Sean Hannity has been on the front line of a forever war – on Christmas – for years. Every December, the Fox News host eagerly covers what he considers a holiday “under siege” by the ruling class, which aims to cancel the beloved holiday and its time-honored traditions.
Now, Hannity’s yuletide crusade is getting the direct-to-streaming treatment with Jingle Smells, a so-called “anti-woke” Christmas movie produced by Hannity and streaming on Rumble, the company providing a platform for Russell Brand and Matt Gaetz.
When the ne’er-do-well son of a cop takes a job as a garbage man to prove he can hold down an honest job, he stumbles upon a room full of toys his bosses have ordered him to destroy. That’s because the action figures depict the newly canceled action star Mason Stone (we get it, he’s the Rock). The film asks viewers to believe that Hollywood dropped him after him for saying: “May God bless America, and may he protect our troops.”
Instead of following orders, the garbage collector becomes Jingle Smells, a “Robin Hood of the holidays” who doles out the figures to kids whose parents can’t afford gifts. While passing out the toys, Jingle Smells asks children to keep his act of kindness just between them – yep, a strange man offering kids toys and telling them not tell to their parents is the hero of this story.
As Joe Berkowitz at Fast Company wrote, the premise of Jingle Smells stinks just as much as the film’s dad jokes about veganism or the climate crisis. Objectively, the film is not funny – but it is ironic: if the character of Mason Stone, a sort of off-brand Jason Momoa, were real, he wouldn’t lose his job for cheering on the troops. Real-life celebrities, including the Scream actor Melissa Barrera, the Hollywood agent Maha Dakhil, and the Harper’s Bazaar editor, Samira Nasr, have faced serious consequences for their criticism of a US military ally.
But there’s one surprising aspect of this Hannity-led film: it’s not really about the War on Christmas. In Jingle Smells, the villain is not some mayor here to pull down a town’s decorations or Starbucks CEO putting snowflakes on mugs instead of a Christmas tree.
Instead, the antagonist is the wishy-washy head of a toy company who pulls an action figure because triggered college students are crying about it online. Our heroes are fighting a War on Woke, not Santa Claus.
TV Christmas movies have faced a reckoning in recent years, with the Hallmark Channel going woke(ish), by livening up its programming ever so slightly. Now, the network’s characters aren’t always white, sometimes they’re gay, and this year one film even had a sex scene.
It’s all too much for some viewers. Last year, Candace Cameron Bure – who in an insult to Mariah Carey is sometimes called the Queen of Christmas due to her starring in over two dozen Hallmark holiday films – left the network for the safety of Great American Family, a conservative alternative channel.
At Great American Family, Bure wouldn’t have to worry about pesky same-sex couples ruining Christmas films. She said that Great American Family fare would “keep traditional marriage at its core”.
“I knew that the people behind Great American Family were Christians that love the Lord and wanted to promote faith programming and good family entertainment,” Bure explained.
So this year, Bure starred in My Christmas Hero, playing a doctor who falls for her hunky, military man patient. Like Jingle Smells, My Christmas Hero distances itself from the war on Christmas. It’s what Great American Family calls “safe storytelling” – films about faith, family and white people from the suburbs.
Most of the channel’s fare sticks to that script. In A Christmas Blessing, Lori Loughlin (formerly of Full House fame, now better known as one of the college admissions scandal parents) plays a TV chef who, according to the trailer, “finds her higher purpose is serving others”. She takes over a charity kitchen, falls for a man she sensuously teaches how to chop onions, and serves a holiday meal in church clothes.
Conservative pundits have railed against the War on Christmas for at least two decades. But it’s stale material by now. Hannity and other Fox News hosts wage a war on wokeness every month of the year. By the time December rolls around, viewers are over it. Give them snoozy, straight holiday romcoms instead.
What’s the true meaning of Christmas, according to Hannity and Jingle Smells? ’Tis the season to make merry, which means dunking on the gutless left and their corporate greed. But to watch the film, you’ll first have to pay Rumble a whopping $20.
