One of the highlights of the busy holiday season for me is, without a doubt, the overabundance of mind-numbingly terrifying exercises in fear that masquerade as pleasant "Christmas holiday Yuletide season specials." We might think we have it bad in the age of video, what with Kathie Lee singing her heart out and Yet Another Very Special Episode of Touched By An Angel (can Roma Downey and Della Reese help a despondent teenager/junkie/dogcatcher/teenage junkie dogcatcher re-find the Yuletide spirit by learning the True Meaning of Christmas?!) but I assure you that children many many years ago were subjected to similar, if not worse, tortures in the name of the ol' ho-ho-ho.

Case in point: A Visit To Santa. You can find it at archive.org, which features a most excellent clearinghouse of film shorts from the middle part of the 20th century. (HINT: Look under "V" for "Visit.") Several shorts you can find in the archive were used in Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I'd like to think that if the show continued on and they were in need of more holiday fodder (after deftly skewering Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and that odd Mexican Santa movie) that they could've used this somewhere. As it stands, unfortunately, the show is no more and so this film lies unused in the electronic archive -- next to the films on the social importance of good grooming, why Communism is very bad for everyone, and, of course, films about menstruation the girls got to see in gym class while the boys did something else outside.

But A Visit To Santa is not merely camp or hokey in the way so many of these shorts are. No, its content ranges from the oddly inexplicable to the downright wrong. The plot is quite simple: Two young children write a letter to Santa asking if they can come visit him at the North Pole. Santa, who looks and sounds more like a goombah from Jersey than a jolly fat guy from the North Pole, invites the kids up on Christmas Eve, and after we see home movie footage of Santa opening shopping malls, we watch as he takes the children through his magical holiday department store and then up to see some model trains run. Then they go home but not before a Very Special Holiday Message.

Sounds almost tolerable, doesn't it? Well, most of the footage is narrated by a very. odd. fellow. archive.org says this film was made in Pittsburgh, which explains the narrator's weird regional accent -- he says "warsh" instead of "wash" and "garsh" instead of "gosh" and has a grand old time with the long O sound. The narrator, with the help of a slightly addled writer, lapses in between prose and rhyme, makes random comments loosely related to the footage at hand, and has strange little conversations with himself, all to the accompaniment of someone learning to play "Jingle Bells" and other Christmas favorites on a cheap home organ. Oh, it's fun, all right. Fun in that tasting-metal kind of way. And that's not even including the elves with no pants who run around Santaland.

So spike that ration of eggnog liberally with rum, me hearties, and put away that mistletoe, cause you is on my Naughty List this year and you're about to get a little bit o' coal in your browser. Get ready for weep copious tears as you, YES, YOU BEHIND THE SHED, STAND STILL LADDIE take your very own Visit To Santa.

Wherever possible I've included the film's Actual Dialogue to accompany the stills I took. I'm not joking and I'm not being facetious here -- the stuff I'll be relaying is, in fact, the actual dialogue from the actual film.

Actual dialogue will be displayed like this, in that fine monospaced font that makes almost anything look like an actual movie screenplay.

And believe me, that's the first time the word "screenplay" has ever been used in reference to this film.

I've also tried to recreate the weird cadences of the Narrator and characters in the film, so expect some strange, sentence. Construction. If you don't believe the dialogue is actually real and spoken in such an odd fashion you can download the MPEG yourself from archive.org and take a listen. I didn't make a single word of this dialogue up because, frankly, I don't need to. It's that strange.