We do. We believe in Santa Claus. It’s apparent in the films that still get made, the animated ones which draw adults (even if they don’t want to admit it) as much as children. It’s apparent in the scale of the Christmas celebration – in the extent of its reach, well beyond those who adhere to the original faith. Santa Claus secularized and popularized Christmas. For many people, Santa holds greater influence over the psyche today than God.
No nation celebrates Christmas with more fervor than America. Americans appropriated all the myths and fables and fairy tales associated with the event and – as Americans are wont to do – transformed Christmas into magic so powerful that to learn the truth about Santa is a traumatic experience for a child. It’s a loss of innocence; a nasty shove toward cruel reality. It’s a trauma we never fully wish to heal. Instead, adults cling for a lifetime – precariously through their children for the most part (outwardly, at least) – to the myth of Santa Claus. Despite knowing full well that Santa doesn’t exist, a tiny childlike insistence that he somehow could exist, that he should exist never really dies.
I grew up in a much different time. The commercialization that exists today had yet to consume the holiday, to overwhelm the ritual. Our mother came into her own during the season that began with a sumptuous Blue-Nun-wine-fueled Thanksgiving. She shaped a magical experience in our family home with selfless energy and surprising creativity; the only time of the year when she took the household reigns and our father did as he was told. The Christmas Tree was always spectacular in its understated beauty, richly ornamented without being gaudy. Stockings our mother had stitched for us when we were very young dangled above the hearth where most evenings a crackling pine-wood fire burned. The house was filled with a unique combination of scents that bewitched us: a sensory overload that lulled all of us into sweet holiday inertia.
Outside, tiny white lights illuminated the shrubbery. And a wreath our mother made herself – her crowning annual achievement – adorned the front door, spotlit by a floodlamp fashioned by our father years ago from a Maxwell House coffee can. Under the gentle supervision of our mother, her wishes expressed in facial expressions more than words, he established the spotlight on the front lawn with careful precision and bridled complaint.
Mistletoe in the foyer and poinsettias throughout the house completed the decoration. The warm glow of the commanding Christmas Tree was the only light in the room, apart from the fire. Its effect was to draw us closer, mute insistence that we come together at the dinner table or before the tree and fire – a potent influence even for my younger sister and I, as recalcitrant teenagers – to watch TV or otherwise talk to our parents in a manner completely out of keeping with any other time of the year. All of the decorating set the stage, the pains and effort we saw our mother endure for the benefit of us all, consciously or unconsciously, her single-minded resolve to preserve our childhood beliefs, worked. It kept us downstairs, out of the adolescent seclusion of our individual bedrooms; it gentled and in some ways ennobled us. This fleeting annual holiday steeped more in the trappings of pagan ritual and Father Christmas than in Christ (which our pious mother from time to time bemoaned) kept a hold on my sister and me for life.
Not everyone has the good fortune to experience a Christmas like this. We assumed – if we thought about it at all – that our mother did all of this for us out of love for her family, pride in her home; although her effort seemed excessive for such prosaic goals. Sadly, she died too soon for us as adults to ask what really had compelled her. I believe – even if she would never have admitted it – that it was – at least, partly – her attempt to recapture childhood, a moment where she renewed the familial security of childish innocence and freedom from care. Not just for herself, but for everyone: for her stolid husband – our emotionally-distant father – and for us. In our case it was not to recapture it but to preserve it for as long as possible; to retain the undeniable enchantment of the season for a lifetime.
The day I came home from school and revealed that I no longer believed in Santa Claus, that I was no longer a child duped by the fantasy, my mother’s tearful reaction shocked me. Afterwards, in the privacy of my room, I wondered at my new-found knowledge. Slowly, my juvenile mind managed to grasp that this wasn’t a discovery to celebrate but a loss to accept with an uncertain yet poignant sense of sadness. The bluster that went with the abandonment of childish things wasn’t compensation enough. In time it was this loss that proved far more momentous than the loss of my virginity not too many years later.
I was instructed – enjoined – to allow my sister her belief in Santa Claus until the inevitable day when she would come home from school with the same announcement. Chastened, feeling almost tainted by my knowledge, I complied. And when she did, our Christmases changed. But not as we would have expected. Gifts beneath the tree took on a more practical nature. Requests were made before Christmas and mostly granted. Yet our mother’s enthusiasm continued unabated; our father’s silent submission remained unchanged. The children’s toys were behind us, but at our mother’s insistence, name tags on presents continued. Written in her elegant penmanship and reused each year, we still found gifts on Christmas morning labeled “From Santa Claus.”
While we were children, Christmas had always demanded at least one church service, in addition to whatever Christmas play was staged at the church schools my sister and I attended. Our mother insisted that the basis for the holiday not be ignored; that it wasn’t only about receiving gifts; that the spiritual aspect was mandatory to ensure proper balance. But as we grew older, after we no longer believed in Santa Claus, even as our church attendance declined – much to our mother’s chagrin – the “pagan” Santa-related rituals continued. We were far from a perfect family – although our mother went to great lengths to preserve that image (despite the far from perfect conduct of the men in her house) – but we came just that little bit closer to perfection toward the end of each year. By Christmas Eve, warm and content in the truly maternal embrace of our family home, there was no place else anyone of us would have wanted to be.
These deeply experiential rituals are what binds us to the belief (or the nostalgia of having believed) in Santa Claus. In a society that today has atomized to the point of total dissolution of the matter that holds us together – marriage, family, community – the Holiday Season and the stubborn refusal to let go of a harmless “belief” in a jolly gift-giving fat man has more staying power (at least in the popular imagination) than God or Christ. Yes, we expect more from our religion than we do from Santa, but it’s also a proposition that demands a far more binding commitment than the simple acceptance of the Father Christmas fable. But the universal appeal of Santa speaks of something more than a brief pleasant return to childhood innocence. There’s a significance in it that we humans intuit perhaps more than we understand. No matter how we may feel about Christ or God, these few remaining pagan comforts are what we cling to, and if we could find a way to embrace this more meaningfully, we may find it possible to extend the warmth of Christmas beyond the all too short season.
Christmas has been commercialized as well as sanitized over the years. Even though it has changed much since my childhood, the unaltered presence of Santa has not. Old Saint Nicholas has weathered the changes well. He has avoided ridicule and revisionism; he offends no one. His wish has remained simple yet profound: “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”