Santa Claus
Once a year, millions of children around the world eagerly wait for a plump, bearded man dressed in red and white to bring them presents to open on Dec. 25. Known as Santa Claus, his origins are mysterious, and his very existence has been disputed. Some people believe that he lives and works in the North Pole, employs a group of elves to manufacture toys, distributes the gifts annually with the aid of flying reindeer, and regularly utters “Ho, Ho, Ho” in a commanding voice.
But is Santa Claus man or myth?
Santa Claus, as we know him today, first appeared in North America in the early 19th century, but his ancestor is believed by many to be St. Nicholas, a Christian monk born around 280 ce in what is now known as Turkey. In Dec. 2024, archaeologists working at the Church of St. Nicholas in Demre, Antalya, Turkey, unearthed a sarcophagus believed to contain the remains of the famed saint.[1][3][14]
Reputed to be kind and generous, St. Nicholas became the subject of several legends, and his Dutch name, Sinterklaas (shortened from Sint Nikolas), eventually evolved into Santa Claus. Early images of Santa portrayed him wearing a variety of robes, hats, and colored stockings, and he looked nothing like the familiar rotund figure we know today. [10]
Santa’s modern appearance has been traced to an 1823 poem titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (also known as “The Night Before Christmas”), written by American author Clement Clarke Moore, which described him as having a “beard on his chin…as white as the snow” and being “chubby and plump.” He was also described as being “little” and was pulled in “a miniature sleigh” by “eight tiny rein-deer.”[5]
In the late 19th century, the classic Santa we know now, dressed in a red outfit trimmed with white fur, appeared in images drawn by illustrator Thomas Nast, which were first published in Harper’s Weekly from 1863 to 1866. Santa remained half-size, however, until later in the century. Before Nast’s interpretation emerged, one portrayal of Santa in Harper’s Weekly showed him beardless and in a sleigh pulled by a turkey. Contrary to a common misconception, the Coca-Cola Company did not invent the red-suited Santa, although they did feature the jolly gift-giver dressed that way in a 1930s advertising campaign, which may have led to the popularization of this instantly recognizable outfit. [1][10]
The first time Santa was spotted in a department store was in 1890 in Brockton, Massachusetts, although some believe it was nothing more than the store owner, named James Edgar, dressed in a costume. [4]
In the U.K. and some other English-speaking countries, Santa Claus is known as Father Christmas, and in French-speaking areas, he is known as Père Noël. Each of these alternate Santas were once distinct individuals, but they are now virtually synonymous. [3]
In 1955 the Continental Air Defense Command began tracking Santa’s yearly flight, a tradition that was adopted in 1958 by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). With the use of radar and satellites, NORAD follows Santa’s progress as he delivers his Christmas present payload. According to NORAD, the satellites use infrared sensors to detect the bright red nose of one of Santa’s reindeer, known as Rudolph. [2]
Santa’s presence is felt around the world each Christmas, and his popularity seems only to grow every year. He appears in movies, shopping centers, at Christmas parties, and, many believe, in chimneys everywhere, carrying his sack full of presents. But is he real?
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| Pro 1: Santa Claus exists as certainly as love and generosity exist. Read More. | Con 1: There’s too much hardship in the world for there to be a Santa Claus. Read More. |
| Pro 2: Science and historical data support the existence of Santa Claus. Read More. | Con 2: Science doesn’t support Santa Claus. Read More. |
| Pro 3: Santa Claus is the manifestation of the historic St. Nicholas. Read More. | Con 3: Christmas is about Jesus Christ; Santa doesn’t exist. Read More. |
Pro Arguments
(Go to Con Arguments)Pro 1: Santa Claus exists as certainly as love and generosity exist.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” wrote American reporter and publisher Francis Church in his response to a letter to the editor from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon. Published in The New York Sun on Sep. 21, 1897, it is one of the most famous editorials ever written.
“He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist,” explained Church, “and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.…He lives and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”[6]
Pro 2: Science and historical data support the existence of Santa Claus.
“Mountains of historical data and more than 50 years of NORAD tracking information leads us to believe that Santa Claus is alive and well in the hearts of people throughout the world,” reports the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). “Based on flight profile data gathered from over 50 years of NORAD’s radar and satellite tracking…Santa probably stands about 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighs approximately 260 pounds (before cookies). Based on fighter-aircraft photos, we know he has a generous girth (belly), rosy cheeks from sleigh riding in cold weather, and a flowing white beard.
“NORAD can confirm that Santa’s sleigh is a versatile, all weather, multipurpose, vertical short-take-off and landing vehicle. It is capable of traveling vast distances without refueling and is deployed, as far as we know, only on December 24th (and sometimes briefly for a test flight about a month before Christmas).”[7]
“Science has long shown that Santa Claus is real,” adds neuroscientist Dean Burnett, “and those who claim otherwise are invariably in the pocket of the big toy companies, who don’t want people thinking they can get free playthings and so will pay for their products. The evidence is beyond any reasonable doubt, and the arguments of the Santa deniers have been repeatedly debunked.…
“Admittedly, the whole ‘flying reindeer’ thing does seem very far-fetched, and this is a fair accusation. Investigations suggest that the flying reindeer image is a distortion of the truth, in that reindeer are native to the Arctic so Santa may well keep reindeer on his premises and perhaps they did pull his sleigh originally. But there is substantial evidence now to suggest that Santa powers his sled with the energy obtained from a precisely controlled quantum singularity. Basically, Santa has access to a small black hole, which he uses to perform his duties.” [8]
Pro 3: Santa Claus is the manifestation of the historic St. Nicholas.
St. Nicholas—Christian bishop of Myra, Turkey, in the 4th century and patron saint of children and sailors—was celebrated in the Eastern and Western churches, noted for his generosity and gift-giving. As Encyclopaedia Britannica reports, St. Nicholas was imprisoned and likely tortured for his faith during the persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian but was released under the rule of Constantine the Great. “He was reputed to have given marriage dowries of gold to three girls whom poverty would otherwise have forced into lives of prostitution and to have restored to life three children who had been chopped up by a butcher and put in a tub of brine.” In many countries, children receive gifts on his feast day, Dec. 6. [13]
“After the Reformation,” explains Britannica, “devotion to Nicholas disappeared in all the Protestant countries of Europe except Holland, where his legend persisted as Sinterklaas (a Dutch variant of the name St. Nicholas). Dutch colonists took this tradition with them to New Amsterdam (now New York City) in the American colonies in the 17th century. Sinterklaas was adopted by the country’s English-speaking majority under the name Santa Claus….The resulting image of Santa Claus in the United States crystallized in the 19th century, and he has ever since remained the patron of the gift-giving festival of Christmas.”[13]
Con Arguments
(Go to Pro Arguments)Con 1: There’s too much hardship in the world for there to be a Santa Claus.
“Bah, humbug!” snaps Ebenezer Scrooge in disgust in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843). “What else can I be [but cross]…when I live in such a world of fools as this,” says Scrooge in response to his nephew Fred wishing him a merry Christmas.
“Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” says Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” [11]
Con 2: Science doesn’t support Santa Claus.
“Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical),” writes an anonymous source in Spy magazine. “This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
“Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth…we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles…This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second—a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
“The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa.
“On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that ‘flying reindeer’…could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.
“We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload—not even counting the weight of the sleigh—to 353,430 tons.”[9]
Con 3: Christmas is about Jesus Christ; Santa doesn’t exist.
“No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus,” writes Mennonite blogger Edwin Shank. “We come from a culture of truth-no-matter-what. It is unthinkable for us to tell our children something other than the truth. And Santa Claus is not the truth.
“We all know it. Santa Claus is a lie. It is a culturally accepted untruth that culturally compliant, culturally conformed parents collectively tell their unsuspecting children. Our culture wants to call it something else, but let’s be honest. We know.”
“To us, Christmas is a time to remember the birth of Jesus Christ over 2000 years ago in Bethlehem, Judea. (Luke 2) This special moment, when Jesus came to this earth may not be the greatest moment in God’s salvation plan. (The greatest moment occurs about 33 years later at Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection.) But ‘the Earthly birth of The Heavenly Son of God’ is still special. Nothing like it ever happened before. There’s been nothing like it ever since. Nor will there ever be anything like it in the future.
“The reason we plain-folk Christians do not celebrate Santa Claus is easy to explain. It is simply that Santa and the surrounding elves, sleighs, reindeer etc. has nothing at all to do with the birth of Jesus. Nada. Nothing. Zilch.” [12]
Discussion Questions
- Should people believe in Santa Claus? Why or why not?
- Can fictional heroes harm or help the social and intellectual development of children?
- Is Santa Claus anti-Christian? And can Christians who understand the meaning of Christmas still legitimately believe in Santa Claus and practice the secular traditions of Christmas?
Take Action
- Track Santa’s journey with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
- Learn more about Santa Claus at Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- Explore the origins of Santa at the St. Nicholas Center.
- Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the “other side of the issue” now helps you better argue your position.
Sources
- HarpWeek, “Santa Claus and His Works,” harpweek.com (accessed Nov. 17, 2020)
- U.S. Army, “NORAD Continues Long Tradition of Tracking Santa Claus,” army.mil, Dec. 23, 2016
- History.com Editors, “Santa Claus,” history.com, Feb. 16, 2019
- Jamie Kageleiry, “Where Was the First Department Store Santa Claus?,” newengland.com, Dec. 12, 2019
- The Week Staff, “The History of Santa Claus: 7 Interesting Facts,” theweek.com, Dec. 23, 2011
- Francis Church, “Is There a Santa Claus?”, The New York Sun, Sep. 21, 1897
- North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Dec. 2014
- Dean Burnett, “Santa Claus Deniers: Why Do They Get So Much Airtime?,” The Guardian, Dec. 11, 2014
- Anonymous, Spy magazine, Jan. 1990
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Santa Claus,” britannica.com, Aug. 17, 2020
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843
- Edwin Shank, “No, Virginia, There Is No Santa Claus,” acceptedwithhim.com, Dec 9, 2023
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “St. Nicholas,” britannica.com, October 4, 2024
- Dario Radley, “Sarcophagus of ‘real Santa Claus’ found at St. Nicholas Church in Turkey,” archaeologymag.com. Dec. 7, 2024