I’ve already written a mostly serious think-piece about ‘Why the Santa Myth is Bad for Your Children’s Elf’, which you can read by clicking on the highlighted link. I found that the article inspired the same sets of questions, challenges and accusations, which I’ve tried to address here, but this time with a little less of a serious head on. In fact, I’ve gone full-on bonkers in some places. Hope it makes you laugh if we’re sympatico on the subject, and still makes you laugh even if you think I’m the monster (even though it’s clearly you, you monster).
Why are you trying to rubbish Santa? It’s tradition. We’ve always had Santa, elves and reindeer at Christmas time. ALWAYS.
Yes, you’re right, indeed we have. Who can forget the famous cave paintings depicting early man clubbing a bear to death as Donner and Blitzen whizz above his head on a coke-fuelled adventure, pooping down gift-wrapped bones and Christmas cards made from human skin? Or Jesus sitting on Santa’s lap asking for a camel that can go through the eye of a needle, and Santa shaking his head and asking, “Is that on the Pray-station 4?”
The Santa we know today – big red coat, bushy white beard, jelly belly and jolly disposition – has had more origin stories than all of the heroes and villains at Marvel and DC combined. He’s an ever-shifting mish-mash of Christian saints, pagan history and alpine folklore who’s been constantly co-opted and re-packaged by ad-men, marketers and movie moguls the world over, to the point where he’d be almost unrecognisable to those long-ago mountain children who grew up hearing tales of the petty, vengeful old bastard who partnered up with a half-goat, half-demon called Krampus to go around the countryside stuffing kids into a sack. Ho-Ho-Hosef Fritzl.
Shall we bring Krampus back? Shall we? After all, horny old Krampus is far more traditional than the Coca-Cola-coated old coot who shimmies down our chimneys at present. I’m all for it, incidentally. I think Christmas would be improved immeasurably by the introduction of blood-curdling terror (which would also be a perfect complement to Brussels Sprouts).
On second thoughts, let’s not get too hung up on tradition. We used to do a lot of things back in the day: burn witches; stone adulterers; smoke on aeroplanes; vote Liberal Democrat. There’s always room for change. We don’t need to preserve the status quo (and by ‘status quo’ I mean ‘any established or prevailing world-order’ just as much as I do the 1970s rock band, who were fucking terrible).
We already took Jesus out of Christmas.
What’s one more fictional bearded character?
Why can’t you let your kids use their imaginations and believe in magic? Without Santa the world would be a greyer, duller place for kids.
Of course, you’re right. It’s only at Christmas-time that we permit our kids to exercise their imaginations in glorious, ambulatory 4D instead of just making them ingest imaginative content through the TV; making them sit there like old ladies attached to morphine drips, with nary a blink shared between them, as they impassively absorb hour after hour of cartoon dogs or videos of kids on YouTube opening plastic egg-cases (for some inexplicable reason, this is considered entertainment), while we sit there by their sides, occasionally force-feeding them lumps of sugar and chunks of fried pig.
Our kids spend eleven months of every year shuffling around the house like robot-butlers haunted by the souls of civil service middle-managers, daring to imagine only that the next day and the next day and the day after that will be exactly the same as it was today.
Until, that is, the igniting spark of Christmas arrives! Huzzah! ‘Tis yuletime, so come to life, my children. Come to life! It’s time to play, to dare, to dream. Let your thoughts have substance, for ’tis the season of magic. ‘Tis also the season that teaches kids that it’s okay for fat old men to break into houses in the dead of night that have children sleeping in them.
It’s the time of year where parents everywhere will say to their spawn: “Come on, kids, it’s time for your annual, officially-mandated month of very strictly regulated within firmly set parameters imaginative role-play! I know I’ve spent the past year shouting things at you like, ‘Why don’t you live in the real world and stop being silly?’ and ‘No, Kevin, you’re not a magical koala bear on a spaceship with a guitar made of stars, and if you say that one more time I’m going to smash your X-Box into little pieces and feed it to grandma in a sandwich’, and ‘I wish I’d had time to pretend I was a flying postman called Kite Pete AS MY MUM WAS PUNCHING ME IN THE FACE AND TELLING ME SHE WISHED I’D BEEN ABORTED‘, but now – I promise – I’m going to channel all of my dead-eyed vapidity into regurgitating the same old stock-phrases about Santa that I trot out every year, and pretend that I’m taking you on some unforgettable, mind-bending journey to the very periphery of the knowable universe, when in reality I’m just lazy and deeply unimaginative, and SANTA’S NICE, AND I LIKE NICE THINGS, THINGS THAT MAKE PEOPLE GO AWWWWWW, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, plus I really like accessorising trees, and making my house look like a John Lewis catalogue.’
Magic is for life, not just for Christmas. Santa is nothing more than a template, a suggestion, a Shutter-stock photo. Kids should be creating their own mental mischief all the time, every day. And you, as a parent or a big person in their lives, should be running around the house with them pretending to be fifty-foot-high hedgehogs on the run from the Intergalactic Council of Sentient Jelly Cakes, or bears with the heads of dolphins, or screaming at each other in made-up languages. Kids need magic. It sustains them. They just don’t need their magic accompanied by a side-order of lies.
Why is it so important to deceive them as we enchant them? Wouldn’t Santa still be a lark if the kids knew he wasn’t really ‘real’? Of course he would. Harry Potter isn’t real, Star Wars isn’t real, and people have become multi-millionaires a million times over on the back of that shit.
Do you want to go ‘all in’? Is that what you want? You want to go all in? Let’s do it then! Let’s tell our kids that EVERY fictional character is real: Ronald McDonald, the Honey Monster, the Gruffalo, Mr Hankey, Death, dragons, Scooby Doo, Muttley, Garfield, Jesus, Danny Dyer. ALL of them. You want magic? HERE’S your fucking magic!! Check out this world: kids who can’t eat their Rice Krispies because they’re frightened that Snap and Crackle are going to burst out of the packet and kick the fuck out of them; kids who think Ned Flanders is their real next door neighbour; kids who think Voldermort is coming to pick them up from school and then turn into a giant spider and eat them. Let your mentally-exhausted children live in that world. Let them run THAT gauntlet, you sickos.
Or… we could just declassify Santa.
Oh, come on, you believed in Santa as a child, and I’ll bet YOU liked it, you big spoil-sport
It’s simple, really. Nothing should be done to inhibit a child’s burgeoning critical faculties, or to corrupt their very sense of the world as an observable, rational and comprehensible place. But don’t get me wrong. You’re right. I myself used to believe wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. I used to get letters from him, in very ornate handwriting. And I thought, this could only be the work of a magical being, he writes like a bloody pro. This guy’s the real deal. I also used to get plenty of Valentine’s cards. I don’t think I can properly express the horror I felt on the day I was old enough to realise that the letters from Santa and the Valentine’s cards were all in the same handwriting. That was a shock to me. “Well, Santa. I see last year’s presents have come with a few strings attached. I’m not that sort of boy. But maybe throw in a few Easter eggs and we’ll talk.”
The truth was even more horrible. I cross-referenced the Santa letters and the valentine’s cards with the handwriting on my birthday cards. Turns out the Santa letters and the VD cards were from my gran.
“Roses are red, I’m your mum’s mummy, and I’m going to stuff you, back up in my tummy.”
I know she was just trying to boost my fragile little-boy ego around Valentine’s Day, but I really bought in to the whole romantic fantasy. And all that time the unrequited love of my young life was a bloated septuagenarian who smelled of cabbage. I was cat-fished by own gran before it was even a thing.
Yee-Haw! It’s Sharkmas!
Imagine if you heard about a culture where the kids were told that every June the 15th a cowboy called Finn Clintson hurtled around the world on a great white flying shark, stopping off to eat air fresheners out of people’s cars, and delivering boxes of rice only to those houses where the kids were managing to play darts at a professional standard.
Families start putting neon sharks in their windows at the end of May. They take their kids to aquariums where they sit on Finn Clintson’s great white shark (a stuffed one, of course) and tell Finn what kind of rice they’d like for Sharkmas. On Sharkmas Eve, all the dads put fresh stacks of air fresheners in their cars, and leave the doors unlocked so Finn Clintson doesn’t have to break through a window. The cries of ONE HUNDRED AND EIIIIIIIGGGHTTTYY can be heard bellowing from every window, down every street, between May and June, as kids everywhere almost break themselves trying to emulate their Sharkmas hero, Les ‘Danger’ Wallace. Listen carefully and you’ll hear: “DO YOU EVEN WANT TEMPURA RICE THIS YEAR, ABIGAIL?” and “YOU MISSED DOUBLE-TOP? IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO MAKE FINN CLINTSON’S SHARK DIE OF SADNESS!!”
And no-one’s allowed to tell their kids that Finn Clintson isn’t real, or where the rice really comes from, or that sharks can’t fly. Even the schools keep up the charade, bringing Finn Clintsons into the school and having the kids make little wooden great white shark decorations to dangle from their Sharkmas Hat Rack. Ten year old kids are walking around literally believing in flying sharks and cowboys dropping rice-boxes in people’s houses at night.
What would you think of that culture?
You’d think they were all cruel and mental, right?
Happy Sharkmas, you cunts.
What’s wrong with the whole Santa thing? Why can’t you let kids have their innocence a little longer, when this world is such a terrible, horrible, disgusting, nightmarish place?
The sort of people who trot this one out are usually the sort of people who spend more on their Christmas decorations than the GDPs of most small countries. While the poor line up on Christmas Eve to get tinned turkey from their local food banks, they’re busy spunking out £50-a-pop on individual strings of ethically-sourced tinsel from John Lewis and £600-a-go on tree baubles designed by John Paul Gaultier that have been pain-stakingly moulded from impressions taken of Paul Hollywood’s balls, all in the name of erecting a festive art installation in their homes that’s as close to the anti-septic perfection of a snap in an upmarket catalogue that a person can get their house to look and feel before it tips over into becoming a modern-day emperor’s mausoleum.
“We need Santa as a bulwark against this horrible world,” they say, as their kids open up a parcel containing a functioning, sentient robot and a watch that can tell the time in other galaxies. “They need to keep their innocence,” they say, as they drive their kids to Jenners’ Boxing Day sale, passing housing schemes along the way where the kids had out-of-date toothpaste for breakfast and dog-food for dinner, and had to take their siblings on in hand-to-hand combat for the privilege.
“Why is this world such a big, cruel, savage toilet?” they ask, as they fill out forms to send their kids to schools with wrought-iron gates and ivy creeping up the balustrades.
Santa doesn’t visit the schemes and estates where the red on the Aquafresh is actually blood. He just flies over them, as high above the ground as possible, tutting and shaking his head. Maybe he ejects the odd teddy bear with an eye missing, or a spoon without a handle, just to feel festive, but he daren’t land. “They’d have the fucking runners off my sleigh in a heartbeat,” he says, with a nervous laugh. “And they’d have the reindeer fighting to the death in an underground betting shop.”
Believing in Santa never did YOU any harm though, did it?
First of all, how do you know? How do any of us know? Millions upon millions of Americans think it’s normal to want school teachers to carry guns, or for poor people to die in agony because they can’t afford hospital treatment. That’s only crazy from the outside looking in.
Am I right, Finn Clintson?
Anyway, I’m not sure that exposure to organised religion at a young age did me any lasting harm (I’m an ardent atheist these days), but that doesn’t mean that I consider organised religion to be harmless. It’s incredibly dangerous, but in the wrong hands, and heads, it’s incalculably so.
My gran smoked for about nine decades and didn’t die directly from smoking-related illnesses, but that doesn’t mean that smoking is safe.
I once lathered my naked body in liquid LSD and then tried to recreate the classic arcade game Frogger by repeatedly running backwards and forwards across the motorway, but I was killed by a truck and came back as a High Priest of the Gnome people, so maybe that’s not such a great example.
In any case, whatever supernatural stories you need to tell yourself to make you feel better about your own actions, or less afraid of your own inevitable death, and whatever all-powerful entities you need to create in order to give those stories life, are all absolutely fine. They are. Really. They’re great. More power to you. Just so long as they don’t bring harm to any other living being – yourself included.
But the second you start seeking out other like-minded ‘souls’ with similar beliefs and supernatural figureheads to yours, with a view to forming a club, one which quickly moves to multiply, standardise, immortalise and spread its rules and beliefs in the form of some irrevocable holy manifesto, the contents of which are destined to be poured down the throats of ‘heathens’ and children everywhere, then that’s not so fine. Then it becomes political. But worse. Because while political leaders and political ideas can change and evolve with time (in theory, at least), religious leaders and ideas – in the main – do not. Otherwise, what’s the point? Either your God has all the power and all the answers, or he’s a pretty shit God, right? Religion is nothing more than politics preached from the cloud and the pulpit, as opposed to the podium and the press conference.
The big difference is, though – again in theory, and specific to this place and time – I’ve got at least some say over whether or not my kids are proselytised into a religion, or indeed a political party. I don’t seem to have any power over whether or not my kids have a belief in Santa inculcated in them.
Even if the Santa myth had no ill effects, and didn’t constitute a massive breach of trust between child and parent/guardian, even then… why are people who don’t want their kids to believe in Santa forced to go along with it? What makes this relatively new and dangerously commercialised myth more important and sacred than a person’s right to raise their children the way they want to?
I’ve tried various things to gently shake my eldest son from his belief (I’m part of a team, remember, so I can’t just scream ‘SANTA IS A HOAX’ in his face fifty times a day, as much as I may want to). Just a few weeks ago I interrogated his belief in Santa. He’s 4. “How do you know it’s Santa and not just me and your mum going downstairs and putting presents out?”
He thought for a moment.
“Because he comes at night. And YOU’LL be asleep too. So it can’t be you.”
Such quick-thinking, such mental gymnastics, but all employed in the service of doing somersaults over ghosts. What damage are these falsehoods doing to his brain? Imagination is fine. Lies are not.
I stroked his hair and looked him dead in the eyes. “I just want you to remember, when you’re older, that there was one man in this world who didn’t lie to you.” And I pointed to myself.
That’ll come in handy if I need him to avenge me in the future…
Can you believe it’ll be Sharkmas again in just six months? Where has this year gone.