Neil Miller is Laura's second husband, Charlie Calvin's stepfather, and Lucy's father in The Santa Clause films.
History[]
Neil married Laura after she divorced Scott. Neil is first seen driving Laura and Charlie to Scott's house on Christmas Eve. He stays in the car to avoid being made fun of by Scott. Charlie gets along well with Neil, even preferring him in many ways to Scott. Neil is a psychiatrist by trade, one of the things Scott ridicules him for. After Laura argues with Scott, she gets back in the car with Neil, and they go to his family's. They return the next day to pick Charlie up. Like Laura, Neil becomes concerned when Charlie starts to display a year-round enthusiasm for Christmas, and telling people Scott has become Santa Claus, which he doesn't believe, even though it's true. Eventually, he and Laura move to have Scott's joint custody right of Charlie revoked.
During the custody hearing, after Laura says that she wanted a Mystery Date board game for Christmas when she was Charlie's age, but never got one, Neil admits that he was three years old, and he wanted an Oscar Meyer weenie whistle; he added that Christmas came, but he didn't get one, and that was when he stopped believing in Santa Claus.
Neal then apologizes to Charlie for not believing him when he said that Scott was Santa, and Charlie replied, "That's okay, Neil. You were just denying your inner child." At the end of the movie, when Scott/Santa drops those gifts for Charlie, Neal, and Laura. Neil gets a wienie whistle from Oscar Mayer and blows it with a look of childlike wonder in his eyes.
In between 1994 and 2002, Neil and Laura have had a daughter together, named Lucy. Neil and Scott get along much better by then, although Scott still occasionally makes fun of him. Neal was surprised to hear that Scott has to get married in order to keep being Santa. Neil tells Scott that he can do it before he notices Scott slowly changing back to his old face. Later when Scott and Curtis were trying to summon the tooth fairy in order to get to the North Pole, Neil attempted to help. He tied one of Scott's teeth to a toaster to make it come out which Neil had done several times when he was young in order to get money much to Laura's disbelief. The attempt didn't work, and Scott ended up falling down the stairs instead. Luckily for them, his daughter Lucy had one of her baby teeth come out which attracted the Tooth Fairy.
In the third film, Neil and Laura guilt Scott into inviting Lucy to the North Pole because it did not seem fair that he brought his son and not her there. They also insist on going along to supervise. Once at the North Pole, Neil and Laura are greatly amazed at the sight of being at the actual workshop and happily enjoy themselves. However, when Lucy discovers Jack Frost's plot to become Santa Claus, she alerts Laura and Neil, but when they get to her, Jack Frost freezes them. Scott restores the original timeline and Lucy hugs Jack Frost to normal which unfreezes Neil and Laura.
In the alternate timeline where Scott never becomes Santa Claus, Neil's marriage to Laura ends in divorce because Scott continued to be a workaholic in this timeline and becomes even more of an absentee father. Neil tries his best to be a father to Charlie, but Charlie resents this, placing a lot of stress on him and Laura. Scott tracks Neil and Laura down to the North Pole, in which Jack Frost is now Santa. He turns it into an amusement park and Neal takes Lucy there every year. Lucy is not the same sweet child in this timeline, and she just acts demanding to Neil. Neil is also antagonistic to Scott. Scott eventually succeeds in restoring the original timeline.
Gallery[]
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