Social Functions of the Santa Conspiracy

As December 25th approaches I've been thinking about Christmas and the traditions that accompany it. What would an alien anthropologist make of our behaviour this time of year?

From an outside perspective, I imagine that the great Santa Claus deception would seem to be one of the more bizzare traditions. Out of love, we adults go to the effort to give children gifts at Christmas, but then instead of taking the credit we go to great lengths to trick children into thinking that the gifts come courtesy of an overweight elderly Eskimo with superhuman couriering abilities. It's a deception as weird as it is implausible, but yet we find it entirely charming. And if I had kids would I partake in the conspiracy?....ummm.....yes, of course! But why? Why do we do it?!

The Pagan, Christian, and Coca-Cola origins of the Santa myth are well known. But that's not what i'm interested in. What I want to know is what function the Santa conspiracy plays? What do we adults hope to achieve by partaking in the hoax? What's the pay-off?

Let's put on our nerdy over-analytical thinking caps, shall we? Here's a few preliminary hypotheses:

1. The Gift of a Fantastical Story

Perhaps we perpetuate the Santa myth because we think it is a story that children will enjoy. It's a story with a friendly hero, flying animals, and a seemingly impossible quest. So perhaps the Santa myth is like any story that we might tell to children for their enjoyment, but this story just happens to involve the annual provision of goodies to children worldwide.

Now, sure, kids enjoy fantastical stories whether it be Harry Potter, the Chronicals of Narnia, or a make-believe scenario of their own imagining. But they can enjoy stories in this way without believing that the story is literally true. Why then do we go to such great lengths to convince the kiddies that Santa a literal reality? There's got to be more to it.

2. The Gift of a Comforting Belief

What aspects of the Santa myth might a child find comforting if they believed in the literal truth of it? Perhaps the Santa hoax is intended to create a sense for the child that they are loved and cared for, not only by their parents and family, but also by the whole world; Santa, maybe, represents a grand-parent of an ultra-extended family that includes all children everywhere. Or perhaps the Santa hoax is merely supposed to instill optimistic expectations about life more generally. The child might be expected to think something along the lines "an overweight elderly Eskimo went to enormous effort to break into my houuse to give me presents, thus, the world must full of such kindness and altruism more generally."

I've been trying to think back to my own childhood memories of Christmas, but it's all a bit sketchy. I know I was definetly excited about getting presents, but how much was that enhanced by the delusion that Santa would be bringing them? I just can't remember. It's all a bit hazy.

3. Training Children in Blind Faith

Maybe Santa serves a training ground for children to develop the ability to believe in something implausible (or at least in something that at times may be hard to believe). The parent might hope, on some level, that developing this ability might facilitate better faith in religious/spiritual concepts (note that Santa in many ways resembles the Christian God concept; perhaps Santa is God with training wheels). Alternatively, a parent might hope that, having exercised their 'faith muscle' in childhood, the child might be better able to "believe in themselves" later in life, even when the chips are down.

4. Behavioural Control via Supernatural Surveillance.

Santa "knows when you are sleeping" and "knows when you're awake" and "knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake". Yes, Santa has supernatural powers of observation, and therefore can punish bad behaviour even if it goes undetected by the child's parents. So if the child isn't 'good' all of the time then they won't get any presents. Thus, by partaking in the Santa conspiracy the parent may hope to gain some control of the child's unsupervised behaviour.

Thankfully, my parents deleted this aspect of the Santa myth from my childhood. It was made clear that Santa is an unconditional gift giver. No sack of coal for me, but then, I was a habitually well behaved child....mostly.

5. Anonymised provision.

Parents may want to provide a child with gifts, but don't want the child to know that the gift came from them. But why wouldn't they want to take the credit? A couple of possibilities seem likely. First, in times of financial hardship parents might wish to keep a child from knowing that it cost them money to provide the gift. They might not want the child's enjoyment of the gift to be tainted by any worry about what it cost the parents. Second, parents might wish to avoid creating the impression that the child could have want they want at any time of the year. If Christmas gifts were attributable directly to parents children might wonder why they couldn't of had that new Barbie in July when they first asked for it.

In some ways this seems quite a shame. I think parents should take credit for the effort and thought that goes into the gifts. The tradition in my immediate family was (and still is, LOL) that 'Santa' delivers various odds and ends into my Christmas pillow case (stockings are too small), but that my main Christmas gift comes directly from my parents. And i'm really glad that Mum and Dad chose to do it that way. It allowed my main gift to serve as a demonstration that my parents understood the kinds of things that I liked and supported those interests and hobbies. It served as a really nice validation of my personality. And surely it's more important that it's your parents validating your personality than the big red Eskimo.

6. Santa is a classically conditioned stimulus

Just as Pavlov's dogs associated the ring of a bell with the provision of food, we associate Santa with the warm fuzzy excitement of Christmas, simply because the two stimuli have been paired together so often. However, we mistakenly assume that it is the Santa myth that partially creates those feelings and so we see it as an indispensible part of our children's Christmas experience.

6. Santa is a selfish-meme

Another possibility is that perhaps Santa is a selfish-meme, a self-replicating idea that survives because it's good at surviving. Could the tail be wagging the dog?

In summary, then, it seems that there are a number of functions that the Santa conspiracy might play. So parents, parents-to-be, and all of you who grew up believing in Santa, tell me what you think? Do any of these hypotheses fit your experience in any way? Can you think of any other functions that Santa might play in family life?

(I started writing this blog entry at 10am and it's nearly 2.15pm. Time to stop analysing away everyone's Christmas and do something productive. Hope I didn't unweave anyone's rainbows.)