Towards a theory of Santa

Or, the Ghost of Christmas Present

Ian Stronach and Alan Hodkinson
Ian Stronach is Professor of Educational Research and Co-Director of the Centre for Educational Research and Evaluation (CERES) at Liverpool John Moores University. His most recent book is Globalizing education, educating the local: How method made us mad. London: Routledge, 2010. His email is I.Stronach@ljmu.ac.uk. Alan Hodkinson is Associate Professor at Liverpool Hope University. His email is hodkina@hope.ac.uk.

Any theory of Santa would locate him within invented tradition (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983), as a creature whose makeup is certainly as contemporary as it is ancient, and a cultural object in continuing global evolution and dissemination. Despite his antiquity, it would be hard not to regard his accretion and dissemination, along with Coca-Cola who sponsored him into his current visual appearance in 1930 (Belk 1985), as post-modern rather than pre-modern. Although Western in nature and Christian by past colonization and contemporary association, Santa does pretty well in a whole range of other religions and cultures, interlacing the overall December ritual season with other elements of myth and celebration, such as the Japanese Cinderella Christmas (Moeran & Skov 1993), or the Christmas games of the Inuit (Bodenhorn 1993). He is a global icon whose local translations may vary greatly, but whose iconography is more of a constant. And in most of these appearances, he would have to be regarded as a seasonal epiphany of Capitalism itself, in which Commerce and Christianity come together in ways that might alarm the nineteenth-century popularizer of that combination, David Livingstone. Nevertheless, such an association has, as we will see, a certain colonizing commonality. Letters to Santa Anthropologists and cultural theorists tend to approach Santa through a series of polarities. He is a sacred figure for a secular world (Carrier 1993: 82; Keenan 2002). He presides over a celebration attended by a double rhythm of heightened solidarity and exaggerated antagonism (LviStrauss 1993: 47, his emphases). Carnivalesque inversions attend his season: for example, Santa epitomizes the family, while licensing elsewhere a certain promiscuity (Curtis 1995). In the US, he can even appear in Supreme Court deliberations on the legitimate separation of church and state (Fenn 1990). Our1 empirical work on how young children construct and reason with Santa shows him both operating across and blurring cultural zones, and reinforcing their differentiation. Seventy schoolchildren from northwest England between the ages of three and 10 were interviewed in groups on the subject of Santa. Our sample represented a broad cross-section of the local distribution of class, gender and faith/non-faith schools, with the sample turning out to be predominantly white and nominally Christian. The children in our sample tended to conflate aspects of Santa and Religion. Indeed, one school held a carol service in which Santa Claus is coming to town was sung.2 Younger children tended to offer physical differentiations of the polarity between Myth and Religion, such as size and colour of beard, or clothing:
Jesus is a baby, Santa is bigger. Jesus has a brown dress and a brown beard when hes not a baby. Jesus doesnt have a red suit.

Conflations of Christianity and Father Christmas were common among younger children, with Santa joining the Holy Trinity, or Jesus helping to make the toys or licensing gift-making:
Jesus tells Santa to give us the presents because we have been good. They link. Wait! They are the same. Father Christmas works for God.

Occasionally, older children would speculate about the nature of myth and its necessary origins:
I do and I dont [believe] well, I dont, cos why does he leave us presents for nothing? But then, why is there a celebration for him?

We came across one account (this from a headteacher) of a priest who had addressed the school and then been asked a question about Santa. The priest had said that Santa did not exist, and the children had been naturally very shocked. Returned to their classes, children told their teachers that Santa certainly did exist. Arguments varied, but included practical calculation: One child explained how Santa must be real as his mother could not afford to buy him presents and he had always got presents, so Santa must be real. This kind of proof recurred. Indeed, Santa (along with the Tooth Fairy) was seen to have an advantage over Jesus. His annual resurrection gave tangible evidence of his truth. Gifts were the guarantee of that truth, and of his selfless kindness (Bennett-Hunter 2010: 61). Of course, Santa Claus is also the materialist up against the Christmas of Christ and, as Carrier notes, he conducts an annual ritual through which we convert commodities into gifts (Carrier 1993: 63) by way of the alchemy of wrapping paper, ribbons, cards and the removal of price tags. Odd, that such peripherals constitute the essence of the gift as personal, sincere, and, for the recipient, thereby worth cherishing. This is pleasure that is not in possession but in daydreaming about imagined possession (Langer 2002: 73). In capitalism, it seems, we learn to love the inessential as at least sincere. Yet it is the stuff that on the day we throw away. Perhaps we desire the nonessence of gift, as Derrida once argued:
The gift of the name gives that which it does not have, that in which prior to everything may consist the essence, that is to say, beyond being, the nonessence of gift. (Derrida 1995: 85)4

Fig. 1. Santa with his sack, delivering presents.

Yeah, Jesus is Gods son and Santa Claus is his helper. Does Santa die? Santa gets replaced by a newer one when he gets too old. Santa is different from Jesus because he didnt die on the cross and he brings presents to people. They are both not real. They are made up.3
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1. The research team, which included the authors of this article, was made up of social researchers, Initial Teacher Education (ITE) tutors, and second- and third-year BA students. The team members were: Ian Stronach, Alan Hodkinson, Beth Buckley, Colette Ankers de Salis, Deborah Pope, Samantha Ridgway, Katie Green, Donna Lafferty, Jenna Davies, Lucy Wells, Zoe Wilson, Charlotte Cummings, Angela Savage, Jane Birchall, Elizabeth Ellis, Ciara Hayes, Charlotte Hayes and I. Wellsh.

Santa offers, we might add, a double alchemy: he is the commodity as gift, but he is also the gift as the epitome of all commodification. Potlatch and capitalist simulacrum collide in an annual destruction of wealth, assertion of status, affirmation of family solidarity, and confirmation of order. Christmas is the very production of consump-

While younger children contrasted Santa and Jesus in physical terms, offering descriptive accounts of difference, older children cited metaphysical, rather than physical, distinctions:

Fig. 2. Artist Haddon Sundbloms first Coca-Cola Santa Claus had its debut in 1931. Fig. 3. Kentucky Colonel Harland, dressed as Santa Claus in Japan in front of a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) branch.

(reported for example in Belk 1985) are a little too insistent, perhaps, but it is interesting that this process of penetrating the domestic has to be beyond surveillance. It is taboo to look out for Santa. Sleep is just as much part of the ritual as the offering in the fireplace, and was widely believed by the children we interviewed to be an absolutely necessary requirement to guarantee Santas arrival with the presents. It also provided a neat alibi for the progressive and recurrent exposure of many apparent Santas as false:
. all the Santas that we see are not real because we are always asleep when Father Christmas comes. People think hes not real but he is, cos last Christmas I slept with my mum and my dad and I was hugging them both and they didnt go out [of the room].

THE COCA COLA COMPANY

2. That song stresses the naughty/nice moral economy of Santas regime You better watch out etc. 3. Although only one of our sample offered this absolute disclaimer. 4. Derrida drew on Mauss work on the gift, and sought to articulate the nature of gift as essentially a non-essence. 5. Polanyi offered the term in order to mark how an argument can cope with refuting evidence through extemporized addition. 6. This heaven has its earthly enactments. The Finnish Tourist Authority has vigorously promoted its Lapland as Santa Claus Land, bolstering the myth and beating off competitors elsewhere, in Greenland, Canada and Sweden (Pretes 1995: 2). 7. Hagstrom identifies Santa as a thoroughly American figure (1966: 249), dismissing hagiographic appeals to St Nicholas. He argues, rightly, that these are post-hoc attempts to ground the story, though he perhaps misses the point that the story of Santa has always engaged in such expansive gestures as in the 1970s appearance of Mrs Claus. 8. There have been attempts to demonize Santa as an adult lie, an enduring betrayal of children, a morally unacceptable deception. The film Miracle on 34th Street (1994) considers these possibilities. We share Hagstroms (1966) scepticism about attempts to pathologize Santa. Lighten up its Christmas! See Gill & Papatheodorou 1999 for a consideration of the pros and cons. 9. Santa is more than the deception of the young: he is the self-deception of the old, disbelief notwithstanding. Its not the same as the point made by Festinger et al. (1964) about disproof strengthening belief; in fact its close to its opposite, where disbelief strengthens persuasion. Parents can go to considerable lengths, or rather heights, in this respect. One child offered evidence: On Christmas Day there was a boot on our chimney. 10. The Criminal Records Bureau is a UK agency whose purpose is 16

Santa can only be present in our absence, in a kind of negative theology (Eco 1998). In the end, he must enter the home, deposit his gifts and accept his offerings, unseen and unrecorded an uncomfortable thought for an age of hysterical accountability. The narrative is unchanging in its structure but more malleable in its detail, as with Santas key and other innovations. Transport and toy-production issues were a simple matter of recounting for the younger children, with some embroidery, but older children were willing to import variations such as rockets, taxis, even the teleporter, to bolster his plausibility:
My brother put a camera out to see outside and I saw a shooting star so he might have been the shooting star.

KENLEEWRITES / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Various resolutions that gave parents some role were also suggested:
My mum says that she goes and buys the boxes from the shops and then she sends them to Santa to put the toys that I want in and to make them magic.

tion, and letters to Santa are both an innocent exercise of childhood desires and the work of consumers-in-training (Downs 1983; Otnes et al. 1994: 191). As the god of gifts, Santa is the master bearer of Christmas toys and gifts (Richardson & Simpson 1982: 429). Lvi-Strauss, however, also posits a discrepant and more plural ideal located in the figure and its season:
Is it not that, deep within us, there is a small desire to believe in boundless generosity, kindness without ulterior motives, a brief interlude during which all fear, envy, and bitterness are suspended? (Lvi-Strauss 1993: 50)

In general, younger children tended to conflate the magic and the mundane. They readily accepted flying reindeer, sometimes offering rationales like:
Carrots and magic powder to make it fly. Holly the Christmas fairy teaches the reindeers how to fly.

So wealth, status, identity and contradictory values are in uneasy circulation around the figuring of Santa and his Christmas. Santa operates in a series of contradictions across social, political and moral economies. It doesnt seem to bother him, or his young followers. Generally, he is a benign, jocular, generous figure, a childrens deity who has many of the features of other supernatural figures: eternal, patriarchal, omniscient, recurrent, absolute, has his own calendrical day, and, as such, children pray to him (letters to Santa). There is heightened sensibility:
Scream because I am happy, Ive got presents. Feel joy, scream of joy.

They coped with potential disconfirmations much in the manner identified by EvansPritchard in relation to Azande witchcraft belief epicyclical elaboration covered up threats to the main thesis (Marwick 1982; Polanyi 1958: 292),5 until the believer stage gave way to a more transitional stage (e.g., Santa is real but I dont think he is magic), and then to disbelief, in much the same ages and stages that previous Santa research had found (Blair et al. 1980). At the same time, younger children came up with their own sorts of mundane explanation for the ritual, drawing on their own experience and common sense, and sometimes borrowing from other fantasy narratives:
Red is his favourite colour so he wears it all the time you know. He lives in a tube. [Four year old, presumably addressing the chimney issue] His family dont know he is Santa. [An echo of Superman, perhaps]

A secular temper would suggest that, like other deities, Santas darkest secret is that he may not exist (of which more later). Nevertheless, children are led to see that magic informs both the sending of messages and the reception of gifts via the impossible passage of the domestic chimney. That immutable funnel offers an uncloseable, unlockable entry to the domestic, intimate access indeed (Hall 1984: 68). Indeed, the Santa story has been characterized as an acting-out of childbirth in the family, rehearsing expectation, secrecy, labour and delivery (Serba 1944, quoted in Hagstrom 1966: 249). In our sample, the chimneys part-obsolescence was easily overcome, via the window, the door, Santas key and so on. The Freudian images

At any rate, Santa almost literally is the magic of Christmas, and he even has a heaven in Lapland, although its rules are the opposite of the conventional Christian creed.6 Indeed, instead of dying and going to heaven, we live and heaven comes to us if only in a one-day capitalist cornucopia. Dickens, Tiny Tim and the reformed Scrooge have a lot to do with the moral economy aspect of this motif (Dickens 1984), although Dickenss Christmas is a ghostly rather than a Christian event. It is an attempt to realize and universalize the giving inversions of Christmas:
the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shutup hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they
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Belk, R. 1985. A childs Christmas in America: Santa Claus as deity, consumption as religion. Journal of American Culture 12: 87-100. 1993. Materialism and the making of the modern American Christmas. In: Miller, D. (ed.). Unwrapping Christmas, pp. 75-104. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bennett-Hunter, G. 2010. Christian mythologies: Sacred and secular. In: Lowe, S.C. (ed.). Christmas philosophy for everyone: Better than a lump of coal, pp. 59-69. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Blair, J., J. McKee & L. Jernigan 1980. Childrens belief in Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. Psychological Reports 46: 691-694. Bodenhorn, B. 1993. Christmas present: Christmas public. In: Miller, D. (ed.). Unwrapping Christmas, pp. 193-216. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Caplow, T. & M. Williamson 2007. Decoding Middletowns Easter Bunny: A study in American iconography. Semiotica 32(3/4): 221232.

Extending the anthropology of Christmas It has been well known at least since Impressionism that juxtaposing the colours red and green creates a kind of shimmer, which engenders life and movement. Christmas traditionally puts red and green together, but this time the shimmer is between the Christian festival and the Santa phenomenon. Features of that shimmer are the tensions between the secular and the religious, between time as movement and the stillness of ritual time, between the timeless innocence of childhood (Cross 1998: 7) and the carnal and commodified adult worlds. We have listed other anthropological polarities, and want to argue that none of them stand in opposition to each other so much as they set up relays of difference between and within themselves. In particular, Santa may be the acme of materialism, even an anti-Christ (Belk 1985: 90), but as we saw, he also has most of the attributes of a god, and so the Christian God of Christmas has his likeness in Santa as well as his opposition. Santa echoes him, perhaps even mockingly. There is more. Santa decontaminates the commodities he dispenses; they are gifts from Santa, brought by magical means to the deserving on earth. His work thus sacralizes, rather than profanes. When we say that Santa Claus inaugurates a celebration of consumption, materialism, and hedonism, we need to include his contrary presence as a secular god (Belk 1985: 96), and also a kind of ghostly spiritual god. Indeed, he is also a pedagogic god. His behaviour/ reward/punishment regime offers to young children both promise and threat: Santa may or may not come, according to their behaviour: stimulus/response offers the extrinsic motivation for moral behaviour, a first step towards the childs internalized conscience.8 On the other hand, the mythic Santas workshop increasingly turns out to be dormitory factories in the Far

East, where exploited children, rather than happy elves, produce cheap toys. The dark secrets from which innocent children must be protected are no longer sexual, but industrial. (Langer 2002: 76) None of our sample addressed this theme, preferring this sort of account:
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to record the conviction records of those working with children. Convictions and even cautions lead to a refusal to issue a certificate of clearance, without which adults cannot have contact with children in their employment. Such certificates have to be renewed regularly, and any new employer requires the issuance of a new certificate. 11. Conservative Party Manifesto 2010: 38. This may sound like a facetious suggestion, however, we would direct cynics to the document cited, which sponsors Big Society, not big Government (2010: 36), putting a smiley face in the first o and a pouty one in the third o. Well beyond the reach of any satire, unfortunately.

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Fig. 4. Santas relationship with Roodolf and some dietary guidance He likes mints peis. Fig. 5. A stylish Santa strikes a pose. Fig. 6. The surprise arrival of Mrs Claus.

were really fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. (Dickens 1984: 15)

There is no Santa in Dickenss embryonic Christmas,7 although his ghostly prototype is offered in a laughing, bearded figure in a fur-trimmed coat, the Ghost of Christmas Present (Dickens 1984: 70). In addition, Santa is in constant invocation as a pseudohistorical recollection of a less commodified festival, where food rather than gifts presided, where the wealthy gave and the poor received, and Christian sentiments concerning the family, its unity and wellbeing, were paramount. Santa and Christmas are worshipped and mourned for what they never were, as a kind of nostalgic stasis forged as a historical loss of moral meaning and value. It is a nostalgia written into the Christmas ritual itself (Lowe 2010), a profit-and-loss equation that is as authentic as cotton-wool snow in pseudo-Regency windows. A last polarity is offered by Kuper. He notes the prominence of family in the celebrations, a domestic focus, celebrated in the United Kingdom by the theoretical epitome of the Royal Family. And, of course, we could add Santa as a generic father as well: he is, after all, Father Christmas, and Father with a capital F can only mean a god of family. But Kuper wishes to stress a different polarity, deploying van Genneps distinction between ritual time and normal life (Kuper 1993: 164). Christmas, in this sense, is a special time, marked out as different by ritual food, consumption, religion, holidays and the state, as well as by the family. In the UK, the state does not stand at this Christmas moment in contrast to the family, since it is the state-as-Royal-Family that addresses each individual family through the Queens Christmas Message. It is a vivid celebration of hierarchy as a democracy of mere families. Santa, in that rendering, is a Thatcherite who replaces society with a coalition of families.

Carrier, J. 1993. The rituals of Christmas giving. In: Miller, D (ed.). Unwrapping Christmas, pp. 55-74. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Conservative Party Manifesto 2010. Invitation to join the government of Britain. May. Cross, G. 1998. Toys and time: Playthings and parents attitudes to change in early 20th century America. Time & Society 7(1): 5-24. Csikszentmihalyi, M. & E. Rochberg-Halton 1981. The meaning of things: Domestic symbols and the self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curtis, B. 1995. The strange birth of Santa Claus: From Artemis the goddess and Nicholas the saint. Journal of American Culture 18(4): 17-32. Derrida, J. 1995. The gift of death (trans.) D. Wills. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dickens, C. 1984 [1843]. A Christmas carol. London: Penguin. Douglas, M. 1984. Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and danger. London: RKP. Downs, C. 1983. Letters to Santa Claus: Elementaryschool-age childrens sextyped toy preferences in a natural setting. Sex Roles 9(2): 159-163. Eco, U. 1998. Faith in fakes: Travels in hyperreality. London: Vintage. Fenn, R. 1990. Premodern religion in the postmodern world: A response to Professor Zylberberg. Social Compass 37(1): 97-105. Festinger, L., H. Rieken & S. Schachter 1964. When prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a group that predicted the destruction of the world. New York: Harper. Gardner, D. 2009. Risk: The science and politics of fear. London: Virgin. Gill, J. & T. Papatheodorou 1999. Perpetuating the Father Christmas story: A justifiable lie? International Journal of Childrens Spirituality 4(2): 195-205. Hagstrom, W. 1966. What is the meaning of Santa Claus? American Sociologist 1(5): 248-252. Hall, D. 1984. The venereal confronts the venerable: Playboy on Christmas. Journal of Popular Culture 7: 63-68. Hobsbawm, E. & T. Ranger 1983. The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keenan, W. 2002. Postsecular sociology: Effusions of religion in late modern settings. European Journal of Social Theory 5(2): 279-290.

He [Santa] is really kind because he makes presents for all the good children and asks the elves to help them.

One child was more sceptical:

He is kind to all the children but not to the elves.

But there are no simple or static polarities. These toys often emplot struggles between Good and Evil (cf. Harry Potter etc.), in a further irony. The evils of capitalist production and exploitation are the goods of consumption. Greed becomes generosity, exploiting becomes helping, in a bizarre inversion of capitalist moralities. And it is clear that older kids in our sample also construct Santa in moral terms:
.they hear that its nice and naughty, and if youre nice you get more presents but if youre naughty you get less presents so they really want more presents, so they are good. Mum says that if I dont go to bed at eight oclock then Santa wont come. My mum said if I dont think Father Christmas is real then Ill get coal in my stocking.

A rather instrumental moral economy is invariably invoked, putting a god into good, as it were, and providing a prototype soulmate. Santa has contradictions and oppositions both within himself and between his version of Christmas and the religious one, although, at the same time, there are homologies and relays between these differences. Caplow and Williamson (2007) see Christmas as symbolically interpretable only between the contrasts between Easter and Christmas, but an alternative line would insist that it is the differences within Christmas that are most revealing and productive. Arguably, Santas Christmas is more real than the religious one. The religious one brings no tangible proof of Gods gifts, and the religious wrapping paper of peace, goodwill, brotherhood of all men etc. is patently not brought about through the attendant rituals. The religious gifts turn out to be merely words, another kind of wrapping paper. They are also given, and ritually so, but they are like broken toys: they do not work, and are empty invocations. Here there is no ritual delivery, and the outcome delivers the essence of non-gift, to parody Derridas account of the gift. Unlike the letters to Santa, there is no response. In that sense, Santa rescues the religious Christmas for children and adults by giving some substance to values such as benevolence, good humour, giving without return, generosity and universal concern (rhetorically, that is, and only actually in one sense, and for a tiny proportion of the worlds children). Nevertheless, he is a god who makes himself present, whose disciples (parents) are active on his behalf, and who recognizes and blesses his Elected Children. He brings gifts, and their good behaviour is rewarded in tangible ways they can appreciate. He is the new deity, as Otnes and others have noted (Belk 1985; Lowe 2010; Otnes et al. 1994). Through these homologous actions Santa realizes Christmas, in a way that the religious version never can. The adults may not believe, but they perform Santas will on earth: they are his willing disciples; they bring about his annual miracle. There is an inversion here. Adults behave as if Santa were true, and make him true in that performative sense.9 The presents arrive and the magic of the ritual is preserved. Indeed, our personal disbelief seems to strengthen our ideological drive to make sure that others continue their belief, perhaps somewhat on our behalf as part of the magic of Christmas, as adults continue to call it: Pretes attributes such a wilful deception to nostalgia for childhood, [a desire] to become and remain a child in a perceived or romanticized childhood (Pretes 1995: 13). In the more avowedly religious version of Christmas, adults may claim to believe, but they do not commonly

behave as if they did. In performative terms, therefore, Santa is perhaps the more convincing of the gods available to the festival and of course there have been many over the centuries, if we want to posit an origin in Artemis, or St Nicholas, or whoever (Curtis 1995). Santa, in this account, is a necessary component in the survival of the other, more Christian, Christmas, for whose inadequacies and implausibilities he compensates, spiritually as well as materially. In a capitalist Xmas, isnt Santa the last Christian? Nor is his reality so very different from that of other gods. In their journey towards disbelief, children learn to question whether each manifested Santa is the real one, and which are false prophets, but the issue of transubstantiation can be applied as easily to a costumed old figure as it can to wafer and wine. Each false Santa is evidence of the original one, each encounter a communion with the principle of Santa. That principle is not undermined by adult disbelief in the literal story of Santa. As in all religions, truth has its lines of retreat. So Santa is a post-modern object, in global dissemination and transformation, a superstitious epistemology promoted by processes of both belief and disbelief. Weirdly, his disbelievers are his most insistent evangelicals. When children begin to ask if the Santa they encounter is the real Santa (Thompson & Hickey 1989: 379) they are modernist in their critique. They seek a truth that is not there. His mask is his truth, his truth is his mask. He is all surface, but far from superficial. His history is a pseudo-tradition, but one that naturalizes itself so quickly and completely that the red coat, the hat, the reindeers, the unexpected emergence in the 70s of Mrs Claus from the closet, are experienced more as revelations of ancient truths than as commercial inventions. History is invented in its happy stupidity (Fenn 1990). Santa represents the special time of a moral economy to pit against and yet ultimately celebrate the epitome of the political economy of everyday work and life. Santa is, after all, the god of consumption. Recurrently, he is criticized for these capitalist and materialist enthusiasms and sponsorships and, as Lvi-Strauss reported, he even got burned in effigy in 1951 by irate Dijon clerics who saw in him a growing secularization of a religious festival. But, as we have tried to show, Santa is much more of a religious figure than is usually recognized, and not just because he is the bearer of gifts rather than commodities: he structures and performs religious possibility, transcendent reward and punishment. Making Santa accountable: A risk assessment In a world of accountability, however, we have to further complicate this polarized and relayed Santa of divergent forms, contents and movements. Thus far, normal/special; commodity/gift; sacred/secular, market/family; greed/generosity are mobilized and traded in the Christmas bazaar. In terms of the discourses of safety, a triadic relation develops whereby Santa is profane, as well as secular and religious. He is placed under suspicion, a kind of house arrest, and a further set of polarities develop within the earlier polarities and contradictions:
amusing-abusing friendly-exploitative giving-taking known-unknown family-stranger benign-malign

In the audit culture Santa becomes a figure of pollution (Douglas 1984), requiring checks against his past behaviour. He has previous of course, in the bacchanalian versions and aspects of solstice celebrations; in particular the German St Nicholas was known as an eater of children (Curtis 1995: 22). Santa as Pan is historically
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Kuper, A. 1993. The English Christmas and the family: Time out and alternative realities. In: Miller, D. (ed.). Unwrapping Christmas, pp. 157-175. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Langer, B. 2002. Commodified enchantment: Children and consumer capitalism. Thesis Eleven 69: 67-81. Lvi-Strauss, C. 1993[1952]. Father Christmas executed. In: Miller, D. (ed.). Unwrapping Christmas, pp. 38-54. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lowe, S.C. (ed.) 2010. Christmas philosophy for everyone: Better than a lump of coal. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Marwick, M. 1982. Witchcraft and sorcery (2nd edition). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Moeran, B. & L. Skov 1993. Cinderella Christmas: Kitsch, consumerism and youth in Japan. In: Miller, D (ed.). Unwrapping Christmas, pp. 105-133. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Otnes, C., Y. Kim & K. Kim 1994. All I want for Christmas: An analysis of childrens brand requests to Santa Claus. Journal of Popular Culture 27(4): 183-194. Piper, H. & I. Stronach 2008. Dont touch! The educational story of a panic. Routledge: London. Prentice, N., M. Manosevitz & L. Hubbs 1978. Imaginary figures of early childhood: Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 48(4): 618-628. Pretes, M. 1995. Postmodern tourism: The Santa Claus industry. Annals of Tourism Research 22(1): 1-15. Richardson, J. & C. Simpson 1982. Children, gender and social structure: An analysis of the contents of letters to Santa Claus. Child Development 53(2): 429-436. Polanyi, M. 1958. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Strathern, M. 2000. Audit cultures: Anthropological studies in accountability, ethics and the academy. London: Routledge. Stronach, I. & J. Clarke 2010. Bring back Das Kapital punishment! The Credit Crunch and the death of the knowledge economy. Forum 52(1): 115-123. Thompson, W. & J. Hickey 1989. Myth, identity, and social interaction: Encountering Santa Claus at the mall. Qualitative Sociology 12(4): 371-389.

familiar. Such a medieval European doppelganger version of Santa was common, and is now being revived by the audit culture. Santa is now stranger danger, a Moral Pan-ic, sequestered in his den with our vulnerable children. Has he molested children in the past? CRB checks10 notwithstanding, will he molest children in the future? In anticipation of this ever-present threat, his actions must be made transparent, in the language of the discourse. He must not sit children on his knee, the windows must not be obscured in the grotto, now constructed in Plexiglas (Thompson & Hickey 1989: 377). Elf police must accompany him at his station. Parents should be very careful to ensure that no Santa is left alone with a child. There must be no kissing. If published, photographs of children with Santa must be pixellated for fear of alerting other predatory Santas out there in the nightmare of public intimacy that is the Christmas season. Such fears do not come from nowhere in relation to the Christmas ritual over which Santa presides. In its carnivalesque moments there always were and still are aspects of sexual licence for adults flirtation, parties, secretaries on bosses knees, mistletoe, office flings, etc. Nor is Santa as lecher a cultural impossibility: Playboy has from its inception in 1953 worked this theme (Hall 1984), in the belief that behind every jolly elf is an energetic monster (Hall 1984: 68). Christmas is a ritual of deliberate deception, where the old deceive the young, and where material reward is conditional on spiritual belief, or at least on a necessary pretence of it. But such unruly behaviour was always a hidden adult scenario in a ritual in which the adults know, and the children dont. Children inhabited a Christmas world of heightened sentimentality where care, concern, innocence and the efficacy of magic were unusually their lot:
Build a Christmas tree. Santa comes in with a Christmas power, puts presents under the Christmas tree and uses his powers to go out again. I think hes thoughtful because he always brings what Ive asked for.

Santa as Father represented a generic celebration of the family as together, united, giving, tokenizing love for each other and idealizing that togetherness. That is the heart of the expressive myth, and it is perhaps significant that when Santa and Christmas go cross-cultural, it is the togetherness of a relationship that remains a central focus, when the trappings of religion and specific cultural tradition are displaced. For example, the Christmas of Japan in the 1980s is a piece of Eurokitsch that constitutes a major celebration of romantic love (Moeran & Skov 1993: 121). In that instance Christmas is not the pretext for young couples to book themselves into hotels for the night, it is the text itself. What the audit culture (Strathern 2000) does is to write suspicion and fear into the management of the Christmas ritual. Inverting the values that Santa epitomizes, and what we may recall Lvi-Strauss referring to as our small desire to avoid fear, envy and bitterness (Lvi-Strauss 1993: 50), the adults are invited to simultaneously celebrate Santa in principle as generous, the bearer of gifts, friendly, loving and place him in practice under intense, systematic and suspicious surveillance. Belief/disbelief develop a new dimension, a dark shimmer of contradiction. Santa becomes Satan, in an abrupt anagram that recurrently reverses itself. In such a scenario of profane inspection, Santa is abolished as an ideal, as a generic Father, as an interlude, as a sponsor of any kind of moral economy. The same audit culture penetrates the other, apparently more religious, half of the Christmas ritual, not just through surveillance, CRB checks, and suspicion of child-abusing priests, but more profoundly in undermining

from within notions such as trust, responsibility and even a Christmas notion of peace. Peace in the audit culture becomes interminable weapons inspection in the case of Santa, largely a farcical search for Weapons of Miss/ Master Destruction. Innocence is another victim of omnipresent suspicion, and so too does hope give way to fear. You cannot be suspicious and fearful of an ideal without destroying it. Audit is thus the death of Santa as complex and contradictory ritual, capable of whatever kind of uneasy synthesis. It is interesting and significant that this auditable discourse of Santa has a contemporary home in the pornography of Playboy. The fear that Santa might really be Playboys dirty old man that the world is essentially pornographic and children must be ceaselessly defended against its encroachments fuels precautionary behaviours that themselves rest on an underlying pornographic view of the world. To paint the picture in the cultural colours of affect, the shimmer of red and green becomes the shudder of yellow and black. Santa as Stranger Danger. Santas moral economy, such as it is, is destroyed, leaving only the exchange of commodities, still wrapped as gifts it is true, but bereft of trust in his supposed virtues of generosity, universal friendship, and concern for the happiness of children. The Christmas-related suspicions then grow: are crackers safe, or should their contents be subject to risk assessment? And what if these anonymous gifts, by definition lacking transparency, contain bombs or poisons? Parody, of course, but endless and endemic distrust becomes the burden of a proper responsibility for safety in audit discourses, part of the contemporary culture of fear (Gardner 2009: 15). In this account, Mary Douglass notions of pollution (monster) and hygiene (god) lose their opposition and become overlays, and even fuel each other. Belk, drawing on Csikszentmihalyi and RochbergHalton (1981), has analyzed Christmas as an example of terminal materialism (Belk 1993: 96), in which the ritual descends into mere commodity exchange and even selfgifting. One half of the equation swallows the other in a final act of consumption. But here we have a different ending, one that we might want to call terminal auditerialism. The regime of audit cannot tolerate the ideals of Santa and thus invades the ritual with its profane and insane suspicions. The problem is made worse by the fact that Santa asks nothing in return, and that is a matter for the very greatest suspicion. A stranger bearing apparently altruistic gifts for the young is a central nightmare of audit and safety discourses. Santa/Satan is then expelled in three directions privatized within the home; safely relegated to distant spectacle as part of a heavily policed parade or tableau; and suspiciously monitored in his necessary interactions with the young. Perhaps this announcement of Santas death is premature. As adults, parents and children we kind of hope so. But it does seem that the audit culture has made him seriously ill, and in a number of additional ways. In 2011 we can add a further twist to this story of Santa. The uneasy coincidence of Christmas and Capitalism is currently undermined by what may also turn out to be the death throes of the latter, at least in some of its current manifestations (Stronach & Clarke 2010). Taken together, this theory of Santa as impending crisis has peculiar and significant implications for the religious half of the Christian festival. Will there be a Christmas Crunch to follow the Credit one? Or will Santa prevail as part of the UKs new Big Society part of a family-centred, self-funding event that makes no demands on the state and relies on civic and corporate sponsorship? Perhaps such an event might be united with the mooted Big Society Day.11 After all, both involve a necessary suspension of disbelief.l
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ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 27 NO 6, DECEMBER 2011