Some may argue this is not really a Christmas movie and they are right. One wonders why it was turned into one. Were the powers that be hoping for a Christmas classic shown year after year? If so, it didn't turn out that way. Currently, you can't find this movie anywhere any longer. I thankfully have a DVD of it, because I fortunately found a legitimate VHS tape of it years ago, and could make a DVD with a Panasonic recorder.
The story starts off with a 14-year-old boy named Jimmy, who lives with his grandfather in New York City. His parents died in a car crash a few months earlier and his grandfather did not want him, but had to take him. (He was apparently estranged from his son due to marriage to a woman he didn't approve of.) Jimmy comes home from school one day and his grandfather says unkind and unfair things to him. He runs out of the apartment and his grandfather follows.
Out on the sidewalk, Jimmy meets up with a man dressed as Santa Claus who knows his name. The man leads him into his Santa shop and starts telling him a story about a boy named Tim who lived in Wales long ago. Tim's paternal grandfather refused to acknowledge his existence, since his son married a gypsy girl. His father dies in a war and his mother dies in childbirth, so Tim is raised by his maternal grandfather. Fourteen years later, they return to where Tim was born and Tim has to deal with being part Roma and part gadjo.
The Wales part of the story is the main part and it has nothing to do with Christmas. At the end of the film, however, the story returns to Santa, Jimmy and Jimmy's grandfather, who had entered the shop and listened to the whole story, too. Welsh actor Gweirydd Gwyndaf plays both Jimmy and Tim, and his paternal grandfather is Edward Woodward in both time periods. One could see it simply as two stories with the same lessons to be learned, or as a reincarnation story where lessons once again weren't being learned. Whatever it's meant to be, it's a truly interesting story with an excellent cast. Too bad it isn't shown every Christmas or at least available for streaming somewhere.
