SANTA CLAUS’
SIGNIFICANT OTHER...
by
Margaret Visser
Both
the evergreen and Santa Claus are embodiments of Christmas. He is old,
vigorous, and jolly like the festival itself, and also fat and generous—a
red, mobile, vocal, male fertility symbol.
The tree, like Christmas, is new every year but ever the same. It gleams with
fruits and garlands and glows with light during the darkest, most barren
season of the year. Like Santa it brings us presents. Not being a person, the
tree is a more abstract idea of Christmas than Santa, but it has definitely
anthropomorphic aspects; silent, green, and static, the lit tree is female
rather than male.
The
old German song “O Tannenbaum”
actually addresses the tree and calls it du;
in one English version the second line exclaims, “Your gay green dress
delights us!” Like a woman, it is adorned with hanging drops and necklaces:
in a family, indeed, it is usually the mother’s task to dress the tree.
(Father would light the candles; nowadays, he checks, fixes, drapes, and
plugs in the tree’s lights.) Its needles and branches give out a pleasantly
unfamiliar scent in the house for as long as the festival lasts; perfume, in
our culture, still tends to be expected rather of women than of men.
In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the attraction of the tree was
precisely that it had no personality, and could signify Christmas in an
abstract manner. It was a weapon of the German Protestants in their war
against the Catholic propensity to depict the human form and to use drama in
the process of worshipping God.
The
Christmas gift-bringers in Catholic cultures were (and often still are) the
Three Kings, or St Nicholas, who arrived on horseback to stride among the
city crowds; from the thirteenth century onwards the traditional folk art of
the holiday was the Christmas crib, with its realistic depictions of people
and animals in the story of the Nativity. The Christmas tree was a brilliant
Protestant substitute and riposte: it was nature distinctly enculturated, an
object often man-sized but pyramidal in shape, pretty hut indubitably not
human, and therefore pure.
Christmas,
echoing the general embourgeoisement of society, moved indoors and become a
private, family celebration, In many European countries St Nicholas
gradually evolved into Santa Claus and had, like the tree, to enter the house
in order to do his work. He came “from the sky,” like the star placed on
top of the tree. The ancient Yule log—nature appropriated, the outside
brought indoors for as long as the feasting takes—also contributed to the
tree as a ritual emblem.
Catholics
eventually took to the Christmas tree, and Protestants accepted Santa Claus;
both now occur together, still doubles, in many respects, of each other. The
crib is often found at the foot of the tree, under the star of Bethlehem at
its tip; the baby Jesus is of course the original Christmas gift. Mundane
gifts tended to be placed on a table nearby, as they still are in Germany.
When the English adopted the tree in the 1840s, they were still doubtful
about cribs, and put the presents under the “skirts” of the tree: if
Santa is a phallic gift-bringer, the tree is his female, fertile counterpart.
The
star is often replaced, especially in Anglo-Saxon cultures, by an angel or
a “fairy.” The origin of this is partly the Christkind,
Christkindl, or Christkindlein, another
German Protestant answer to St Nicholas. This is a female figure—another
doublet of the tree—a herald of Christmas, who arrives dressed in white
with a red girdle, a bell, and a rod, bringing presents to the children. To
keep her decently abstract, her face is covered with a white cloth. The
figure may also be considered sexless, in conformity with the neuter gender
of its name in German.
The
Christkindl came to be called Kriss
Kringle in America; she merged with the Nativity angels and ended up on top
of many a tree. She also became a constituent element in the modern, very
American, Santa Claus, who has taken on some female attributes and whose name
has sometimes been Kriss Kringle. The lights on the tree come in part from
another female embodiment of the Christmas season as festival of light: the
Scandinavian St Lucia, impersonated by a beautiful young woman wearing a
crown of candles.
Santa is a myth for children, and he leaves presents only for them. These are found gifts, never handed over directly; in this they are like the objects carefully hidden in wrappings and laid under the tree, to be taken from there rather than from their givers. But the tree gives to grownups as well as children, and, when there are no children for whom adults can stage the coming of Santa Claus, they often continue to entertain his companion, the Christmas tree. Of course, these days both Santa and the tree are increasingly called away from the family hearth, and out into the public domain once more, where their services are required not to give goods but to sell them.
“Santa Claus’s Significant Other” by Margaret Visser in The Way We Are
Copyright © 1994 by Margaret Visser