Updated website
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005Apologies if you received multiple notices. Had problems with cut and paste.
Anyway, the (school) holiday has given me time to update my website: www.geocities.com/landdelacruz
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 and checking it twice,
Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice,
Santa Claus is coming to town
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.
We adults know that Santa Claus does not exist and yet, year in and year out, we perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus to our children. Maybe it is because Santa Claus is a convenient explanation for our practice of gift giving. It is a narrative that explains our traditions. And while we’re making up a story, we might as well make it magical by telling of a fat old man working with dwarves in the North Pole, being driven by reindeer that fly by pretending they are walking on the ground, delivering an infinite number of gifts in a finite (red) bag down houses (which are all presumed to have chimneys).
All that is fine, people need their illusions. But I think that somewhere along the way, Santa Claus has served as the proxy for society in its role of creating order. We do not only use the myth of Santa Claus as an explanation, we use it also as an instrument that creates order and "good behavior" among our children.
Just take a look at the lines of the popular song, "Santa Claus is coming to town" and you’d realize how society has managed to do just that. The song tells of an omniscient being who rivals St. Peter in his knowledge of all our actions (good deeds and sins) and who will hold us accountable for all of these actions. The consequences are not as dire (we do not speak of entry into heaven or an existence of condemnation in hell) but there are rewards and punishments nonetheless. It isn’t explicitly stated but Santa Claus rewards good children with gifts and punishes the bad children with deprivation. And there even is an initial list of what constitutes "badness": crying, and pouting. The bridge ends with an admonition for kids to be good not for the sake of being good but because Santa Claus, that great moral accountant, is coming to town.
Drop in any Christian household with kids and you’d see how this element of control has been used, especially by parents and guardians. About four days before Christmas, my sister and her husband decided to remove all the gifts from our Christmas tree because their kids weren’t behaving. The official line was that Santa Claus had taken the gifts back because the kids were naughty.
After a while, children figure out that Santa Claus isn’t real and the decision on whether or not there will be gifts is made solely by their parents (and there will always be gifts). But by the time they are old enough to realize this, other mechanisms for keeping the child in check would have taken over. The cycle becomes complete when little children become parents and start to wield Santa Claus as an instrument to control the behavior of their own children.
