Rediscovering Santa Claus, between religiosity and paganism

A surprising Santa Claus , told by one of the fathers of structuralism and cultural anthropology , following a news story: on the steps of the cathedral in Dijon on Christmas Eve 1951, a puppet of this character with a big white beard and dressed all in red was hanged and then burned in an excessive demonstration of a faith that claims to be pure, compared to the commercialization and paganization of the Christian holiday.

A holiday, Christmas, celebrated with a resonance that was not there before the war and which is a direct result of the influence exerted by the United States. On these other issues, the detailed introduction by Gianfranco Marrone to the book by Claude Levi-Strauss “Santa Claus executed” (Sellerio, pp.110, translated by Clara Caruso) intervenes.

Levi-Strauss focuses his attention on children in relation to this belief of "coherent illogicalities" , being perhaps the only one in which adults do not believe, and yet they push children to believe it, making them non-initiates periodically reunited with the initiated.

The press, after the fact, defends Santa Claus, who does not harm anyone and is liked by children and the scholar notes that in this way the problem is avoided, which is not to understand why children like him, but why adults invented him: "It is not every day that an ethnologist has the opportunity to observe, in the society in which he lives, the sudden development of a rite and even a cult; to research its causes and to study its impact on other forms of religious life".

Christmas as we experience it today is an essentially modern celebration, despite its archaic characteristics and the Christmas tree has been mentioned in German and English texts since the beginning of the eighteenth century and, taking into account traditions, habits and customs, «it appears as a syncretic solution, that is, it concentrates in a single object needs that were present until then, but separate: magic tree, fire, lasting light, persistent greenery».

Santa Claus is instead a completely modern creation and even more recent is the belief that he resides in Greenland and the scholar wonders in which category he should be placed from a religious point of view. «He cannot be mythical, because there is no myth that explains his origin and his functions; and he is not even a legendary character, since he is not connected to any semi-historical story». Rather, in his supernatural and immutable form, he is a divinity, and a divinity of only one age group, which differentiates him from a real divinity. He thus concludes that ««Santa Claus, first of all, is the expression of a differential code that distinguishes children from adolescents and adults», thus connecting to practices that ethnologists link to rites of passage and initiation, which highlight, in this case, behind the contrast between adults and children, a deeper contrast between the dead and the living.

And on this contrast the anthropologist Antonio Buttitta intervenes in his essay that closes the volume , in which of course he also refers to traditions such as the Sicilian one, according to which the dead bring gifts to children on the second of November. The discussion then articulates in depth and meaning, it speaks of history and tradition, of religiosity and paganism, and Levi-Strauss returns to the news underlining how the Dijon clergy, wanting to destroy Santa Claus, "did nothing other than restore to its entirety, after an eclipse of a few millennia, a ritual figure, thus taking on the burden, under the pretext of destroying, of proving its perpetuity".

(Online Union)