Santa Season
This post is a reprint of an old post about Santa Claus and Christmas, I wrote 3 or 4 years ago on my long defunct Friendster Blog. Friendster is where I started blogging. Lucky for me, there is also this other place on cyberspace which keeps my old work, acting as a library for me to pick out old writings. I keep that private though.
So here is the post I am talking about. This has been edited a bit.
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If you have been spending weekends just like I have, and was very recently acquainted to monkeys mating on Discovery or to the guy who broke the Guinness book record for breaking open the most number of melons in a minute by bashing them with this head (excitingly eventful weekend don’t you think), then I am almost certain you spent most of the time in front of the tube.. and at one time or another surfed past those movie channels.. yes?
For some months now and almost every weekend, there is a Santa story showing on TV. If not a Santa story, its about Santa’s known collaborators, elves. Either way they all had something to do with Christmas.
I guess it is so very well timed, and though I haven’t been in a department store recently, I’m guessing the carols are now playing all day long, spreading holiday cheer to the shoppers, reminding us that the time for giving approaches… so “buy, buy,buy….”
Christmas approaches and they say Santa is now preparing his sleigh…
… there are so many stories about Santa, Christmas, the season, and much like many other feel good movies, you just can’t help and think that these are simply to entertain, and partly for purposes of capitalistic marketing strategy to get us to spend more .
But what and who really is the man in the red suit? Who is Santa Claus?
You will find out later if you read on, however if you ask about the things he does and what he can do, all the things you know of Santa as you have read, heard in stories or seen depicted in movies or TV, they are all like any legend that are told, re-told and with each telling, getting more interesting with more twists and turns.
Santa Claus is an evolutionary creation, that has developed over time.. here is a timeline.
- Before the 1800s, Santa was portrayed as an elf-like figure with one reindeer
- In 1822 a popular poem came out in New York, which portrayed him as the gift giver, and with eight reindeers each with its own unique name, flying through the trees with his sleigh and dropping into the living room through the chimney
- Around 1866 the North Pole was presented as Santa’s home base…
side note: the story of Santa Claus is one that has evolved thru time as evidenced through printed and published work of text and graphics, with the legend getting better and more elaborate, now here’s where the story is best known as a capitalistic cash cow, a success story that is used up until today
- At the beginning of the 1930s, a struggling soda company was looking for ways to increase sales of their product during winter, then a slow time of year for the soft drink market. They turned to a talented commercial illustrator who created a series of memorable drawings that associated the figure of a larger than life, red-and-white garbed Santa Claus with “Coca-Cola.” Coke’s annual advertisements featuring the drawings of Santas holding bottles of Coca-Cola, drinking Coca-Cola, receiving Coca-Cola as gifts, and especially enjoying Coca-Cola — became a staple Christmastime feature which helped spur Coca-Cola sales throughout the winter, and produced the bonus effect of appealing quite strongly to children, an important segment of the soft drink market.
Coca-Cola had a great deal to do with establishing Santa Claus as Christmas figure in America at a time when the holiday was still making the transition from a religious observance to a largely secular and highly “commercial” celebration. In an era before color television (or commercial television of any kind), color films, and the widespread use of color in newspapers, it was Coca-Cola’s magazine advertisements, billboards, and point-of-sale store displays that exposed nearly everyone in America to the modern Santa Claus image. Coca-Cola certainly helped make Santa Claus one of the most popular men in America, but they didn’t invent him. The modern image of Santa, his appearance and get-up evolved from around the 19th century.
So what am i saying? Poor old Santa, the legend of the jolly ol feller used and abused for capitalistic gain?
Why and how?
Each Christmas, we panic. We feel like we never have enough money. I know it happens to me, I panic because I dont have enough money to buy enough Christmas presents for everyone I need to buy Christmas presents for.
We forget the very essence of Christmas and what it stands for… we know its a time of giving, but we overlook the fact that we should give what we can… with our heart in it, and that the value of the gift is not measured by its price tag…but the sincerity and meaning in giving.
So, who is Santa Clause?
He may be many things for many people, and he may just be the guy on the Coke soda can that still comes out every christmas season, even until today.
For me, Santa Claus is neither person, saint nor living being… Santa Clause is the personification of all that is good in us, which sadly only seems to manifest and become more evident in December.
We people, create figures that are outward manifestations of that goodness in us; we create idols or icons that manifest traits and qualities of the ideal kind of people we aspire or need to be; these projected figures or beings become iconic representations who in turn remind us of who we ought to be.
I hope we are reminded, not just for a few days in December, but every day of the year.
Comments
One Comment on Santa Season
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Christmas and Winter Solstice Celebrations | Winter Solstice Celebrations | Roy Sencio on
Mon, 24th Dec 2007 5:56 pm
[...] In fact, Santa Claus was supposedly clad in green, and not red. He is thought to have been a personification of Odin, chief of the gods in Norse mythology. This tradition blended almost seamlessly with the ‘new’ image of Santa, who is based upon a real person. Interestingly, Santa only became the red and white, jolly figure we know today because of a commercial promotion by Coca Cola in the thirties, who made Santa red forever, to match their own company’s established color. I wrote a blog about that sometime ago, called Santa Season. [...]
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