A: It is, I’m afraid. I think they were planning on assaulting a mall this past weekend with anti-consumerist carols. “I’m Walking in a Consumer Wonderland” was one of them. Yeah, for these people I’m the mall’s puppet, I’m a heterosexual white overeater who should not be emulated in any way, but these people absolutely miss the point of a midwinter festival. Christmas is a midwinter festival; it shares religious meaning—deep religious meaning—with the whole tradition of wanting, at the very darkest time of the year, to be surrounded by light and heat and greenery and plenty. To ask that capitalism essentially collapse itself in December for the sake of some misplaced notion of thrift is unreasonable. These attacks are really Marxist in origin. If you go into the website of some of these groups the question is posed: if we don’t buy at Christmas won’t a lot of retailers suffer, and the answer given is yes, and that’s what they want, they want to destroy the retail industry and rebuild a fairer, juster, greener world out of the rubble.
Q: The kids’ll be really happy with that.
A: Yeah, I’m a little ticked off about it too.
Q: I’ve been reading recently about church attendance being up because of the economic times, and a lot of churches are expecting strong attendance this Christmas. Is a movement back to church at Christmastime one that takes attention away from Santa?
ANot at all. Santa Claus is a quasi-religious figure. I have godparents like St. Nicholas, I’m a descendant of the movement in the Middle Ages that saw gifts brought by saints for the Christ child. Many churches will have Christmas trees in them, which are not an overtly Christian element, and the kids in these services will have two kinds of magics to contemplate on Christmas Eve. They’ll have the nativity play and all the miracles associated with that, and they’ll have the expectation of a magical gift-bringer.
Q: Is there any reason to expect, given the times we’re in, that people would be more likely to follow Santa’s example and give of themselves? Would we expect more people to put money in the Salvation Army boxes, or volunteer at charity dinners for the homeless?
A: I think it depends on how long the recession lasts. The impulse to charity is embedded in Christmas. Christmas has always been the great time of finding ways to distribute charity, and that will never disappear. I do worry, however, about the tendency by certain retail outlets and by malls to make it harder for organizations like the Salvation Army to operate on their premises.
Q: You mean the anti-bell-ringing campaigns that we’ve seen in recent years?
A: Yeah, or those who feel that it’s a religious thing and they ought not to be exclusive or that there are certain kinds of liabilities that might legally fall on their heads. Whatever it is, it’s certainly been harder for these groups to find places that will take them.
Q: Santa’s always been a little bit judgmental. There’s a who’s-naughty-and-who’s-nice dimension to his presence, and if kids do wind up receiving less this year, are they going to just think they’re not as worthy?
A: The judgmentalism attributed to me has slackened off in the last hundred years. I don’t even carry coal or horse manure or long black birchen rods that I used to have to carry in the 19th century. The only thing that I might do is delay the visit to a house where a child is intentionally wakeful, but I certainly wouldn’t put anything less under the tree.
Q: The whole world’s going green and one would expect that Santa, living in the North Pole, is aware of the effects of global warming. Has it changed your style of operations?
A: I’ve been green since day one. I travel by reindeer, for crying out loud! Do you know how much dung a reindeer produces in the course of a year?
Q: That’s a lot of methane isn’t it? You’re contributing to the problem.
A: No, that fuels the mighty furnaces at the North Pole. Actually, I tap into geothermal heat for most of the year.
Q: There have been a lot of bad Santa movies out in recent years. Do you take this as a backhanded compliment?
A: Well, it is a backhanded compliment, and the fact that they are so cheesy and reach ever farther and farther beyond the bounds of what people know to be the authentic Santa story shows just how deeply embedded the belief in me is in the culture. If you take a look at, say, the last 10 years of Santa movies, they’ve abandoned certainly the Miracle on 34th Street kind of approach about faith or not faith. We now have all kinds of children attributed to me whom I don’t have, daughters, one’s an evil twin and one’s a good one, or they’re fascinated by the notion of how Santas might pass on the magic from one generation to another. Wake up, folks, it’s just me! I don’t have children, I don’t have successors, and insinuating that you put on the suit and you’re forced into some kind of involuntary bondage as Santa—or that when I retire, according to the CBC, I go to the Santa Senate—this is all just pure nonsense.
Q: Were there any great songs or movies of you during the Great Depression?
A: There were no good movies, but the greatest addition of the 20th century to the canon of belief in me was the addition of a ninth reindeer on the part of a Chicago department store that handed out flyers toward the end of the 1930s and alerted the world to the presence of Rudolph, my backup guide.
Q: Just to sum up, you’re in good shape, you’re not going to be in that lineup for a bailout with the car companies and everyone else?
A: Not at all. I’ve been working out, I’ve been running the reindeer through their paces, and it’s going to be a great Christmas.
Q: Anything special you’d like as a snack?
A: Ooh, shortbread. I’m partial to shortbread.
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