by Gerry Bowler
You usually can’t tell because of his jolly countenance, but Santa occasionally gets discouraged and wants to scrap the whole Christmas business. In The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), the gift-bringer becomes a little sulky and it is Mrs. Claus who comes to the rescue. Claiming that he is unappreciated, he announces that this Christmas Eve he will take a vacation from delivering toys around the world. His wife sets out to discover whether the Christmas spirit is still alive and triggers a chain of events that rescues the holiday and sets her husband back on the job. (Santa does not seem to have been completely cured of his seasonal malaise. Fifteen years later in It Nearly Wasn’t Christmas (1989), he is disconsolate once more and requires proof that commercialism has not triumphed before he will consent to climbing aboard the sleigh again.)
While the late nineteenth century introduced us to the notion that Santa Claus might be married, the late twentieth century suggested that he had enthusiastically fathered an impressive number of children. These offspring, however, are not always a credit to their parents. Like Father, Like Santa (1998) tells the story of Santa’s estranged son, Tyler (Harry Hamlin), who has turned into a bad husband, a distant father, and a ruthless industrialist in the toy business bent on putting Santa (William Hootkins*) out of business. Despite unrest in the elf workshop, Christmas is saved as Santa, sinner, and family are reconciled. In Mr. St Nick (2002), a veritable royal dynasty of Clauses are each destined to serve as Santa for a century: Kelsey Grammer plays Nick St. Nicholas, a Miami playboy who is reluctant to step into the shoes of his aging father, Santa Claus, a.k.a. Nicholas xx (played here by Charles Durning, who reprised the role of the gift-bringer often throughout his career). Nick’s scheming fiancée and the allure of the beach stand between Nick and the continuation of Christmas as we know it. Santa Jr. (2002) sees son Chris Kringle, a twenty-something slacker, assigned to “the West Coast route” as a way of breaking him into the toy delivery business. Unfortunately, his experimental chimney escapades result in an arrest for breaking and entering when he is mistaken for the Christmas Bandit. Once Upon a Christmas and its sequel Twice Upon a Christmas (2000 and 2001) spring upon unsuspecting television audiences the idea that Mr. and Mrs. Claus have spawned a good and an evil daughter. Santa’s girls are the malign Rudolfa (Mary Donnelly Haskell) and the benign Kristin Klaus (played by supermodel Kathy Ireland), who manages to persuade her father not to retire (yet again!) and to keep her older sibling from selling off the North Pole to make way for a casino.
One of the delights (and there aren’t many) of this latter-day flourishing of Santa Claus movies is the perennial challenges of portraying the North Pole, its inhabitants, and its workings. How, for example, does one solve the elf problem? It would appear that elves, as shy and retiring creatures of the woodland, are reluctant to answer casting calls and consequently few genuine articles are seen on film. The 1959 Mexican epic Santa Claus dispensed with this dilemma by stating that the polar workshop was staffed by children from around the world who dress in native costume and sing their native songs all day. Santa Claus: The Movie seems to have gone for recruiting every short male in southern California – at five-foot-two, Dudley Moore towered over many of his elf mates – while Santa Claus Conquers the Martians used dwarf actors. In The Santa Clause, elves were played by children wearing prosthetics to give them turned-up noses and pointed ears. The best job of elf-portraiture was, naturally, Elf, which explained that gnomes and trolls had been tried as Santa’s helpers but the former drank too much and the latter could not be house-trained. Director Jon Favreau used oversized sets and clever camera angles to give the impression of a diminutive workforce while using a normal-sized cast. Though most elves are happy at their work, there have been reports of labour strife. The Munsters’ Scary Little Christmas (1996) reveals that, when their demands for a vacation fell on deaf ears, Santa’s little helpers temporarily turned him into a fruitcake. One thing that unites the elves of all these movies is that, without exception, they wear their hats indoors.
Modern moviegoers have grown used to dazzling special effects and expect to see reindeer flying in believable ways. Few Santa Claus films disappoint in this regard, though some have sought an easy way out by claiming that the reindeer themselves are only clockwork toys of a larger growth (the Mexican Santa Claus) or substituting rocket cars (Must Be Santa). In later films, Santa’s reindeer have become characters of their own, usually contributing to the plot through some temporary disability, as in Prancer (1989) where a young girl must nurse a deer back to health, The Santa Clause 2 where one is afflicted with flatulence and gross obesity, and Mrs. Claus where a reindeer named Cupid goes lame.
The same sort of comparative curiosity can be applied by the diligent viewer to treatments of Santa’s headquarters. Those movies opting for the northland-cottage effect include Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, where operations are decidedly small scale and hand operated, appearing too inefficient to stock the shelves of more than a single backwoods toy store, and Santa Claus: The Movie, where the action is on a grander scale but still dominated by woody décor. Mexico’s Santa Claus demonstrated a number of hightech devices in Santa’s palace to aid his labours and alarm privacy-rights advocates: the Dream Scope to detect children’s wishes; the Ear Scope, Cosmic Telescope, and Master Eye to monitor events on Earth; and a Golden Key That Opens All Doors. The Santa Clause movies show a blend of assembly-line methods and traditional artisanship, and Like Father, Like Santa ends with the promise of modernization of toy production. As impressive as some of these other efforts are, the scope of Santa’s enterprise in The Polar Express dwarfs all rivals. Here a vast, complex North Pole City, resembling a red-brick Scandinavian capital, is manned by tens of thousands of elves trained in the latest techniques of computerized manufacture and surveillance of the naughty and the nice.
Not all Santa Claus movies are created equal. Some deal with the adventures of the gift-bringer himself and others with his imitators, many of them – most of them – severely dysfunctional. Occasionally this serves a genuine dramatic purpose, as in Trading Places (1983). When a drunken, disgraced executive, Louis Winthorpe III, crashes an office party dressed as Santa Claus, waving a gun, stuffing smoked salmon into his suit, and then stumbling out into the rain, we can gauge the depth of his fall. In A Christmas Story (1983), the dreadful department-store Santa who boots Ralphie down the slide is the symbol of every adult who stands between our hero and his desire for a Genuine Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Lightning Loader Range Model Air Rifle with a Shock-Proof High Adventure Combination Compass and Sundial set in the stock and who tells him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!” The appearance of larcenous thugs dressed as Santa in Jingle All the Way (1996) neatly illustrates the perverse lengths to which parents will go to provide their children with the latest toy craze.
More often than not, however, depicting Santa as drunk, on the lam from the Mob, engaged in a fraud, or embarking on a career as a serial killer simply provides a too easy fictive contrast with the Real Thing and kick-starts a plot that is usually too thin to survive without it. Take, for example, the Santa-as-axe-murderer movies, such as Terror in Toyland (a.k.a. Christmas Evil and You Better Watch Out, 1980) or Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984). In the latter, young Billy’s sanity is imperilled when he sees his parents being butchered by a Santa-suit-wearing robber and is brought up in a punishment-obsessed orphanage. When he gets a job as a department-store Santa Claus, he snaps and embarks on a violent killing spree. This screen gem prompted no less than four sequels, two of which also involve a homicidal Kris Kringle. In Santa Claws (1996), young Wayne catches his mother doing more than just kissing Santa Claus under the mistletoe – naturally leading to multiple homicides, many committed while dressed as Santa. None of this festive film gore says much about Santa except that his blood-soaked appearance provides the audience with a cheap irony; few such movies revolve around an impressionable youth traumatized by watching his family being killed by someone dress
ed as an electrician or used-car salesman. The same may be said of horror movies in which the imitation Santa Claus is the good guy. In Elves (1990), neo-Nazi masterminds intent on creating a new master race plot to mate a virgin with an elf on Christmas Eve. The elf has already murdered one department-store Santa Claus but is foiled by the replacement Santa, a chain-smoking, overweight, recovering alcoholic played by Dan Haggerty of Grizzly Adams fame, and the plan falls apart.
One movie of this ilk that does succeed is Bad Santa (2003), with Billy Bob Thornton as Willie Stokes, a drunken, self-loathing department-store Santa Claus who makes a living robbing the malls he works in with his elfin sidekick. Playing the role of the jolly gift-bringer over the years has only made Willie more misanthropic, but into the twisted, gin-soaked life of this unkempt loser comes a little fat kid (the splendid Brett Kelly) who really believes in Santa and a waitress who has always wanted to have sex with the man in the red suit. There is redemption of a sort here, but it’s not of the easy or expected variety and so it is, in a profane way, all the more convincing. Here the tension between the costume that signals one sort of personality and the pathetic wino who inhabits it produces a genuine story.
Families decades hence are not going to be gathering around whatever device has replaced the television set to watch reruns of Bad Santa at Christmas – its moral darkness and filthy language guarantee that – but the same can be said of almost all of the aforementioned Santa movies. It is remarkable, considering how large a part he plays in the holiday as a whole, how few great Christmas films are actually about Santa Claus. The original Miracle on 34th Street is the only undeniable masterpiece, fit to take its place among It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, Remember the Night, and A Christmas Story as perennials of the season. Some of the animated children’s films will survive, as movies that we favour at an early age tend to do. Others such as The Santa Clause, which touch on family dynamics and father-son relationships, will likely endure as well but neither it, nor any of the succession-problem films, will change the public’s mind about the existence of a single immortal Santa.
In fact, it seems clear that movies have added little to our knowledge of Santa Claus. We seem to be able to enjoy them and their multifarious portrayals of his homelife and adventures without having the core of our beliefs about him changed in the slightest – just because Must Be Santa presents him in a rocket car does not mean that children now leave out a gallon of fuel for him instead of carrots for the reindeer. Perhaps we prefer to think of the real Santa as a creature of Christmas Eve only, a nighttime visitor about whom we cannot know very much except his benevolence and grace? We would rather imagine our own versions of a jolly, bearded figure tiptoeing in the dark to our Christmas tree rather than fixing on the features of a Charles Durning, Ed Asner, or (elves, preserve us!) Whoopi Goldberg.
Is the same true of the Santa Claus we sing about? What does popular music tell us about our relationship to the gift-bringer? In 2004, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) announced the society’s twenty-five most-performed Christmas songs of the new millennium:
“The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)” (Mel Tormé, Robert Wells)
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin)
“Winter Wonderland” (Felix Bernard, Richard B. Smith)
“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” (Fred Coots, Haven Gillespie)
“White Christmas” (Irving Berlin)
“Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” (Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne)
“I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (Walter Kent, Kim Gannon, Buck Ram)
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (Johnny Marks)
“Little Drummer Boy” (Katherine K. Davis, Henry V. Onorati, Harry Simeone)
“Jingle Bell Rock” (Joseph Carleton Beal, James Ross Boothe)
“Silver Bells” (Jay Livingston, Ray Evans)
“Sleigh Ride” (Leroy Anderson, Mitchell Parish)
“Feliz Navidad” (José Feliciano)
“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (Edward Pola, George Wyle)
“Blue Christmas” (Billy Hayes, Jay W. Johnson)
“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (Johnny Marks)
“Frosty the Snowman” (Steve Nelson, Walter E. Rollins)
“A Holly Jolly Christmas” (Johnny Marks)
“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” (Tommie Connor)
“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” (Meredith Willson)
“Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane)” (Gene Autry, Oakley Haldeman)
“Wonderful Christmastime” (Paul McCartney)
“Carol of the Bells” (Peter J. Wilhousky, Mykola Leontovich)
“Santa Baby” (Joan Ellen Javits, Philip Springer, Tony Springer)
“This Christmas” (Donny Hathaway, Nadine McKinnor)
Again, it is interesting how few of these songs – only 20 per cent – mention Santa Claus; even fewer are religious in nature and the majority celebrate home, festivity, and snow. This does not mean, though, that Santa has not made his impression on the musical scene. In fact, the first substantial attempt at setting Santa Claus’s life to music was performed on Christmas Eve 1853. This was American composer William Henry Fry’s Santa Claus Symphony, which premiered in New York under the direction of the wonderfully eccentric Frenchman Louis Jullien, who had thirty-six first names, was wont to conduct waving a jewelled baton from an armchair, was imprisoned for debt, and died mad. Fry’s work is a one-movement piece that attempts to tell the story of Christmas from the birth of baby Jesus to a holiday party, a traveller lost in a snowstorm, and the arrival of Santa with his bag of goodies, before ending on the tune of “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
“Up on the housetop reindeer pause / Out jumps good old Santa Claus.” Americans have been writing popular songs about Santa since the mid-nineteenth century when Benjamin Russell Hanby, an Ohio abolitionist minister and author of “Darling Nellie Gray,” wrote “Santa Claus” – better known by its subtitle “Up on the Housetop.” This jolly little number was the first of many to describe Santa, his activities, and the toys he brings (toys that few twenty-first-century kids will find in their stockings): “Here is a hammer and lots of tacks / Also a ball and a whip that cracks.” In the same era, toes were set tapping by a similar Christmas ditty, “Jolly Old St Nicholas,” sometimes attributed to Hanby, which also speaks of Santa and his selection of gifts.
Just as early movies were content merely to portray Santa Claus going about his Christmas Eve business, early musical recordings concentrated on the mechanics of his arrival, his stocking-filling, and his departure. In 1918, Montreal composer Henri Miro and his band waxed a 78-rpm number for His Master’s Voice entitled “Kiddies’ patrol: Christmas Eve,” whose program notes tell the whole story: “Santa Claus is coming; Sleigh bells in distance; Drawing nearer; Arrives at house; Selects toys; Goes down chimney; Distributes presents; Returns; Jumps in sleigh; Cracks whip; Away he goes; Drops whip; Picks it up; On he goes; Disappears in distance.” All of this was accompanied by a soundtrack of Santa talking and muttering “ho, ho, ho” to himself.
On the whole, secular Christmas songs were not very popular until the 1930s; record company catalogues before the Depression were dominated by sacred seasonal music. The first Santa song really to make a splash was 1934’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, the song that introduced the notion of an all-seeing Santa “making a list and checking it twice.” Coots was a writer for radio and vaudeville star Eddie Cantor, who at first rejected recording the tune because it was too much in the children’s genre, but, at the behest of his wife, Ida, finally relented. He sang the song at the climax of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Seventy million copies of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” have been sold in versions by musicians ranging from Gene Autry to Bruce Springsteen, the Four Seasons to the Jackson Five.
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nother prewar Santa songwriter was Briton Tommie Connor, most famous for having written English lyrics to the German ballad “Lili Marlene” and for having provided Gracie Fields with her smash botanical hit, “The Biggest Aspidistra in the World.” In 1937, he wrote “The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot,” recorded by Phyllis Robins in the United Kingdom and later by Nat King Cole in the United States. This was a tear-jerker about a laddie without a daddy who received no toys one Christmas. Two years later, just as Britain entered the war, Robins also recorded the equally touching Connor song “I’m Sending a Letter to Santa” about a child who only wants his soldier father home safely. (This was a not infrequent request to the gift-bringer; in fact, songwriters produced a whole subgenre of such invocations, as evinced by the likes of the Claude Demetrius and Aaron Schroeder tune “Santa Bring My Baby Back (to Me),” “Dear Santa, Bring My Daddy Back to Me” by Glenn Gibson, and Sam Lewis’s “Santa, Bring My Mommy Back to Me.*”)
There is another type of vocal recording made in the prewar years that deserves mention, though it is not of popular music: the recorded sermon. Three minutes was the usual length of a 78-rpm disc, and preachers found a ready market for short sermonettes on themes of repentance and salvation. Southern evangelists could reach an audience in households that owned phonographs, but that had not yet invested in the newfangled radio. Sermons on the topic of Christmas were common, and some of them used Santa Claus to illustrate the unpredictability of life and stress the need to always be prepared to meet one’s maker. The Reverend J.M. Gates of Atlanta’s Streamline Baptist Church, for example, recorded a message on November 3, 1926, entitled “Death Might Be Your Santa Claus.” Good sales of this lecture encouraged him to follow it up the next year with “Will the Coffin Be Your Santa Claus?” and in 1939 “Will Hell Be Your Santa Claus?” In his 1926 sermon, he warns his listeners:
