It’s Christmas time here at the Fan. As if you couldn’t tell by all the ear-murdering Christmas music covers blasting in every single store. In light of the season, I picked an anime that when I started I could’ve sworn couldn’t exist. That’s right, an anime [loosely] about Santa.

When I decided I wanted to review an anime about Christmas, I figured I was licked to begin with. I mean, I’m trying to find a show about Christmas from the country that made a picture of Santa on the cross! But after about a minute of Googling I managed to come across Itsudatte My Santa!, and I can’t say I was disappointed; it was almost exactly how I imagined it would be.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but the first thing I noticed within ten seconds of watching is the opening exposition being disturbingly similar to that of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. If anything go and watch the first ten seconds, it’s uncanny. So Mr. Depressing Narrator Man talks for a bit about children’s fantasies of Santa being crushed at a young age, and how he never had a Christmas because his parents were always away on important business. Instead his grandma made him a giant cake each year, and that cake for one made him even more depressed. To top off this beautiful speech, he denounces Santa’s existence. This guy’s kind of a downer.

Before the credits can even finish fading away, a conversation between two teenagers, a guy and girl, with the girl inviting the guy to spend the night with her, which is apparently a huge scandal judging by the surrounding crowd’s reactions. To not look like some sort of pervert, she then smacks him to the floor. Reputation Saved. Then she claims to be Santa and a pinnacle of purity that would never do something so terrible. She even got a free police escort.

The more she speaks, the more she seems like Christmas’s version of Himeko from Pani Poni Dash; can’t decide if that’s good or bad. After Kyon guy attempting to run away from Himeko girl, he blurts out he hates Christmas because he was born on December 24th and named Santa because of it, which is a pretty good reason. Her reaction has to be my quote of the week though:

Well fine. If he doesn’t think he needs me to make him happy, I’ll just stick to him like glue until he finally decides to cheer up some.

The logic is painfully infallible there. Que stalking montage! (Oh by the way, she can conjure any item beginning in “san” because of Santa magic.) Naturally though, running blindly around the city is a bad idea. Not long after he starts running, Santa bumps into a gang leader and forces him to drop his three month pre-ordered cake, cus that’s what gangs do right? Eat fancy cake? So naturally he beats up Santa, then gets beat up by Mai (girl.) After all that hooplah Santa gives in to spending the night with Mai.

Within an hour or two, Santa goes from total recluse to sitting outside the [see-through] shower talking to Mai as she bathes. This cycle of manic depressiveness occurs frequently. After a long conversation of explaining his lack of Christmas spirit, Mai makes them a feast, which, as expected, goes over terribly. Long story short they end up on the balcony and she kisses him to transfer “happiness.” Almost immediately he gets a call from his crush inviting him to a party.

So after a day of saying how she’ll make him happy, Mai succeeds with making that phone call happen. But then she yells at him for having the audacity to going to that party instead of being with her; Mai > Happiness. And this is where it gets almost just too much: Santa goes to his crushes house and she claims to never remember calling him, and we find out that Santa apparently never took any of their invitations to other parties, and they have a birthday party for him every Christmas.

Now that he finally has his chance to being happy, spending Christmas with friends, and dating his crush, he runs away back to Mai. He “returns her happiness” by kissing her, conveniently at midnight. If I said it almost got too much earlier, I was wrong. This is where it really gets bad. With a magical girl-style transformation she turns into her “true form” a.k.a. a pin up girl in a near-lingerie Santa outfit (but not without an up-skirt panty shot of course. And that’s not even mentioning the actual transformation itself.)

The newly transformed Santa Mai takes Santa around the world to deliver presents with her. Along the way we see the giant army of other Santa men and pinup Santa girls also delivering presents. She also makes a stop at Santa’s parents’ work so he can finally see them get a phone call from them literally 100 feet away. Now that they’ve made up in their own weird way, Santa is finally happy and goes flying off into the night with Mai on her sleigh.

P.S. Here’s the picture of Santa on the cross.
P.P.S. If you’re a Funimation member you can watch the episode free here.
P.P.P.S. As it turns out, Brittney Karbowski, the voice actress for Mai, actually did play Himeko.