You may have seen the story that an Italian Catholic bishop “spoiled” Christmas for some Italian families by declaring forcefully in the course of a condemnation of consumerism that Santa Claus is a lie.
Christmas is one of the many things that drives historians to despair, in that we know with great confidence exactly how it became the holiday that it is today and what it was before that transformation, at least in the early United States back into the colonial period. In the decades immediately prior to the holiday shifting towards gift-giving and family life, when Santa Claus entered the picture in Anglo-American celebrations around the middle of the 19th Century, Christmas mostly was associated with feasting, drinking and excess. Moreover, in most of Western European and early colonial American history, it was always entangled with the seasonal holidays that many societies in temperate climates with cold winters observe: after harvests are done, food for the winter is preserved, communities that move have shifted to winter dwellings or otherwise prepared for the cold, and agricultural societies are slaughtering livestock that will likely not make it through the winter (either because of insufficient fodder, age, or other reasons), a feast to mark the start of a long period of relative inactivity and isolation is common.
American Christians who today complain of a rising “war on Christmas” are as per their usual at the moment either consciously bullshitting or are completely unaware of the actual history of their religion and its ceremonies. It doesn’t seem as if Santa Claus and consumerism drives the evangelical complaint: it is instead a relatively slight shift in interpersonal etiquette and public culture towards wishing strangers and acquaintances “happy holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas”, in acknowledgement of religious communities that do not observe Christmas as such. That’s evangelical cultural politics these days, where being rude and hostile towards everybody who isn’t in your own group has acquired the force of a commandment.
Though admittedly there also has been some concern for decades about the commercialization of Christmas both from religious communities and otherwise, that really can’t make any sense as a desire to restore the holiday to something purer that it used to be. A non-commercial Christmas that was focused on austere spiritual reflection or on gathering together in community without feasting and drinking would be a wholly new thing in the U.S. and Western Europe, though the option for individuals and families to make that their way of observing the holiday is certainly available to them. But the Italian bishop does have a point, as do his counterparts in the US. There certainly is something uncomfortable about the annual media fretting about whether this Christmas will be good enough to save retailers from bankruptcy, with the usual implication that it’s a civic duty to spend more to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse. Gift-giving is already enough of a mutually resented obligation in social networks without adding that weight to it.
I’m more interested in the perennial thought that has cropped up continuously over most of the 20th Century and into the 21st in conversations about family life, which is whether it’s ok to lie to kids about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and so on. (We had a good seven or eight years here where I staged elaborate St. Patrick’s Day scavenger hunts that were supposedly instigated by a leprechaun where I played that story as if it were absolutely real.)
I’m very much on Team Sure It’s Okay to Lie About Santa, because I think it’s a form of play that teaches children less about consumerism and more about reading, interpreting and composing fiction. You learn a lot about the “willing suspension of disbelief” by maintaining the Santa story (as teller of and listener to the story). That is really what spurs popular anger any time a public figure spills the beans about Santa in a setting where kids might hear. It’s the equivalent of standing up in a movie theater during Avengers: Endgame and loudly lecturing the audience about Why Serious Movies For Adults Are More Important. Don’t crash into someone else’s magic circle when a game is being played, and when the magic circle is big and includes many of your fellow citizens, then just be content to grump out in private.
Except, as always, it’s not quite that simple. A version of that same argument is made by many believing members of a religious community, that it is a rude violation of the respect that we all owe one another to attack the core tenets of their faith in a public setting or in a dialogue. I buy that up to a point: I very much dislike the Richard Dawkins Asshole Church of Atheism.
Another version of the same argument, though, might be to leave people who don’t believe in vaccines or biomedicine alone. And there are other forms of structured lies and elaborated fictions within families and communities that are far more sinister. Say, lately, that American history should be taught as if slavery and racism never existed at all, let alone continue to blight our present moment. Or more intimately, that the harms that some adults do to one another—and to children—in families and neighborhoods should never be spoken of, that people should just pretend. It’s relatively easy to class those kinds of lies as malevolent by pointing out that they aren’t just playful communitarian stories, that they are permitting people to harm others or covering up violence between people. But somewhere there’s a messy space where the stories that some people tell to one another in community and family transgress against other stories and other communities but where that’s the way it’s got to be in a pluralistic society.
There’s some degree of situational license required, not a blanket guarantee that all shared fictions are playfully harmless and must be left alone. The Santa fiction has some terrible dark implications to it, after all, which occur I think to most children readily enough. If you don’t get what you really want, were you bad? Why do bad kids that you know are bad get what they want? Why does Santa favor rich children? If Santa’s making things magically with the help of elves, why is he doling out toys rather than food or medicine?
All questions that powerfully keep me on Team Let’s Lie About Santa, because that’s the virtue of fiction, in the end: that any powerful story, told in a playful spirit, necessarily casts its shadows and has its contradictions. That’s what children learn by participating in and eventually abandoning the Santa story: how to interpret the stories we tell, how to see both what they permit and what they hide.
That’s why I really don’t want, ever to give in to an insistence that we must tell children and ourselves the unvarnished, unmediated, fixed and final truth about Christmas (or anything else), because nothing could be a worse lie or more troubled fiction than the idea that we can actually do that.
Image credit: "L1210140" by Darren and Brad is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Those who want a magic virgin and god-baby for their holiday story are fine with me. I don’t get the surveillance-elf ritual for those who also want Santa, his sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer, but again: tolerance and peace be among us. I like Xmas carols, and I like equally magical lamps that burn for days and days. Lately I have been more interested in Winter Solstice invented traditions, including giant goats and candles all over the place. I’m also down for drinking chocolate and reading books on Xmas Eve. The point for me is not the fictions of the season but the darker beauty of getting through the long night at the turn of the year. So the folklore of the season, maybe, Tim.