Santa is a Fraud

There’s a man on my T.V. screen and he’s been there since the beginning of the month. He’s got a snow-white beard and a red outfit—his jacket is cinched with a thick belt and made complete by fluffy trim around the cuffs and hemline. His nose and cheeks are flushed as he holds up a bottle of soda. He’s standing beside a menu of featured content: “Festive favorites to refresh your holidays,” sponsored by his maker, Coca-Cola. The advertisement promises “to inspire holiday magic all season long,” and first up is National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

‍

In the U.S, we teach our young about this kind and generous man. For the entire year, he’s preparing gifts for every child in every corner of the world. And then, all in one night, he delivers those gifts to each and every one of those children. From him, according to his ability, to all of the children, according to their needs. This seems like a pretty radical lesson, especially for the Coca-Cola Company to endorse. But upon closer inspection, this man we call Santa Claus is more flexible a figure than we realize, used by both corporations and the state to normalize surveillance, discipline, and capitalist values under the cover of nostalgia—those blurry, incandescent lights.

‍

Even in the most straightforward ways, Santa is a figuration of our culture of surveillance. He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. It seems he even knows when you’re watching T.V., or whether or not you’ll put on Christmas Vacation. He also, famously, knows if you’ve been bad or good. So be sure to adhere to Santa’s prescribed morality, because he conducts end-of-year reviews and marks his judgments of you on a list. And he checks that list twice. He’s punitive, too; those he deems naughty get a lesser gift than those he labels as nice.

But how can he be the arbiter of niceness when he owns the means of production yet only redistributes his wealth once a year? Even more, he deploys interspecies slave labor to do so—the elves and flying reindeer paid in nothing more than the joy of working for a good cause and maybe a few sweet treats. Santa is more aligned with today’s robber barons than anything else. He’s Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a CEO like Starbucks’ Brian Niccol or Disney’s Bob Iger. In fact, similar to Christmastime for Santa’s workers, it too is the busiest time for Starbucks employees. For the coffee chain, the holiday months are referred to as “Red Cup Season,” during which they switch their regular cups and flavors for more festive ones, culminating in a day-long celebration known as “Red Cup Day.” On Novemer 13, the day of this year’s “Red Cup Day,” Starbucks Workers United went on strike due to the company’s failure to finalize a fair union contract more than 18 months after national framework contract bargaining began. “We’re turning the Red Cup Season into the Red Cup Rebellion,” said Dachi Spoltore, a barista of five years from Pittsburgh on a ULP strike. “Starbucks’ refusal to settle a fair union contract and end union busting is forcing us to take drastic action.”

The holidays are also peak season for Amazon, which means a particularly exploitative time for its employees in which they are especially overworked, understaffed, and underpaid. Last December, Amazon workers around the country went on strike from December 19 to Christmas Eve, calling for higher wages, better benefits, and safer work conditions. While the strike was rather small in size, it produced key lessons and considerations for future organizing efforts—including that, as Sam Gindin writes in Jacobin, “an effective response…necessitates an independent left organized across Amazon with a politicized training program, regular communication and strategic discussions by way of a newsletter, a capacity to recruit salts, and links to socialist supporters in other unions and in the community.” These workers’ actions expose the reality of the holiday spectacle; beneath the cheer and generosity of Christmastime lies a system that extracts as much labor as possible while demanding gratitude and joy in return, all with Santa Claus as the mascot.

But Santa is more than just a corporate emblem. He is, materially speaking, an example of reputational laundering—his cheerful image used to bolster state power, militarism, and empire. The North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Santa tracker, which turns 70 this year, provides the public with the opportunity to “track” the man’s whereabouts in real time on Christmas Eve as he departs from the North Pole to travel the world. If Santa Claus ever was truly a communist—perhaps prior to his corporate capture by Coke—NORAD’s program shows us exactly how the U.S. government would respond to his activities (given he was also real). He wouldn’t be able to step his boots outside of the North Pole, let alone around the world, without being labeled a terrorist.  Along with being facilitated by a military command, the Santa tracker program has also been endorsed by a variety of U.S. and Canadian military units and political figures, from former president Joe Biden to the Eastern Air Defense Sector of the New York Air National Guard. Santa has even gone to war for the U.S. A 1942 agitprop poster suggests that, in place of toys and trinkets, Santa gifts weapons to American children during wartime, and he does so while bearing a rifle and possessed by the same rosy cheeks that he’d later utilize to promote Christmas Vacation on my T.V.

It was around a decade prior to that wartime poster that Santa was standardized in his suiting and smile. Before the 1930s, his depiction varied. At one point, in 1294, he was a glowing saint donning a halo. In 1686, his image looked more similar to that of a king’s. In 1864, his suit was yellow, and in 1902, it was black with cheetah print trim on the cover of ​​L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures Of Santa Claus. Throughout the 20th century, Santa’s red coat and white beard became more consistent, and more commodified. When you see Santa today, “you’re seeing an image created, promoted and marketed by the Coca-Cola Company,” Valerie Vande Panne writes in In These Times, noting that the Coca-Cola Company commissioned Michigan artist Haddon Sundblom in 1931 to create the image of Santa Claus we all know today for its “Thirst Knows No Season” campaign. Vande Panne went on to write that “Santa has become the embodiment of our culture’s capitalistic fervor.”

‍

Santa’s embodiment of capitalism becomes even more apparent during the Cold War, especially when set against Russia’s iteration of Father Frost, known as Ded Moroz. Predating Santa Claus, Moroz is rooted in Slavic folklore and was first denounced as a demon by the church. Later on, though, Moroz was integrated into Russia’s Christmastime traditions—until 1928, when the Stalin-run Soviet Union banned religion on account of it being a bourgeois instrument to repress the working class (“the opium of the people,” as Marx considered it). The ban covered any associated symbols, including Ded Moroz, who was considered an ally of the priest and the kulak (wealthy peasant farmers who hired labor and owned and leased land). By 1935, though, Stalin brought Moroz back to life, now as a nationalist, fully secular symbol for non-religious New Year’s celebrations. As Santa was used to promote American capitalism and sell war bonds in the States, Moroz appeared in Soviet propaganda, especially during the height of the space race. In one New Year’s postcard, Moroz sees off a Soviet rocket, and in another, he holds up a boy in an astronaut suit who waves a flag adorned with the communist peace dove.

‍

Last year, Pul N3 Telegram—a pro-Kremlin channel—aired an ad in which an American Santa Claus rides into Russia with a sleigh full of missiles. “Russians, here are your presents,” American Santa says, only to be shot out of the sky by Ded Moroz and a Russian serviceman moments later. “We don’t need any kind of foreign stuff flying above our heads,” Moroz says right after Santa explodes  into fireworks. Moroz  and the serviceman then fist bump. Here, we see two figures dueling ideologically but nonetheless the same in their function as tools of the state, used as a means of masking nationalism and militarism with a kind, nostalgic face.

Today, Santa has reached another turning point—or perhaps an unceremonious end, and at the hands of his modern maker no less. Last year, Coca-Cola launched a holiday ad campaign depicting Santa that was AI-generated and, despite receiving backlash, launched another slate of AI slop this year. Santa’s image is yet again utilized for business purposes, which is nothing new. Only now, his likeness is crafted by and being used to normalize technology that is increasingly exploitative of human labor. He has become a Frankensteinian figure, made up of stolen parts and sewn together to carry out the biddings of his Victor, of which there are many, each as hubristic as the next. One of them is Jason Zada, founder of Secret Level, an AI entertainment studio responsible for the main ad within the Coke campaign (Zada also created the mid-2000s hit app ElfYourself, where you can upload a picture of your face and it subsequently appears on the body of a dancing elf).  In The Hollywood Reporter, Zada brushed off criticism of his holiday spot. “The average consumer doesn’t really care [...]” He said. “We put happiness on faces, smiles on faces. Why would you get mad about something like that?” Zada’s undermining of valid concerns and criticism exemplifies exactly how Santa Claus has worked as a propaganda tool since before the Cold War. State and corporate powers rely on the public’s consideration of Santa and Christmastime at large as apolitical. But Santa is as politicized as any other public talisman used to promote wartime efforts and surveillance, and whose image boosts the reputations of big businesses and the military. That manipulation of image has become even more unrestrained now that he’s AI-generated. There’s nothing he won’t or can’t do or become or promote or condone or condemn because he himself can never truly be or do or become anything except that which he’s instructed. His perpetual malleability and artificiality are precisely what make him such an attractive creature and tool for propagandists. Both Moroz and the American Santa show that the figure of Santa Claus not only has no true form, but no true ideology.