199. DOES SANTA EXIST? - A Christmas Inquiry
When I asked a group of 12-13 year olds if they thought Santa existed, I got some predictable, cynical, responses.
“No. One year I got some slippers from Santa, but the next day my dad asked me if the slippers he got me fit ok. You got me? I asked. I thought it was supposed to be Santa?”
“I was using my mum’s iPad on Boxing Day and she’d left some tabs open on Amazon and all the gifts Santa was meant to have given me were on there.”
“I literally saw my parents putting things in my stocking.”
“My older brother told me it was only mum and dad. Only little kids believe in Santa.”
But I asked them to remember our definition of Santa we had come up with before I’d asked the question to be clear their evidence for Santa’s non-existence was good enough.
Santa, they had agreed, was:
A man who is believed to go all around the world on Christmas Eve and deliver presents to all the good children.
A man capable of knowing who is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and keeping a list, separating the two into distinct categories.
A man not all cultures and traditions around the world believe in, so a man who only delivers gifts to those good children who also believe in Santa and/or celebrate Christmas.
A man we don’t entirely know everything about because the story has changed over history (i.e. Coca Cola changing his robes from green to red) and because different families seem to have different traditions and experiences with how exactly Santa operates.
A man who might be hundreds of years old and deeply supernatural, or a mantle worn by a series of less-supernatural Santas, replaced over time after a certain number of years’ service under the name.
A man. (The students were fairly sure Santa was always male in traditional descriptions, but were open to the possibility, if the ‘multiple Santas over time’ theory was true, that a future Santa could be a woman.)
I pointed out that while their ‘evidence’ certainly seemed to point to the idea that none of them were being given gifts from Santa - at least not on the Christmases in question - it did not completely remove the possibility that Santa Claus might still exist. After all, our definition already incorporated the idea that Santa did not bring presents to all children. Perhaps, I offered, they had all just become naughty children at some point and found themselves on the wrong list? Perhaps their parents, not wanting their naughty children to feel bad at Christmas, had stepped in when they knew that Santa would not visit and attempted to keep up an illusion that their gifts were still coming from Father Christmas. Rather that than allow them to wake up on Christmas morning to nothing?
“But I’m not naughty.” said one boy, self-assuredly.
“According to you.” I retorted. “But we don’t actually know what moral system Santa is operating on.”
It’s true. Our definition accepted that Santa makes this naughty and nice list, but no criteria for either list is given. Maybe Santa operates on some version of ‘Santa Command Theory’ - whatever Santa says, goes? Or some list of deontological rules and duties only he is privy to? While my students claimed not to have done anything particularly ‘naughty’ in their young lives so far, I thought of the rumours around former WWE owner, Vince McMahon (no - not those rumours, or rather criminal allegations - those would definitely put him on the naughty list!) Legend has it that McMahon saw sneezing as a sign of weakness, and if a wrestler dared sneeze in his presence, some form of recrimination would follow. In his own personal fiefdom of WWE, McMahon’s crazy rules had to be adhered to, no matter how mad. And what is the North Pole but Santa’s equally singular fiefdom? Maybe my students have all fallen foul of something Santa doesn’t like, even if the rest of society has no problem with it?
That is, of course, if we believe them at their word that they were innocent little cherubs. I know in my own example by the age of 13 I had committed my own fair share of sins. Lying, stealing, swearing, fighting, blasphemy, jealousy. All these things would have been on my record by that age. Maybe Santa’s morality is common to our own, but his level of forgiveness is far lower. Maybe Santa is a “one strike and you’re out” kind of guy? Like God punishing all of humanity with Original Sin forever because of the single predictable and entirely low-level indiscretion of Adam and Eve, maybe Santa’s ‘nice’ list is full only of newborn babies and those children with completely unblemished records. Do one thing wrong, and you’re cut off for good the same way those first humans were kicked out of Eden forever?
We have, after all, admitted that we don’t know everything about this Santa character. That we even make some elements up based on our cultures (such as Santa’s coke-branded attire). So maybe we softened the original lore around Old Saint Nick? Allowed space for mistakes and forgiveness which likely stemmed from earlier generations’ own disappointment at discovering their smallest offence had barred them from Santa’s grace forever. Indeed, what could better explain the phenomenon of parents offering gifts to their naughty children in the name of Santa than the trauma of previous generations who woke up on Christmas mornings past to an empty stocking and a sense of their own damnation?
So did my students have any better evidence for me against the existence of Santa than their own personal experiences of not receiving gifts that other, better behaved, young people might still be receiving?
“People just know Santa doesn’t exist.” One said. “All the adults talk about it and it’s just obvious.”
But I pointed out that we had already established that Santa might not bring gifts to naughty people, and this criteria for naughtiness might exclude many people from a very early age from the ‘nice’ list. Of course there would be many adults who grew up, just like them, seeing their own parents trying to plug the gap left in Santa’s absence by doing the job themselves and believing, wrongly, it was always their parents. There would be a lot of misinformation and confusion about around Santa. Especially if maybe one of the key criteria for ‘niceness’ in Santa’s ethical theory was ‘belief in Santa’? The idea isn’t so far-fetched. After all, the Abrahamic God has made belief in them and proper worship of them a cornerstone of each religion’s ethical theories. Maybe, like with religious worship, being ‘nice’ extends to the way the belief in Santa is practiced? Perhaps you get on the ‘naughty’ list for leaving out the wrong sort of tribute on Christmas Eve? We were a mince pies and sherry household (with carrots for the reindeer), but maybe this is like doing a Christian communion with roast beef and ginger ale instead of bread and wine? Perhaps the Americans have got it right and it’s only cookies and milk which will not engender Santa’s wrath? For all we know only a handful of people are actually visited by Santa each year because only a select-few meet the opaque criteria of Santa’s unique definition of ‘nice’. But that would still make it true that Santa exists and delivers gifts to all the good children on Christmas Eve. It is our own definition of ‘good’ which is called into question, not Santa’s existence.
“My mum told me though.” said another. “There’s no Santa.”
“Appeal to authority,” I remarked, batting away their objection. “A common fallacy. But the fact remains your mum, or any adult who claims to know for sure that there is no Santa, is not an authority on Santa because, as we have already established in our definition of Santa Claus, there is some element of mystery around what exactly anyone knows for sure about Santa. Your mum might utterly believe she is telling you the truth, but she still might be wrong. There is no reason she would have special access to knowledge about Santa’s existence unavailable to everybody else and every reason to assume that she might, for a number of reasons, simply be one of those people on the ‘naughty’ list early who were told by their own parents there was no Santa to make them feel better about the fact that there was a Santa and he just wasn’t going to be delivering a gift to them.”
We had already established, after all, that if there really wasn’t a Santa, then parents lie and therefore cannot be trusted as a source of information.
If there isn’t a Santa, parents lie to their children that there is.
If there is a Santa, parents lie to their children that there isn’t.
Either way, parents lie.
“Also,” I continued, “your parents themselves might not even know Santa ever delivered gifts to you if they themselves don’t believe in him. If a parent doesn’t believe in Santa, but don’t want their children to feel bad on Christmas Day, of course they’ll get something themselves and say that it is from Santa from day one. Yet perhaps in those early years, before you turned ‘naughty’, there was always one or two things given to you that they couldn’t quite explain? Not believing in Santa, they wouldn’t credit Santa with the gift as that would be outside the realm of possibility for them. They would probably attribute it to someone else in the family getting you something they hadn’t been told about, or a friend. And that’s before we even acknowledge that we don’t actually know what kind of ‘gift’ Santa actually brings! As we have admitted to Santa’s possible supernatural nature, maybe the gift Santa brings is health, or luck, or wisdom? Something non-physical. Not a gift wrapped in paper but a gift nevertheless. No Santa-doubting parent would ever spot Santa’s gift to their child, but the gift would still be given so long as they remain on the ‘nice’ list. In fact, now we have opened up the possibility that Santa’s gifts are non-material things, it allows for the possibility that Santa isn’t as strict and unforgiving as we first thought. Maybe Santa is still giving gifts to most of us, no matter what our parents think. They just aren’t gifts you can hold in your hand or fit in a stocking? So wrong-headed parents, stung by empty stockings and barren scenes beneath the tree, started to add to Santa’s non-material gifts more material ones?”
Ultimately, I concluded, we were left with three possibilities:
1) Santa doesn’t exist.
This one has not been successfully proven with evidence sufficient to cast away absolutely any doubt. So we can dismiss it quite easily.
That leaves us with:
2) Santa does exist, but is far stricter about his ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’ list than we previously thought, leading to many parents having to step in and do Santa’s job for him once their children get older. Or Santa’s gifts are not visible to us, being non-material in nature, and so a mistake in our understanding of what these gifts might be has led to parents buying additional gifts ‘from Santa’ in error.
This is the possibility we have been exploring, and one we cannot really dismiss without having more knowledge of Santa Claus than it is possible for a mere mortal to have.
But I also allowed for a third possibility as compromise:
3) There is no physical being called ‘Santa Claus’, but the shared ‘Santa Claus’ idea, which definitely exists (as shown by our agreed definition of Santa we shared regardless of whether we believed or didn’t believe in him) acts as a real force in the world. A force which we have already seen multiple testimonies of making parents bring the idea of Santa, that existed merely in the mind before, into actual reality for their children by fulfilling Santa’s role within their own family right here in real life. Santa could be a self-actualising myth which, spoken and shared across generations, manifests itself each year in the actions of real children going to sleep on Christmas Eve believing that this man will visit them as they dream, and real gifts appearing for them in the morning, fulfilling that promise. Maybe that is all Santa Claus is and all it needs to be: an undeniably existing phenomenon of annual gift-giving wrapped up in a sense of magic and mystery, for which children agree to behave in a certain way all the other days of the year in order to gain access to the experience once again? An experience so good, they will wish it for their own children when the time comes, and for their children’s children? An experience so good, one might even call it a ‘gift’. One which comes, in a very real sense, from the equally very real idea of ‘Santa’.
Given our inability to choose option (1), we were left with option (2) or (3). And all of us agreed that, whichever option we found most convincing, there was one thing we could all agree on: the possibility that Santa existed far outweighed the possibility that he didn’t.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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