Santa Claus does not exist.
I kind of want to get that out there first of all. Just so we are entirely clear. Santa Claus doesn’t exist, and that is quite possibly the most powerful thing about Santa.
I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a brief recap of recent nonsense.
Earlier this month, December 2018, a marketing company, GraphicSpring, sent out a survey asking how to best modernise Santa. One of the questions was “If you could ‘rebrand’ Santa for modern society, what gender would he be?”, with the three answers being Male, Female or Gender Neutral. Of the respondents, 10.6% said female, 17.2% said gender neutral, and 72.2% said male. Anyway, this has worked up some people, with a wave of pieces from various places decrying the idea of a gender neutral Santa.
Let’s be entirely clear here: this is not a measured opinion poll. This is a marketing company creating buzz, and using the fact that a lot of people have knee jerk reactions both to Santa himself, as a beloved holiday figure, and to anything they regard as “shoving transness down their throats”. A cynical viewer might even argue that it is a clear attempt by GS to use transphobia as a cynical way to get marketing clicks, knowing that the brunt of the anger will be directed at the trans and non-binary communities, not at themselves.
Anyway, this is clear attempt by GS to use transphobia as a cynical way to get marketing clicks, knowing that the brunt of the anger will be directed at the trans and non-binary communities, not at themselves. All the trans and non-binary groups* I’ve been involved with have generally been mostly confused by this entire thing, since no one has really asked for Santa to be made gender neutral. Maybe as a joke, but seriously, that’s not really something you need to worry about. It isn’t actually a thing.
But there is another side to this, and for that I want to return to what I mentioned above. Santa isn’t real, and that is one of Santa’s greatest strengths.
Santa Claus is in many ways a symbol as much as he is a character, and I think the best thing he symbolises is generosity, and anonymous generosity at that. There’s a couple of ways to read him. Santa as a judge of behaviour, who know when you’ve been bad or good, and the bad get coal** is another popular reading for instance, but my personal view of Santa is less as a character, and a role that people step into. Signing a gift from Santa removes the giver from the equation. We know Santa doesn’t exist, but still, it is his name on the presents. Santa gives without the hope of receiving anything back, except maybe a glass of milk and a few biscuits. Santa is a mask for us to wear so we can in turn, focus on giving and kindness, and I think that is Santa’s greatest strength. Santa does not exist, and we can all be Santa.
So, if you ask me what Santa’s gender is, then my question in turn is, what is your gender? Because that is Santa’s. And Santa is also agendered, using they/them as their pronouns, because I am also Santa. And Santa uses he and she and they and all the neo-pronouns you like, because Santa is all of us. Just stepping into the red suit, and quietly placing down a present, before disappearing unseen, back up the chimney into the world that doesn’t exist, just North of the North Pole.
* I am agendered, and I generally use they/them as my pronouns. I will almost certainly be exploring this more, but this is the first post where this has come up.
** Which in itself is another interesting point; is it a warning, or, given that the tradition dates back to when coal fireplaces were used to warm the house, a way of saying “you may be bad, but you still don’t deserve to be cold”? Although in some traditions it is coal from the fireplace, so that is a whole other thing. I tried to look this up for this piece, and for a story I’m working on, but no one’s really sure where the tradition of coal comes from, other than it is pretty widespread and not really done anymore.