As the story goes, Santa inhabits the North Pole with his faithful wife Mrs. Claus. He and his diligent band of elven laborers toil year-round to produce toys for the good boys and girls of the world. On Christmas eve, he departs on a toy-filled sleigh pulled by a herd (or perhaps a flock) of flying reindeer. Traversing the entire planet in a single night, he lands on the rooftop of the home of each worthy child. He enters by descending through the chimney, whereupon he fills the stockings on the hearth and places presents beneath the tree. Then he leaves as he entered, mounts his trusty sleigh, and embarks for the next house. After circumnavigating the globe he returns to his Arctic abode, presumably to begin preparations for the next year’s journey.
Though Santa at times goes by the name Saint Nicholas, Santa’s exploits dramatically differ from those of his namesake. The historical Nicholas presided as bishop of Myra, in present-day Turkey, during the early 4th century. He reputedly gave dowries to poverty-stricken young ladies, thereby enabling them to marry and avoid lives of prostitution. According to tradition, he also raised to life three children whom a butcher had chopped to death. In time he became the patron saint of Russia and Greece, and of charitable fraternities and guilds, children, sailors, unmarried girls, merchants, and pawnbrokers. The Protestant Reformation herald the demise of Nicholas’ cult in Europe, except in Holland, whose citizens referred to him as Sinterklaas. Dutch colonists brought stories of him to America, where English-speakers appropriated him under the name of Santa Claus. There the traditions surrounding him coalesced with Nordic folk tales about a magician who rewards good children and punishes bad ones. Not until the 19th century did the modern portrait of Santa emerge.
Despite this inexplicable metamorphosis, Santa may still appear benign, if preposterous. However, a more insidious portrait of the man and his work emerges from the songs composed in his honor. The children’s favorite Santa Claus Is Coming To Town presents a particularly disturbing conception of him. It begins:
You better watch out, you better not cry
You better not pout, I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
He’s making a list, checking it twice
Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
Santa Claus is coming to town
Already, the lyric s describe Santa as an intimidating authority figure. They call upon children to behave in an upright fashion, and imply that Santa’s arrival will hasten a reckoning for those who fail to do so. He comes to town as Wyatt Earp came to Tombstone, Arizona. In the past a mother may have chastised her disobedient children by informing them of what their father would do had he witnessed their transgressions, but on the basis of this song one can now imagine the mother invoking Santa as the fearsome disciplinarian instead.
Yet the subsequent lyrics make the initial ones pale by comparison:
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness’ sake
Incredibly, the lyrics have progressed from merely characterizing Santa as a judge dispensing rewards and punishments to asserting his omnipresence and omniscience. Beyond the obvious absurdity of these affirmations lies a great and perverse irony. Monotheistic religions have traditionally regarded God as an omnipresent, omniscient judge who rewards people according to their deeds. The ascription of these qualities to Santa is therefore tantamount to an attribution of divinity to him.
This apotheosis seriously impeaches Santa’s ability to represent the modern, religiously pluralistic Christmas. It raises the question of what fundamentally differentiates the “cult of Santa” from the Christianity it supplants. Both have a core narrative construing their central figures in divine terms. Both have millions of adherents, who sing hymns extolling the miracles of their respective founders. Both deal with the issue of sin and its consequences, and promote a moral agenda. Both have a strong tradition of evangelism. The most glaring difference seems to reside in the fact that not even Santa’s followers actually believe in him. This distinction apparently legitimizes Santa as an acceptable public symbol in a diverse nation. Since not everyone has faith in Jesus Christ, he ranks as too contentious for such a role. However, since no one has faith in Santa, he does not generate that sort of controversy. In tolerance-crazed America, it seems, it is only socially acceptable to proselytize when the faith involved is universally regarded as untrue.
However, the ultimate indignity occurs when those who disbelieve in Santa conspire to indoctrinate the innocent and unwitting into believing in him. These adults proselytize their own and others’ children, only to later disabuse them of the very notions they themselves had inculcated in them. While such efforts may bespeak noble intentions, they cannot by definition amount to anything besides intentional deceit, a behavior commonly known as lying. Unfortunately, when it comes to Santa Claus, this concept of “noble deceit” has a venerable history. For example, in 1897, the New York Sun received the following letter from a girl named Virginia O’Hanlon:
“I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it's so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”
To this sincere question, the Sun staked its authority and reputation on a grotesque, six-paragraph response. Excerpts from it include:
“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. . . .
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! . . . There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. . . .
“No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”
No motivation, however well-intentioned, could possibly justify this reply. Though it rightly asserts the existence of realities beyond the senses and the mind, it treacherously links belief in Santa to belief in love, generosity, devotion. faith, poetry, and romance. It even suggests a link between belief in Santa and belief in God. Since Santa’s existence is not merely uncertain but manifestly false, The Sun’s ghastly logic implies the same conclusion for all the others. When Virginia grew up, she probably did not abandon her faith in these things along with her faith in Santa. She likely adopted a more nuanced view of truth which allowed her to accept her answer in the disingenuous spirit in which it was offered. In doing so, she lost the very childlike simplicity the newspaper intended to commend.
What would compel a person to promote a ludicrous fictional character and lie to children about him? Another notable Christmas song may hint at an answer. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” the song of the same name declares. It then goes on to list many reasons for this assertion, such as the jingling of bells, the congregating of friends and family, the hosting of parties, the toasting of marshmallows, the singing of carols, “mistletoeing”, and, strangely enough, the telling of ghost stories. Yet people can make noise, gather, party, eat, sing, kiss, and talk at any time of year; these activities do not gain any special significance by occurring in a particular season, during a particular month, or on a particular day. Neither do they create some mystical synergy by taking place simultaneously, or all within the context of a single celebration. The traditions of Christmas alone, however enjoyable some may find them, simply fail to make the holiday nearly as wonderful as the song suggests. For Christmas to achieve that superlative degree of wonder, something truly wondrous must make it so. Some fact, event, story, or state of affairs must exist which places the celebration of Christmas in a context such that the practices associated with it take on a significance which they lack in and of themselves.
Unfortunately, in this postmodern age, an “incredulity towards metanarratives” dominates the intellectual climate. This philosophy excludes any practical possibility of people sharing an overarching explanation which could contextualize the human experience and invest it with meaning. Thus, while individuals can personally discover wonder-conferring Christmas narratives, they cannot absolutize those narratives to apply to anyone beyond themselves. This phenomenon works to the detriment of cultural cohesiveness, since a community derives identity and unity from shared traditions and values. National holidays like Christmas, which create an expectation of participation on the part of all, make the need for a common frame of reference particularly acute. Through Santa Claus, society has devised an ingenious resolution to this issue. Precluded from concurring on the truth of a metanarrative, it has concurred on the falsity of one and embraced that instead. This arrangement allows people to celebrate Santa’s fanciful tales without assenting to their truth, thereby enabling language about him to serve as a sort of contrived lingua franca for the pleasant exchange of holiday wishes. Since Santa demands not loyalty but lip service, he facilitates an otherwise improbable unity amongst people of diverse perspectives. And innocent children truly do find him wondrous.
Recent developments, however, could eventually render this entire discussion obsolete. If a prototypical postmodernism encouraged the origination of Santa Claus, then an exaggerated form of it may herald his demise. Certain cultural elements, opposed to the prominence of religion in general and Christianity in particular, perceive Christmas as incorrigibly Christian and cannot tolerate even a secular Santa. Advocating not freedom of religion but freedom from religion, these forces wish to eradicate him, along with any vestige of the holiday he represents. This course of action, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would leave Frosty the Snowman as the only neutral symbol of a season which would amount to just that: a meteorologically distinct but otherwise unexceptional three-month period between autumn and spring. This attitude evinces more consistency than that of those who would reject Jesus but not Santa, since it regards promoting either individual as equally unacceptable. But its underlying rationale proves even more dubious, because it does not appeal to any standard of truth or honesty, only to a severe antagonism towards Christianity. It is exceedingly ironic that the most strident opposition to Santa comes, not from those concerned with the fact that he embodies falsity, but from those concerned about his relationship to a religion whose adherents regard Jesus as the personification of truth. Of all the reasons to dispense with the foolish pretense of belief in Santa, his arbitrary association with Jesus counts as the worst.
Christmastime features other celebrations besides Christmas itself: religious holidays like Hanukkah, non-religious festivals like Kwanzaa, and all the traditional rituals associated with the season and practiced by those of various religious dispositions. This diversity of opinion and expression makes honesty the only appropriate response. While human beings will never unanimously agree as to what constitutes absolute truth, they can certainly unite in repudiating absolute lies. Santa Claus qualifies as just such a lie, and humanity must refuse to perpetuate the myth of his existence any longer. If parents insist on teaching their children about Santa, they must divest him of his pseudo-divinity and explicitly portray him as a legendary figure, who, like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. symbolizes traits valued by his culture of origin. All people everywhere must henceforth confine themselves to only making statements which they themselves actually believe. The particulars involved may seem insignificant, but the principles remain profoundly consequential.
