ABL #6: Santa is Burnt Out
“The Santa Clauses” is a masterclass in mismanagement
Today you’re getting something that I feel I could only write for this newsletter.
If you, like me, are well into your standard holiday watchlist by now and craving a fresh twist on a classic, then I present for your viewing consideration the Disney+ series The Santa Clauses, which expands on the 90s-and-Aughts film franchise The Santa Clause.
The series comes frosted in all the nostalgia and callbacks to the originals that you might expect. But deep down at its gooey center, the series offers a masterclass on leadership-driven burnout.
I wrote this in a horrified little fit of enraged sympathy last year while first watching Season 1, months before this newsletter launched. But Season 2 is now streaming, so we’re going to talk about it.
Spoilers ahead, but the show has been out for a year so I refuse to feel bad.
The Santa Clauses begins with a 65-year-old Scott-Calvin-as-Santa (Tim Allen) who’s on the road to burnout, if not there already. It’s been nearly 30 years since he spent Christmas with his family, and it’s affecting him both physically and professionally. His magic is failing him dangerously (reduced professional efficacy) and he’s losing weight unintentionally, at a rate his doctor finds alarming.
For his health, Santa scales back on the toy-making he enjoys and is left with administrative work he no longer finds fulfilling yet cannot delegate. “Let’s just get this over with,” he sighs as he begins his Christmas Eve rounds, admitting he’s “not as fun as [he] used to be.”
After much urging from his family and staff, Santa reluctantly decides to name a successor and retire.
Lesson 1: Decreased fulfillment and lack of autonomy in one’s role are both major risk factors for burnout.
His successor Simon (Kal Penn) is the CEO of a hybrid tech/toy/delivery company that’s a thinly veiled reference to Amazon, and the red flags are there from the beginning. When we first meet Simon, he’s guilt-tripping his team via Zoom for having to work late on Christmas Eve. In the background, his young daughter trims the tree alone. The following year we see him on live TV answering for his company’s failure to deliver its much-hyped product on time, completely ignoring a Black employee’s feedback about feeling unseen, and facing a boardroom of unhappy investors who threaten to withdraw funding over his “management ineptitude.”
His company is “spiraling out of control,” he confesses in his job interview at the North Pole. “There’s no way I can take on being Santa,” he says, citing his role as a single parent. But Santa won’t take no for an answer, and when Simon’s daughter begs to stay at the North Pole, he gives in and takes the job.
Lesson 2: Even when they have the right skills and experience, pushing employees or candidates to accept roles they’re not enthusiastic about only sets them up for failure and burnout.
It’s soon clear Simon doesn’t share the North Pole’s values at all. He greets the elves as “little rockstars,” and compliments their “corporate synergy.” He promises they’ll “work hard and play hard!” “Yay! They’re both the same!” cry the elves, whose workplace culture has been honed for centuries and are about to experience a major culture shock.
Those same elves already have unresolved trauma around leadership turnover. “Oh no! It happened again!” an elf frets in Episode 1 when Santa’s sleigh returns from rounds apparently without him — a callback to the franchise’s first movie, in which the incumbent Santa meets with a fatal accident during rounds. When Scott Calvin’s Santa pops out of his backseat hiding place, another elf promptly vomits from the stress. In a later episode, observing the elves’ devastation over his retirement announcement, Santa asks his head elf whether the North Pole has a grief counselor.
But now Simon sees children’s Christmas wish lists as “orders” to be fulfilled, and Santa’s Christmas Eve rounds as an industry to be disrupted with artificial intelligence. He replaces reindeer with “faster, wiley, self-learning” drones that crash constantly. He picks at the seams of North Pole magic until he ruins it in a move that feels like déjà vu: When this premiered last year, we were watching real-world tech bros break things just for fun and dilute the value of key services the masses relied on. “Christmas every day would diminish the true specialness of Christmas,” one elf frets, parroting the backlash around changes to a certain blue checkmark.
Lesson 3: Prioritizing productivity and profits over people’s well-being creates a culture of burnout.
Simon’s leadership also provided me with an unwelcome flashback to the toxic startup culture where I burned out in 2016. “You’re a rockstar,” he tells his Head Elf after dismissing her concerns. “No, sir. You’re a rockstar,” she replies with a grimace so pained that I full-body cringed in sympathetic muscle memory.
Simon ignores his management team’s advice, blames them for elf absenteeism and poor reindeer performance, and publicly fires them to prove a point to the rest of the staff. In doing so, he creates a work culture of tyrannical silencing and fear of retaliation. One by one, the elves begin to disappear in a timely nod to the Quiet Quitting movement.
Lesson 4: Quiet quitting is about bad bosses, not bad employees.
No elf is as emblematic of quiet quitting as Gary (Liam Kyle), the sole employee left in his department after severe “fudge-it” cuts. Overworked and underpaid, and deeply resentful of Simon’s new leadership, Gary drinks maple syrup on the job to cope with stress and flies under the radar in a Kisses-foil hat. He’s technically still doing his job, but now he has boundaries in place against the creep of hustle culture — when Santa returns to the North Pole and asks for his help saving Christmas from Simon, Gary firmly insists on finishing his cocoa break first.
Lesson 5: Resentment is a superpower that highlights patterns of injustice and mistreatment and shows us where stronger boundaries are needed.
It would have been nice to see Santa return to his role with a fresh perspective on work boundaries and productivity expectations, especially after an impromptu mentorship session from a panel of past Santas who patiently explain that it isn’t his fault the job of Santa is getting harder; the job has always been hard. But that message seems lost on him — with Simon gone, he blames himself for losing motivation and ruining morale more than pressuring someone into an unsuitable role.
Lesson 6: Internalized guilt, shame, and blame are a recipe for burnout … even when you’re not personally responsible for the entire world’s Christmas Spirit.
Chronic stress wreaks long-term havoc on our rational- and critical-thinking skills, which explains Santa’s poor hiring decision, his difficulty absorbing his mentors’ advice, and his persistent feelings of guilt over the situation. But burnout is a systemic issue that’s never the sole fault of the person experiencing it.
And as it turns out, the North Pole’s society is just as steeped in hustle culture as ours. When Santa returns from Christmas Even rounds having finally, finally gotten the Christmas with his family that he’s longed for all season, his Head Elf promptly announces they’re already behind schedule for next year.
Season 2 is streaming now on Disney+, but frankly, I’m not sure I’ll watch. The Season 2 trailer seemed to forget any of this ever happened, but without significant changes to the policies that drove him to burnout at the series’s outset, I’m a little worried for Santa … and a little frustrated by the plot.
Lesson 7: Employee turnover doesn't solve burnout culture; meaningful policy changes do.
There’s more where this came from! If you’d like to see more explorations of how burnout shows up in entertainment media — from Gilmore Girls to Barbie to Queer Eye — then consider supporting my work with a paid subscription. And if you’re an editor looking to commission a piece like this one, please reply to this email and say hello!
Thanks for reading, and happy holidays! Talk soon,
💜 Chloe