They say Christmas comes but once a year, but festivities are starting early this season with the release this week of action comedy Red One.
But it is far from the first time Santa has had to fight for his right to spread peace and goodwill. Here are 10 more Christmas classics, in which St Nick – and the fate of Christmas itself – hangs in the balance.
1. Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
This perennial seasonal favourite sees a New York department store Santa, played by Edmund Gwenn in an Oscar-winning performance, claim to be the real McCoy, a proclamation that escalates all the way to the city courthouse.
Maureen O’Hara and a pint-sized Natalie Wood play the mother and daughter who befriend the elderly Kris Kringle, but it is the film’s deft balance of capitalism and genuine Christmas cheer that make it so enduringly popular.
Miracle was remade in 1994 with Richard Attenborough as Kringle, but it is the warm embrace of the original to which audiences fondly return year after year.
2. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964)
One can hardly claim this low-budget 1964 oddity to be a good film – in fact it regularly appears on worst films of all time lists – but there remains something endlessly lovable about its unvarnished charms.