"Son of a nutcracker" – Buddy

This Elfalong thing has got a bit out of hand. When I first noticed that Elf was absent from the Channel 4 schedules this year, I was slightly put out. Elf is only a decade old, but Channel 4's Elf Day has already become an institution. For many people, it signals the true start of Christmas.

But while I was slightly put out, everyone else seemed to be genuinely outraged. Elf was their film, and Christmas wasn't going to be Christmas unless there was some sort of communal watch-along. The additional fact that those arch enemies of free fun, Sky Movies, had bought the TV rights – and had completely missed the point by airing it every 20 minutes since November – just made it sting even more. The comments underneath my original article turned into a logjam of people demanding that we took matters into our own hands by all watching Elf on DVD at the same time.

And that's how Elfalong came to be. I picked a time, invented an admittedly quite shoddy hashtag, and the game was afoot. Elfalong has been picked up by the Twitter Elite. It's been mentioned on radio stations and written about in other publications. Village halls are joining in, and I think Mumsnet are on board. Most gratifyingly of all, Elf's director, Jon Favreau, has given us his support by repeatedly tweeting the hashtag to his 1.5 million followers in the last few weeks.

Like I said, it's got a bit out of hand. But that just speaks to how beloved Elf is. Although it's a relatively new film, Elf has become part of the fabric of Christmas in a way that dozens of other films haven't. Elfalong is bigger than all of us now. All that's left for us to do is press play at 3pm. And then get trashed on hot booze, obviously. It's Christmas now, after all.

"No tomatoes. Too vulnerable. Kids, they're already vulnerable" – Miles

Why has Elf become so beloved in such a short time? I think it might be because it manages to delicately walk a very narrow line. It's much harder than it looks to get the tonality of a Christmas film right. If you don't pay the correct amount of respect to the schmaltz and nostalgia that surrounds Christmas, you end up with something as duff and mean-spirited as Danny DeVito's Deck the Halls. But it's just as easy to tip the other way, too. Just look at The Christmas Shoes for the perfect demonstration of how to drown your audience in aggressively sentimental muck.

Somehow Elf avoids all these potential disasters. This is quite the achievement. After all, it's a film about a man who possibly suffers from a learning disability. In one scene he fights a dwarf. In another he sneaks up to a woman in a shower and sings a song about date rape at her. It's always a millimetre from being fully offensive. On the other end of the spectrum, the day is saved by a mass sing along. That's nauseating. People should end their viewings of Elf covered in sick. But they don't, because the film lands right in the sweet spot. Elf is silly but tender. It's respectfully disrespectful. It's fleetingly sad, but it's incredibly funny. It is a Christmas miracle.

"This place reminds me of Santa's Workshop! Except it smells like mushrooms and everyone looks like they want to hurt me" – Buddy

Elf is obviously Will Ferrell's film. But one of my favourite things about it is how perfectly cast all the other roles are. James Caan has just the right amount of aggressive exasperation to convincingly play Buddy's dad. Ed Asner is possibly the definitive modern-day movie Santa. Mary Steenburgen is such a perfect fit as Caan's put-upon wife that she's essentially only played that role ever since. And whoever convinced Bob Newhart to play Papa Elf deserves a medal. He turns in such a sweetly hesitant and apologetic performance that it manages to set the entire tone of the film within the first 30 seconds. Even Zooey Deschanel – perhaps the most jarring inclusion, thanks to her subsequent transformation into a wide-eyed Etsy-fuelled quirkmachine – does a pretty good job of playing Buddy's jaded would-be paramour.

However, despite all that, Elf undoubtedly belongs to Ferrell. Unlike Anchorman, he didn't write the film – that task fell to David Berenbaum, last seen co-writing 2008's The Spiderwick Chronicles – but his sense of humour is embedded throughout its DNA. Realistically, at least three quarters of all the characters Ferrell has ever played have been Buddy-style man-children, but here he's exactly the right mix of innocent and chaotic. The most frightening realisation I experience whenever I watch Elf is that it's not impossible to imagine Adam Sandler being cast in Ferrell's place. The fact that he wasn't is enough reason to warrant a rewatch, surely.

Observations

• What's your favourite Elf scene? I'm currently torn between reporter Claire Lautier corpsing as she's told, "Your eyes tell the story, that's what I love about you", the assumption that we already know exactly how evil the Central Park Rangers are and, obviously, the entire Pennies From Heaven sequence.

• Every time I watch Elf, I forget that Andy Richter is in it. And every time I watch Elf, I get sad that Andy Richter doesn't make more films.

• There is a rumour that Will Ferrell doesn't blink once for the entire duration of this film. I'm too lazy to check this, but knock yourselves out.

• Another good thing about watching Elf at 3pm: we'll be done in time to watch Home Alone on Channel 4 at 5.25pm.

• I'd love to see how you're observing Elfalong. Take a photo and tweet it to me (I'm @StuHeritage) and I'll try to share the best ones. I realise at this point that I have become The One Show, and that this is a state of affairs so personally harrowing that I fear I may never recover. Normal crotchety service will be resumed shortly, I hope.

• Oh, and merry Christmas, obviously.