It's the first ever Christmas Special - as opposed to a normal run episode broadcast on 25th December, like The Feast of Steven - so the main inspirations here are many of the traditional Christmas trappings.
Whilst these have happy connotations, associated with gift-giving and family get-togethers, Russell T Davies subverted them for the benefit of an action adventure story - finding ways of making them threatening. In this he was following in the footsteps of Robert Holmes, who had often subverted supposedly safe things to turn them into threats (most noticeably in Terror of the Autons).
As far as the secular Christmas goes, the main figure is Santa Claus. Many people wishing to raise money at this time of year dress up as him, as well as those giving out gifts to children in a variety of settings - from hospital wards to department stores. With a heavy hooded costume and big bushy white beard, the wearer is easily concealed, so it made a perfect disguise for one of this story's villains. These are the Roboforms, or Robot Santas. So disguised are they that we don't actually get to see what lurks underneath the beard and costume.
The Roboforms first appear as a brass band. Salvation Army brass bands are synonymous with Christmas, issuing well known Christmas Carol music.
However, these Santas have weapons disguised as instruments.
At one point they are described as "pilot fish". The naucrates ductor are small black and white striped fish which feed on the parasites which attach themselves to sharks, rays and sea turtles, as well as their leftovers. They get their name from the fact that it used to be thought that they led bigger fish towards sources of food.
In The Christmas Invasion, the Roboforms have come specifically for the Doctor's regeneration energy and the Sycorax are coming to attack anyway, so they aren't actually acting as "pilot fish" at all.
Santa is an amalgam of St Nicholas, Father Christmas and the Dutch Sinterklaas.
The name 'Santa Claus' is a corruption of Saint Nicholas, a 4th Century Greek bishop who was known for his gift giving. He was martyred and his relics are now split between Bari and Venice, and he is the patron saint of both Amsterdam and Moscow.
Father Christmas derives from Tudor England, where he was a bearded figure in either red of green gown. It was as a man garbed in green that he was portrayed in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, translated as the Ghost of Christmas Present. He represented good cheer, feasting and revelry.
With the Reformed Church of England no longer celebrating saints' feast days, St Nicholas' Day on the 6th December was dropped, and Father Christmas was now associated with the 25th of the month.
The 6th December remained the day for gift giving in the Netherlands, however, where the Santa figure is known as Sinterklaas. He is often represented as a bishop figure, in orange robes.
The notion that the traditional Santa Claus we know today is an invention of the Coco-Cola company is not true. They did use the image heavily from the 1930's but another drinks company was already using the image 15 years earlier, and the white bearded, red suited Santa was already featuring in Edwardian images.
The main villains of this story - the Sycorax - also wear red velvet costumes, mirroring the Santa costume.
Another Christmas tradition which Davies includes is the Christmas Tree. The Roboforms plant - no pun intended - a killer remote control one in the Tyler flat.
It was Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria, who popularised the Christmas Tree in England, it having been a popular tradition in his native Saxe-Coburg. The first known Royal Christmas Tree was that of the German Queen Charlotte in 1800.
They are supposed to be erected on the first day of Advent, and taken down on Twelfth Night.
In ancient times, people used to decorate their homes with a wreath of evergreens in mid-winter, as a symbol of eternal life, such as during the Saturnalia of the ancient Romans.
Whilst trees were often decorated with sweets and ribbons, it was Martin Luther who is said to have first added candles - the forebear of the Christmas Tree lights which can be a modern bane.
The Doctor defeats the Sycorax leader with a satsuma. It is traditional to include a small fruit such as a satsuma in a Christmas stocking. In this fight sequence the Doctor seems to suggest that Arthur Dent, the main protagonist of Douglas Adams' The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, exists as a real person in the Doctor Who world.
The notion that Time Lords continue to regenerate for 15 hours may have been included to help explain Romana's try-out of multiple bodies in Destiny of the Daleks, a sequence written by Adams.
The Sycorax are named after the mother of Caliban, from Shakespeare's The Tempest. The character does not appear in the play. Sycorax was a malignant witch who used to live on the island where Prospero dwells, but she died before he arrived. She was the mother of Caliban, and had been responsible for imprisoning Ariel in an oak tree. Prospero uses his own magic to free Ariel, and to enslave Caliban.
The first glimpse of the Sycorax at UNIT HQ shows four of them in a diamond shaped pose - imagery borrowed from Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody video.
The modus operandi of the Sycorax is based on Voodoo, especially in the way they zombify people.
The look of their masks was based on the skulls of horses.
Beagle 2, the ill-fated British lander despatched to the surface of Mars, was the inspiration for the Guinevere probe - the equally doomed mission to Mars in this story. Both factual and fictional probes came a cropper at Christmas. Guinevere collides with the Sycorax spaceship, whilst Beagle 2 crash-landed on the Martian surface when its parachutes failed to deploy as planned.
Finally, Harriet Jones' destruction of the retreating Sycorax spaceship was inspired by the sinking of the Argentine warship General Belgrano during the Falklands conflict. It was torpedoed by a Royal Navy submarine whilst it was outside and moving away from the exclusion zone which the UK government had imposed around the islands.
"Torchwood" are said to have been the ones who fired the weapon - setting this organisation up as the story arc for Series 2.
Next time: New Doctor, New Earth, New New York...
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