by Gerry Bowler
In one of those ironies that makes the study of ideology so interesting, Santa Claus, descendant of a saint and one who had found himself banned from Eastern Europe by Joseph Stalin, now found himself under attack from minions of the Pope. The first blow from Mother Church originated in the United States. The Catholic Review of December 16, 1949, attacked “Santa the Sugar Daddy” as “an unholy fraud.” The Washington Post made this front-page news and reprinted the editorial in full. Santa Claus, it was said, had replaced the Christ child at the centre of Christmas, and children were subject to a “painful, unnecessary and dangerous disillusionment” after a “cheap enchantment,” which could discredit parental authority. Families should abandon this myth: “Leave Santa to those who have nothing better. Leave him to those for whom life must end in disillusion and despair.” This American Catholic attack was amplified two years later in France. Dijon is an ancient city in the Burgundy district of France, better known for its wine and popular mustard than for controversy, but in December 1951 the public burning of Santa Claus in its cathedral attracted world attention. This was a demonstration of the long-simmering resentment of the French Catholic Church against the growing influence of Santa in the lives of families at the expense of the more traditional seasonal symbols, the Nativity scene and Christ child. The American Santa, said local church leaders, represented the paganization of an important Christian festival and was a myth devoid of religious value; he was a heretic and an usurper, and in front of 250 children an effigy of the interloper was sent up in smoke. The local Catholic Youth Association issued a statement declaring, “Desirous of fighting lies and deceitful fables, we have burned this Santa Claus. It is not intended as a sporting or commercial show, but to proclaim loudly that lies cannot arouse the religious sentiment of a child and are in no way a method of education for life.” Cardinal Saliège, the archbishop of Toulon, accused Santa Claus supporters of using him as a way to strip Christmas of its religious character, while Cardinal Roques, the archbishop of Rennes, denounced the unreasoning stupidity behind this imaginary character. Here the bishops were joining a crew of French Santa critics that included academics, psychiatrists, Marxist theoreticians, and other anti-American elements among the intelligentsia. Less than a day later, however, pro-Santa forces had regrouped and a demonstration in favour of Père Noël was held in front of the Dijon town hall, where children were reassured of his continued existence. In Franco’s Spain, where foreign practices of all sorts were habitually viewed with alarm, the Spanish Catholic Church issued an episcopal warning against alien Christmas customs, especially Santa Claus. Long-standing tradition in Spain was to give Christmas gifts at Epiphany (January 6) and attribute their miraculous delivery to the three wise men. Troubled by what they perceived to be an increasing “deviationist” tendency to shift gift-giving to Christmas Eve, bishops in 1952 condemned this “snobbishness” as a Protestant attempt to “undermine the deepest Christian meaning” of a Spanish tradition. Moreover the impudent appearance of Santa Claus in the fantasy world of young Spaniards concealed “a sectarian aim hidden under the red garb of an Old Man who seems naive but who has spent many years of his life as a knave.” Latin American bishops in the 1970s would go further than the accusation of knavery and label Santa Claus a “fat drunk.”
Some American Protestants also found that they had misgivings about the role of Santa Claus in their celebration of Christmas. They worried that the celebration of the Nativity had been inappropriately commercialized. They saw Santa muscling the baby Jesus out of the picture and “Santology” replacing a Christian theology of the season. For such folk, Santa Claus, by promising to reward the good and punish the naughty, reinforces the idea that poor children, who receive fewer and cheaper presents, are bad and the privileged are good. Others were horrified by the expectations that their children placed on Santa, high expectations of material bounty that inevitably fell short of satisfying. One parent discovered that her nine-year-old son had produced a list of sixty namebrand items that Santa Claus was to deliver. Another found her daughter crying in the closet on Christmas Day, emotionally wrung out after opening all her gifts and disappointed by her own lack of joy. “If I had known that this was all there was to Christmas,” she explained to her mother, “I wouldn’t have waited so long.” One child’s solution to this problem was to ask Santa to come earlier, say November 10.
Though some Christians had reservations about Santa Claus, they did not want to abolish him, much less make the entire season disappear. There were, however, critics who held to just such a view – hard-line ultra-Protestants, reddest of the rednecks who believed that the Pope was the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation, with nothing good to say about Santa Claus or Christmas. The Reverend Martin F. Clough offered this opinion in 1949:
Santa is the most popular hoax of the age. Around the globe so-called Christian parents are deceiving the children about Santa Claus. Santa Claus is a modern representative of the heathen god Nimrod who is a defiant hater of God and Satan’s earliest effort to produce Anti-Christ.*
In 1975, a Florida Holiness Church lynched two effigies of Santa Claus; five years later the Truth Tabernacle of Burlington, North Carolina, had the decency to give Santa a trial on charges of paganism, fraud, and perjury before finding him guilty and hanging him. (It should be noted that Mr. Claus was not represented by an attorney of his choice.) A 1990 tract from North Carolina portrayed Santa Claus as the devil and included a poem called “Ho! Ho! Ho!”:
The devil has a demon,
His name is Santa Claus.
He’s a dirty old demon
Because of last year’s flaws.
He promised Jack a yo-yo,
And Jill a diamond ring.
They woke up on Christmas morning
Without a single thing …
One day they’ll stand before God
Without their bag of tricks.
Without their red-nosed reindeer
Or their phony old Saint Nicks;
For Revelation twenty-one,
Verse eight, tells where they’ll go:
Condemned to everlasting hell,
Where there’ll be no Ho! Ho! Ho!*
Such churches despise Santa Claus because attention paid to him violates the second of the Ten Commandments and becomes a form of idolatry. The substitution of Santa (more properly “Satan”) Claus for Jesus is revealed by the following chart*:
SANTA CLAUS
JESUS CHRIST
1. Has white hair like wool
1. Rev. 1:14; Daniel 7:9
2. Beard – curly and white
2. Isaiah 50:6; Rev. 1:14
3. Comes from North Pole
3. Ez. 1:4; Ex. 26:35; Psa. 48:2
4. Omniscient – knows about all
4. Rev. 19:6
5. Ageless, eternal
5. Rev. 1:8, 21:6; Hebrews 13:8
6. Makes list of judgments
6. Rev. 20:12; 14:7; 21:27; 2 Cor. 5:10
7. Checks list twice
7. Dan. 8:14; Matt. 10:26, 1 Cor. 5:10
8. Gifts given on basis of a list
8. Matt. 25:21; Rev. 21:27; 22:14
9. Christmas rewards once yearly
9. Leviticus 23:26–32
10. Confess wrongs to Santa
10. I John 2:1, I Tim. 2:5
11. Promise to be better next year
11. John 14:15, 21; 15:10; I Jn. 2:3
12. Asks children to obey parents
12. Eph. 6:1; Prov. 6:20; Col 3:20
13. Comes on Christ’s birthday
13. Heb. 12:2, 2 Cor. 4:18; Psa. 141:8
14. Hour of his coming a mystery
14. Luke 12:40; Mark 13:33; Matt. 24:36
15. Rudolph’s shining nose to guide
15. Matt. 2:2, 7, 9–10; Numbers 24:17
16. Calls all children to his knee
16. Matt. 19:14, Luke 18:16
17. Be good for goodness’ sake
17. Matt. 19:17; Col 1:29; Phil. 2:13
18. Has a twinkle in his eye
18. Rev. 1:14, 2:18
19. Swift visit to whole world in one day
19. 2 Peter 3:8; Rev. 18:8, Isa. 47:9
20. Omnipresent – found in every mall
20. Psa. 139:7–10; Eph. 4:6
Despite some questionable theology, fundamentalist objectors do raise points that concerned parents had first posed in the nineteenth century: isn’t propagating the Santa Claus myth really telling a lie? Aren’t there moral and spiritual consequences to such an untruth? Said one neo-Calvinist analyst:
Parents who tell their children the Santa Claus myth are endangering their credibility with their children. When they ask you, “Can Santa really see me through these walls?” – What do you reply? Our children ought to be able to know that they can trust everything we tell them without question. How else can we tell them to believe us when we teach them in childhood from the holy scriptures those things “which are able to make them wise unto salvation,” even “the mystery of godliness, that God was manifest in the flesh?”
Santa had seen this type of opposition before and found it dreadfully discouraging. In a self-pitying moment in 1897, he had written his “Farewell,” which was printed by Life magazine. In it he said that he had hopes of being remembered in Europe, but that his imminent demise in America had been brought about by religion:
I die because those who preach the tenderness of Christ to little children say that those parents lie sinfully who mask their own tender impulses under a gentle fable to please their little ones. Santa Claus was always the friend of good and trusting children. That they believed in him was a sign of the goodness of parents who begat them. The children who believed not in him were the children of evil parents, who never cared for the happiness of their offspring.… No discovery of Science has killed me. I was too small a lie to be worthy of the serious warfare of scientific truth. The fine weapons of those who, under the garb of religion, are always looking for wrong in others, have laid me low. Poor Santa Claus departs this earth, not because he did wrong, but because he could not survive the attacks of those who regard happiness as a sin.
Fortunately, Santa survived his case of the blues in 1897. But he was to meet a new enemy in the twentieth century: the psychiatrist.
“A child who believes in Santa Claus, who really and literally believes, because his daddy told him so, that Santa comes down all the chimneys in the world on the same night has had his thinking ability permanently impaired if not destroyed.” So spoke Dr. Brock Chisholm, Canadian war hero, psychiatrist, agnostic, civil servant, proponent of masturbation, eugenics, and world government, and first director-general of the World Health Organization. In 1945, his remarks on the dangers of Santa Claus erupted into a major political scandal with calls for Chisholm’s resignation, calls that he studiously ignored. Though busy on the global stage, Chisholm found time to continue his war on imaginary gift-bringers. Such stories could turn intelligent children into deeply troubled youth, as in the case of a boy Chisholm treated who was wont to wake in the night screaming, was afraid of falling asleep, and was becoming quite reclusive. The trouble was that he believed there might be a big black bear in his room, one capable of flying and getting through small cracks. When taxed with the irrationality of this belief, the boy panicked. Says Chisholm:
Suddenly he leaped at me and beat me on the chest with his fists as high as he could reach on my body and said, “Can Santa Claus come down the chimney? You have got to tell me. You have got to tell me. You have got to tell me.”
If Santa Claus can come down the chimney, what is the good of telling him that a black bear can’t get into his bedroom. None, because he was an intelligent child. If reindeer can fly through the air, and a great fat Santa Claus can come down a chimney with all sorts of things on his back and Santa Claus can call on all the houses in the world in one night and note all about the behavior of all children, then what is the good of thinking about these things because it only leads you to the conclusion that your parents are liars and you can’t believe them at all. This is the only intelligent conclusion an intelligent child can reach. As this is so painful and difficult for a child, he controls his thinking. He says: I must not think these dreadful things, thus he learns to dissociate. He thus learns to divorce cause from fact and not think through in terms of cause and effect even in terms of his own behavior. We produce or do everything we can to produce a totally irresponsible citizen who cannot be expected to think sensibly and reasonably about things throughout his lifetime, or at least produce a person who finds great difficulty in doing so. We have taught him under colossal emotional pressure to do just that – not to think.
Moreover, said Chisholm, a child who believes in Santa Claus grows up to be “the kind of man who will develop a sore back when there is a tough job to do and refuse to think realistically when war threatens.” A businessman with an ulcer and nervous problems can blame his middle-aged ailments on the foolishness he believed as a child. Chisholm announced in 1951 that he was going to bring the case of Santa Claus before the United Nations as a means of denouncing all such local and national fictions that sapped the children of the world of that universal spirit that was necessary for mankind to solve the planet’s problems.
Other psychiatrists piled on, all convinced of the claim of Adriaan de Groot, that “psychoanalytic interpretation can help to recover what has with time become invisible even to the historian after so many centuries of repression and covering up.” And so Renzo Sereno tells us that children, left to themselves, would have nothing to do with Santa Claus, a figure who confuses them and who instills no sense of trust. Parents, however, force children into a Christmas charade partly to prove their own worth, to redeem a frustrated childhood by purchasing a toy they might have wanted in their own youth, and to induce good behaviour. The kids’ natural apprehension and discomfort about Santa Claus is replaced on Christmas morning with a sense of relief – he won’t be back for another year and the feeling of having been lied to by their parents subsides. Though children and adults alike need to believe in something divine – a magical gift-bringer – charmless Santa fails to fill the bill. Kids would prefer a gift straight from the parent as a token of love – instead of receiving things through a middleman like Santa Claus. Consequently, the child “begins to nourish doubts about the love of his parents, and resents being obligated to a mythical ludicrous stranger, rather than being tied to those whom one loves most. In its present form Santa Claus is a harrowing experience …” Sereno professes never to have encountered anyone with a positive experience of Santa Claus. No one who has admitted to believing in him, or being pleased by him, as a child; department-store Santas he interviewed were either jaded old pros in a bars or pompous would-be actors; parents all seemed to resent their kids for not having fun visiting Santa Claus. Everyone, but particularly children, were victims of the “hideous tale” that was Santa.
Other psychiatric approaches have yielded findings such as: Santa is expected to cure penis envy; he recapitulates the entire reproductive cycle (his fat belly is clearly a token of pregnancy and his trip through the fireplace recreates our descent through the birth canal); he is a father figure; a grandfather figure; a sexually ambiguous figure; a fear of death ritual; an Oedipal symbol; a totemic symbol; a fire-mastering shaman; a union of Gaia and Uranus; a myth that relieves the infant’s fear of its mother; a burdensome transaction between the generations; and a poor second to Barney, the purple dinosaur.
At some point in the collective psyche of Western civilization, a nasty idea emerged: Christmas, far from being a universally adored festival, is, in truth, a threat to social harmony. Many people who came to hold this opinion worked in the Umbrage Industry, a segment of the economy that employed people to be upset on behalf of others. These “diversity coordinators,” “multicultural officers,” and “respectful workplace supervisors” were found in most government departments, educational institutions, and larger businesses. The
ir job was to clear the public sphere of all expressions that were in any way religious or otherwise potentially exclusive – that is to say, that had positive meanings for some social groups and not others. A series of extraordinary court decisions had prepared the ground for this attitude to be applied to the Christmas season. Led by the ironically named American Civil Liberties Union, offended citizens across the United States had succeeded in forbidding town halls from displaying Nativity scenes unless the spiritual messages implied were sufficiently diluted by the presence of secular elements such as candy canes and elves (the so-called Reindeer Rule) and school choirs from singing traditional carols. Local authorities began to self-censor: teachers banned students from wishing their classmates “Merry Christmas,” employers replaced annual “Christmas parties” with “holiday parties,” and the city of Pittsburgh went so far as to abolish the Christmas season in favour of “Sparkle Season,” an ill-advised experiment that was ultimately abandoned.
It was inevitable that the same forces that found Christmas objectionable should also determine that Santa Claus was harmful for public consumption. In Kensington, Maryland, in November 2001, the city council outlawed the presence of Santa Claus in the annual Christmas parade. It had been customary for Santa to ride in a fire truck and accompany civic officials to the lighting of the Christmas tree in front of the town hall, but after two families said they would be “uncomfortable,” for religious reasons, in the presence of Santa, council decided that the jolly fat man should be replaced by something more patriotic and less controversial. Outrage was swift. A “Tyranny Response Team” presented council members with Christmas stockings filled with coal and dead branches. Demonstrators called for a Million Santa March; only a few dozen red-clad protestors actually appeared but many of these roared about on motorcycles and pickup trucks shouting, “No Santa, No Peace!” Other Santas handed out candy to children and still others held signs reading, “Grinch for Mayor” and “Celebrate Santa.” In the end, tradition prevailed and Santa Claus did appear on his fire engine.