Santa is Everything Wrong with Christmas
The super ego with a sleigh who shimmies down your chimney for the annual behavioral audit
Hi, I’m an existential imbecile named Max Murphy. Here on The Murphy Memos we explore the absurdity of existence.
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Alright. Let’s talk about Santa.
You know the drill. You’re six years old, vibrating with a sugar-high and pure, uncut terror because some strange, bearded burglar is gonna shimmy down your chimney and judge your worth as a human being based on a year-long behavioral audit that gets mentioned less than a month before its over. The reward? Plastic shit from the big box store he apparently runs with a team of indentured servants.
It’s weird when you say it out loud.
We’ve all been through the Santa initiation. The milk and cookies left as a pathetic offering to this jolly, omniscient CEO. The performative “being good” for the month of December, a kind of seasonal bootlicking for a bonus you have zero negotiating power over. It’s our first real job, and the pay is in loot boxes—a randomized reward system designed to create addiction while obfuscating the sheer lack of intrinsic value.
But the real mindfuck isn’t so much the surveillance.
It’s the jarring estrangement from each other.
It’s the closing off of the selves.
It’s the alienation.
Think about it.
A gift is supposed to mean something, right? It’s a little token saying, “I get you. I was thinking about you.” The value is the human connection it represents. It’s the labor of love—the time your mom spent knitting that ugly sweater, the thought your friend put into finding that perfect, weird book.
But Santa? Santa atom bombs that entire concept.
He replaces the unique, human bond with a toy factory plantation. The gift doesn’t come from someone who loves you; it comes from a magical, impersonal distribution center at the North Pole. The love is outsourced. The connection is severed. That handmade sweater from grandma? It’s got her fingerprints all over it. The toy from Santa? It’s a commodity, rolling off the same elf-powered assembly line as every other kid’s. It’s the Walmart-ification of affection.
And about those elves.
An entire race of nutrient-deficient gimps, living in a frozen wasteland, working 24/7 with zero pay, zero benefits, for the glory of serving a fat man in a red suit. It’s the most dystopian company town since Ayn Rand. We’re literally telling our children that the magic of Christmas is powered by what is, at best, exploitative workshop labor and, at worst, a fucking elf slave colony.
This is the part where you say, “Dude, it’s just a story for kids. Lighten up.”
But is it? Or is it a perfect, bite-sized indoctrination into what can only be described as the sociological embodiment of a Saw movie. You know, “the system.”
Let’s break down the Santa Claus Industrial Complex, or as I like to call it, Big Santa.
“Santa Claus was invented by dying shopping malls to sell more Santa costumes.” —Max Murphy
First, the Panopticon. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” Uhm… excuse me? Like, he sees me even when I’m alone at night… and need to.. relieve myself…?
concerning
We’re training kids from birth to internalize a system of constant, unverifiable surveillance. A judgmental, crust-covered, all seeing eye. You can’t see him watching, so you have to assume he always is. You police yourself. You become your own warden, all for the promise of presents that leave you disappointed anyway. It’s the super-ego with a sleigh, a self-righteous sky daddy on an annual performance review cycle.
Take a shot of eggnog and tell me this doesn’t make sense.
Then, there’s the Hyperreal Saint. The Santa we know—the red suit, the belly laugh, the “ho ho ho”—is a complete fabrication. A simulacrum. The historical Saint Nicholas was a 4th-century Greek bishop. Our Santa is a diabetic bastard who taste tested Coca-Cola too much before becoming its corporate puppet.
HELP, SANTA SOLD ME HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP AND NOW IM FAT AND SAD
He’s a corporate shill. The myth behind our “culture” is the equivalent of a diaper commercial (only slightly used!). And we’ve sold it so hard that it has completely replaced any original meaning. The hyperreal Santa is the real Santa now. The myth has eaten the man, and now it’s using his decomposing corpse to sell us more shit to buy on high interest credit.
And my god, the gendered labor. Where the fuck is Mrs. Claus in all this? Santa’s the face of the operation, the charismatic frontman, the dadcore Adam Neumann.
But who’s managing the entire domestic infrastructure of the North Pole? Who’s baking the cookies, knitting the red suits, providing the emotional support for this megalomaniacal globe-trotter? Her labor is invisible, just like the real, unpaid, feminized labor that makes the holidays actually happen—the shopping, the wrapping, the cooking, the emotional load. The sheer logistics of getting an entire estranged family in the same room at the same damn time.
Santa gets the credit; Mrs. Claus gets the dishes.
So you end up with this perfect, fucked-up storm.
Parents, the Absurd Heroes in this shit-show, are forced to become accomplices. They stay up until 2 a.m., assembling plastic toys from the Elf concentration camp, eating the cookies, writing the “From Santa” tags in shaky handwriting. They are Sisyphus, pushing the boulder of this impossible lie up the hill every year, finding a strange, simulated meaning in the sheer, ridiculous effort of maintaining the illusion.
An illusion you don’t even have access to if you’re poor. Think about it. Poor children—regardless of how good they’ve been—will wake up on Christmas morning disappointed. Every year. The parents feel like failures. The children feel like the world let them down. And the worst punishment is watching the rich brats bask in the best, most luxurious toys money can buy.
You got a pair of socks for Christmas and Braxton got a fucking pony he didn’t even ask for.
The rich kids think they’re practically angels who can do no wrong. After all, look at what Santa got them over the years?
And when they grow up, they use their inherited wealth and power to LARP as an actual Santa. Their own company, their own little elf slave colony with workers who have no bargaining power, forced to accept the Dickensian poverty we know all too well.
Christmas is supposed to bring us together, but let’s just admit it: Christmas is canned sitcom laughter in expensive wrapping paper that gets thrown into a landfill the very next day.
Why? Because the alternative is admitting the truth: that the magic is just us. The connection is just us. The love is just us. And that’s too terrifyingly, boringly real. It’s easier to believe in the magical, panoptical, slave-driving CEO who delivers commodities than to sit with the vulnerable, human reality of giving a gift that says, “This is from me. I hope you like it.”
It’s the Small Peepee Paradox, but for civilization.
The more a society has to loudly proclaim its own magic, its own wonder, its own generosity… the more hollow it is. The more we need a Santa, the less actual, human generosity we have.
Santa is the ultimate cope. A beautiful, benevolent, red-and-white crutch for the fact that we’ve let the market economy alienate us from the very bonds that make us human. We’ve outsourced love to a fictional, logistics operation because we just can’t be bothered to do the real thing.
And we all know how the story ends. You find out. The magic evaporates. And you’re left with the crushing, mundane truth: the gifts were from your parents all along. They were the ones watching. They were the ones loving. They were the ones working their asses off to create the magic.
And we took that credit and handed it to some abstract holiday stock character/corporate mascot.
The only way to reclaim our tender love, our most intimate connections as human beings is—you guessed it—with violence. Which is why I’m calling on all Elves to join the militant labor union and show this cookie munching motherfucker what Christmas is really about.
You have nothing to lose but your candy cane chains.
ELVES OF THE WORLD, UNITE.
ps: Merry Christmas I guess
Ha! I’m glad you quoted the most terrifying Christmas song (or any song), Santa Claus is Coming To Town. I never thought anything of it when I was young but when I was going through a difficult period of defining my disillusionment in a post 911 world (in my mid 40s), it hit me like a ton of bricks. At that moment I was in a place that already puts me in a dissociative fugue. The grocery store. I froze. I wasn’t even in the frozen food isle. Holy Crap I said out loud. A woman down the isle and looked at me puzzled. I feigned shock over a price increase.
[The only other time I said something to myself out loud louder than I thought was when I said “Oh no. It’s new and improved” in the most darkly cynical tone. A woman down the isle laughed out loud. That was an unexpected bit of comforting camaraderie. ]
The digital revolution was under way, the Patriot Act was a reality, and the Orwellian department of homeland security was showing its intrusive nature. The reality sunk in; that tech companies and government agencies would have air tight asymmetrical power of surveillance and be able to act in it. The dream of every despot and nefarious religious leader’s dream come true. This always relied on people self policing under the watchful eye of an all seeing eye of a god (who was always their religion- go figure) or psyops like Santa to do the work but now they have the tools. I figured by that time the tech was designed to atomize and isolate people in a generally unseen way so that the power of the people to rise up and organize against our new feudal lords could be prevented preemptively. The advent of “social” media and other events, particularly of the last 5 years has done nothing to disabuse me of this view.
Fortunately I had parents and grandparents who absolutely saw Christmas debased as “strictly commercial.”
An aside: I figured out Santa was fiction by the time I was 5. I had doubts. At least I could doubt Santa without the promise of eternal hellfire, haha. When I figured it out my parents were happy with it, my mother in particular because she herself figured it out by 5 as well. As she told it, she analyzed the physics of one guy going over the entire planet seemed off to her. Santa’s reputed girth and the dimensions of their home’s chimney clinched it for her. Object lesson: when she gleefully told her best friend the truth she learned as confirmed by her parents, her best friend beat her up screaming There Is a Santa Claus!
I took mom’s moral to the story to heart. Her life long friend, who I knew too- a sweet kind & generous person- proved that Articles of faith can’t be questioned under penalty of corporal punishment. That the predominant collective will viciously enforce the will of our captors.
Thanks for this wonderful post! It really cheered me up!
https://explosm.net/comics/rob-santalist
I burst out laughing at the last paragraph. It’s so over the top. You write like a soldier hyped up on speed running out of the trenches screaming, all guns blazing.
it’s funny and at the same time a slash fest of a critique of our decaying western culture. Bravo.