Children cluster around Santa in this 1903 illustration.
Rose Cecil O'Neill / Library of Congress
There’s a special, even magical connection between children
and the “most wonderful time of the year.” Their excitement, their
belief, the joy they bring others have all become wrapped up in the
Christmas spirit. Take the lyrics of classic songs like “It’s Beginning
to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” “White Christmas,” or even the aptly
titled “Christmas Is for Children” by country music legend Glen
Campbell—these are just a few of the many pop culture offerings that
cement the relationship between kids and Christmas. But it hasn’t always
been this way, even though the holiday celebrates the Christ child’s
birth. How kids got to the heart of Christmas has a lot to tell us about
the hopes and needs of the modern grown-ups who put them there.
Until the late 18th century, Christmas was a boisterous affair, with
roots in the pre-Christian Midwinter and Roman Saturnalia holidays.
You’d find more along the lines of drunkenness, debauchery and raucous
carousing at this time of year, especially from young men and the
underclasses, than “silent night, holy night.” For example, in early
forms of wassailing (the forerunner of neighborhood carol-singing) the
poor could go into the homes of the rich, demanding the best to drink
and eat in exchange for their goodwill. (Once you know this, you’ll
never hear “Now bring us some figgy pudding” the same way again!)
But
the boozy rowdiness of the season, together with its pagan roots, was
so threatening to religious and political authorities that Christmas was
discouraged and even banned in the 17th and 18th centuries. (These bans
included the parliamentarians in mid-17th century England, and the
Puritans in America’s New England in the 1620s—the “pilgrims” of
Thanksgiving fame.) But then, as now, many ordinary people loved the
holiday, making Christmas difficult to stamp out. So how did it
transform from a period of misrule and mischief into the domestic,
socially manageable and economically profitable season that we know
today? This is where the children come in.
Until the late 18th century, the Western world saw children as
bearers of natural sinfulness that needed to be disciplined toward
goodness. But as Romantic ideals about childhood innocence took hold,
children (specifically, white children)
became seen as the precious, innocent keepers of enchantment that we
recognize today, understood as deserving protection and living through a
distinct phase of life.
This is also the time when Christmas began to transform in ways that
churches and governments found more acceptable, into a family-centered
holiday. We can see this in the peaceful, child-focused carols that
emerged in the 19th century, like “Silent Night,” “What Child Is This?,”
and “Away in a Manger.” But all the previous energy and excess of the
season didn’t just disappear. Instead, where once it brought together
rich and poor, dominant and dependent according to old feudal
organizations of power, new traditions shifted the focus of yuletide
generosity from the local underclasses to one’s own children.
Meanwhile, the newly accepted “magic” of childhood meant that a
child-centered Christmas could echo the old holiday’s topsy-turvy logic
while also serving the new industrializing economy. By making one’s own
children the focus of the holiday, the seasonal reversal becomes less
nakedly about social power (with the poor making demands on the rich)
and more about allowing adults to take a childlike break from the
rationalism, cynicism and workaday economy of the rest of the year.
Social
anthropologist Adam Kuper describes how the modern Christmas
“constructs an alternate reality,” beginning with rearranged social
relations at work in the run-up to the holiday (think office parties,
secret Santas, toy drives and more) and culminating in a complete shift
to the celebrating home, made sacred with decked halls, indulgent treats
and loved ones gathered together. During this season, adults can
psychologically share in the enchanted spaces we now associate with
childhood, and carry the fruits of that experience back to the grind of
everyday life when it starts up again after the New Year.
This temporary opportunity for adults to immerse themselves in the
un-modern pleasures of enchantment, nostalgia for the past and
unproductive enjoyment is why it’s so important that kids fully
participate in the magic of Christmas. The Western understanding of
childhood today expects young people to hold open spaces of magical
potential for adults through their literature, media, and beliefs. This
shared assumption is evident in the explosion of children’s fantasy set
in medieval-looking worlds over past century, which was the focus of my
recent book, Re-Enchanted
(where I discuss Narnia, Middle-earth, Harry Potter and more).
Christmas or Yule appear in many of these modern fairy stories, and
sometimes even play a central role—think Father Christmas gifting the
Pevensie children weapons in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—using the holiday as a bridge between the magical otherworlds of fiction and our real-world season of possibility.
Beyond storytelling, we also literally encourage kids to believe in
magic at Christmas. One of the most iconic expressions this is an 1897
editorial in the New York Sun titled “Is There a Santa Claus?”
In it, editor Francis Pharcellus Church replies to a letter from
8-year-old Virgina O’Hanlon with the now-famous phrase “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,”
and describes her friends’ disbelief as coming from the “skepticism of a
skeptical age.” Church argues that Santa “exists as certainly as love
and generosity and devotion exist,” minimizing the methods of scientific
inquiry to claim that “[t]he most real things in the world are those
that neither children nor men can see.”
Many of the arguments for the importance of the arts and humanities
that we still hear today can be found in Church’s language, which
identifies sources of emotional experience like “faith, fancy, poetry,
love, romance”—and belief in Santa Claus—as crucial to a humane and
fully lived life. According to this mindset, Santa not only exists, but
belongs to the only “real and abiding” thing in “all this world.” “Yes,
Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” as it has come to be known, has been
reprinted and adapted across media forms since its publication,
including as part of holiday TV specials and as the inspiration for
Macy’s department store’s “Believe” charity and advertising campaign
since 2008.
The fact that the sentiments in this editorial have come to be
associated with a major retailer may seem ironic. Yet, calls to reject
consumerism at Christmas have been around ever since it became a
commercial extravaganza in the early 19th century, which is also when
buying presents for kids became a key part of the holiday. How to
explain this? Today, just as in premodern Christmases, overturning norms
during this special time helps to strengthen those same norms for the
rest of the year. The Santa myth not only gives kids a reason to profess
the reassuring belief that magic is still out there in our
disenchanted-looking world, it also transforms holiday purchases from
expensive obligations into timeless symbols of love and enchantment. As
historian Stephen Nissenbaum puts it,
from the beginning of Santa Claus’s popularization, he “represented an
old-fashioned Christmas, a ritual so old that it was, in essence, beyond
history, and thus outside the commercial marketplace.” Kids’ joyful
wonder at finding presents from Santa on Christmas morning does more
than give adults a taste of magic, it also makes our lavish
holiday spending feel worthwhile, connecting us to a deep, timeless
past—all while fueling the yearly injection of funds into the modern
economy.
Does
knowing all this ruin the magic of Christmas? Cultural analysis doesn’t
have to be a Scrooge-like activity. To the contrary, it gives us the
tools to create a holiday more in line with our beliefs. I’ve always
found the way we abandon kids to deal with the discovery that “Santa
isn’t real” on their own—or even expect them to hide it, for fear of
disappointing adults that want to get one more hit of secondhand
enchantment—unethical and counter to the spirit of the season. The song
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is supposed to be funny, but it
captures shades of the real anxiety many kids go through every year.
Knowing what children and their belief do for society during the
holidays can help us choose a better approach.
A couple of years ago I saw a suggestion
floating around on the internet that I think offers an ideal solution
for those who celebrate Christmas. When a child starts questioning the
Santa myth and seems old enough to understand, take them aside and, with
utmost seriousness, induct them into the big grown-up secret: Now THEY
are Santa. Tell the child that they have the power to make wishes come
true, to fill the world with magic for others, and as a result, for us
all. Then help them pick a sibling or friend, or better yet, look
outside the family circle to find a neighbor or person in need for whom
they can secretly “be” Santa Claus, and let them discover the
enchantment of bringing uncredited joy to someone else. As Francis
Pharcellus Church wrote to Virginia O’Hanlon more than 100 years ago,
the unseeable values of “love and generosity and devotion” are in some
ways the “most real things in the world,” and that seems like something
that all kids —whether they’re age 2 or 92—can believe in.
Maria Sachiko Cecire is an associate professor of literature and
the director of the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College.
This essay has been adapted from material published in her recent book, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature.
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