The Death of Santa

About twenty years ago I wrote my first novel, “Santa, CEO.” Its inspiration was an email I’d read that posed the question, How could Santa deliver all those toys in one night? This email took the physics route: blazing speed, size of sleigh, how could the reindeer even survive, etc. It was a tongue-in-cheek answer based on our everyday world.

I took a different approach. Long ago, Santa would have figured out that the effort was too much for him; he’d have delegated it.

What followed became a complete world, with Santa at the center: forty thousand stand-in human “santas,” sworn to secrecy, over a million department store santas, thousands of elves and half-elves (Santa and Mrs. Claus themselves two such creatures, pairing elfin immortality with human size, but like all half-elves sterile as mules), a worldwide network of suppliers and retailers, and half a million flying reindeer ranched worldwide.

What I thought would be a kind of extended short story, one night’s light reading, turned into something far more absorbing, as Santa’s world unfolded before me. I disliked those “made for business” novels written by folks using fiction as a vehicle to instruct on this or that business truth. Could I pull off something more compelling?

A couple of years later, I self-published the story, selling a couple of hundred copies. Some folks said they couldn’t put it down, once they got into it. That’s the best review a storyteller can receive.

Still, like any first long work, it had its flaws. For one thing, the beginning was too complex, and the pace was off. I’d tried (unsuccessfully) to mirror the confusion, the feeling you get when plunged into a business you don’t fully understand, wrestling with players and processes. That was a mistake.

Twenty years on, I still like the tale. So much so that I’m rewriting the beginning to address those concerns.

Naturally, the question arises — should I give it a 21st-century facelift? So much has happened. The turn-of-the-century Santa grappled with globalization, hollowing out the workforce, mergers and acquisitions, scheming, diversity, shareholder value at any cost, and so on.

What about today? What about climate change, woke-ness, January 6, generative AI, cyberwarfare, and all the rest?

What, indeed?

It’s not that I couldn’t shift everything forward, make it real for today. It’s just that I don’t think I want to.

“Santa, CEO” dealt with the same things we need to rediscover today. There is, and perhaps always has been, a split in our world, between those who see only the transactional and those who see the aspirational. Edwin Muir bemoaned the loss of his childhood world, where “the sky fit the earth.” (1) In the original “Santa,” the elves, half-elves and people all struggled between that which was profitable, necessary and practical, and that which was magical and possible, if only in dreams.

That century’s end “Santa, CEO” argued for recovering the magic, symbolized by Santa’s neglected and starving original team.

Now, as I write while examining the latest air quality figures, catching the latest news that either presents the earth as on fire or vilifies the presenters as bearers of fake news; when I try to make sense of a world in which books are being banned and speech is threatened on both sides of the political spectrum; where people’s self-expression, whether through art or gender, is threatened; where weapons of mass destruction are accepted and the ensuing mass slaughter is a reasonable price to pay; where freedoms are eroded in the name of certain other brands of freedom, and “patriot” is a word to be fought over like a stuffed toy between two dogs; where every day there is yet another story of violence, of disillusion, of looking toward dictators as solutions to problems; where, ultimately, U.S. children replace play and exploration with “run, hide, fight” — of, in short, fiddling while our Rome burns — I think now, that Santa is dead.

Santa is dead because there is no place left for him, or at least the version of him that I created, to exist any more.

Santa is dead because he has no where to live. The great sky fields that belonged to his magic reindeer teams are full of smoke and haze. The world of snow and ice is vanishing. The ability to maintain a veil of secrecy over a world of magic, and to impart glimpses of that magic to children, is no longer a joyful illusion that can be maintained.

Santa today, as I rewrite his story, will be released into a world so self-obsessed with its own pain that it can no longer see or feel the magic that once was. A world, for all its angst, not that much different from previous generations’ worlds, after all. Because despite pleas to the contrary, people in each generation — myself included — have disrespected one another’s delusions. (2)

Perhaps Santa is dead, because Santa’s biographer, late in life, has at last abandoned hope.

Or has he?

Something stubborn squats in me still. (3)

So.

I’ll finish rewriting “Santa” once again, before I die. He’ll still be the same tough bird he was. And North Pole Industries, his creation, will live. As will his magic reindeer. And the elves and half-elves. And those rare humans privileged to glimpse what it all means.

Perhaps you’re one of them.

Stay tuned. Santa will return. Before it’s too late.

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(1) As recollected by Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair, eds., The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: Muir stating “In childhood I had that feeling of harmony, and I can still remember it; the sky fitted the earth then": but since that time I have often been troubled by a sense of dislocation between the earth and sky: an actual physical, or visual, feeling of something wrong.”

(2) I’ve quoted Will Durant and Ariel Durant before, from The Lessons of History: - “We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities, in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formula should be suspect. ‘History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque.’ Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another’s delusions.”

(3) Well, Philip Larkin again, and totally out of context — but it’s a great combination of words, from his poem Toads: “…something sufficiently toad-like / Squats in me, too…”