That’s finally when Hugh Mann unmasks to reveal himself as Taylor, leaving everyone shocked, but Matthew overall seemed pretty chill about it, which I appreciated. Taylor was like, I can explain! And Matthew was like, Your daughter is in a neck brace, which is more important than our situationship. I was a little confused why everyone was so mad about Taylor being Santa. Obviously it’s not a good idea to have hired someone to work with children without doing a background check first, and employment fraud is probably bad, probably? But also I feel like there must be gender discrimination in the Santa industry, and would Taylor have been hired if she had been honest about being a woman?
Alex: Yeah, if this happened in real life, in no universe does the heat come down on the beloved resort Santa. This is a local newspaper investigation into the hiring practices of the resort and how there are no background checks done.
Sabrina: This is where I have to be honest and say that the first evening I sat down and tried to watch this movie, I paused after 15 minutes to watch my favorite Christmas-adjacent movie of all time, Spotlight. It was a really good decision. And I returned to My Secret Santa when I had a more open, patient heart.
Ultimately Taylor and Matthew reconcile at some kind of unveiling with the same “big crowd” of 20 extras who appear in every single crowd shot. She decides to walk on stage as Matthew is announcing something and then apologizes, and then Matthew finally admits that he was feeling sexual feelings toward Santa. I wish they had been able to have this conversation in private so that Taylor, as the sister of a gay brother, might have been able to shepherd him toward an understanding of his queerness. But no, they had to reconcile in front of a crowd so that everyone could clap when they kissed and then sing a “punk” rendition of "Run Rudolph Run" that I simply do not believe was punk.
Kelsey: As a sister of a gay brother, you would think she would try harder! I agree!
Alex: He does admit he misses Hugh, which makes me believe that there’s room for this relationship to evolve with time.
Sabrina: That’s right, Taylor, it’s never too late to transition!!!!!!!!!
The movie closes with everyone at a Christmas party together smiling laughing whatever. Boring! Let Matthew kiss Hugh on his wizened old lips! Do you feel like you learned any lessons from this movie?
Alex: I learned that it is impossible to be a present parent and also be successful at your career so you gotta choose one. Classic!
Kelsey: A lesson I learned is to never fill your fake belly with only lentils if it is not double lined. You need the lentils to be secure. What lessons did you learn?
Sabrina: I learned the lesson of Mamma Mia, which is that you should always tell your daughter about the band you were in when you were younger because it fosters a genuine and lasting connection between the two of you that can also help transfer intergenerational wisdom about financial planning (in this case from Zoey to Taylor). And I learned to never do winter sports without health insurance.
