Santa is Real

Santa Claus comes to everyone’s town and home every Christmas time, bringing Christmas cheer and gifts to all the good children. This is the core of every tale about Santa Claus, and it is usually mixed in with some technical details about HOW he goes about accomplishing these goals. And sure enough, Santa Claus’s presence exists in the towns and homes of millions of people, and usually alongside gifts and lots of Christmas cheer. So, why then is it commonly accepted that he isn’t real?

            Human society is based on stories. Stories and narratives provide meaning to entities and people, and without them there is no meaning to anything that exists in physical form. This is true for large impact areas like describing how to interpret one human harming another, and it’s even true for areas thought of as objective like data science. Without stories to provide meaning and interpretation, data points mean nothing. Stories shape society even stronger than objective recordings of what exactly happened because of the meanings and values provided through them, and the stories are what make things real in the minds of the people.

            This principle applies to Santa Claus. Stories have been shared all over the world for a very long time about him, and although some of the details of the story are subject to change depending on the culture of the storyteller and consumer, the key takeaways are the same. Santa Claus is present in every home of those who believe in him and what he represents, and he brings with him the spirit of Christmas. This all comes true every year. His presence is all over, and when Santa pops up so do gifts and plenty of representations of Christmas spirit. Many people even don the costumes that the stories suggest he wears, often making people happy and even bringing gifts themselves. Although one man does not physically fly in a sled steered by flying reindeer every year dropping gifts in every home around the world over the span of a few hours, the core values of the stories are all valid and all come true. Santa lives in our minds and shapes our feelings, actions, homes, traditions, and values. This makes him a real entity.

            We are told Santa Claus is not real, but he is as real as many things our society does accept as real. Two examples are money and deities. There is no intrinsic value in a dollar bill, but money is real because of the meaning we give it as a society. A massive amount of people believe in gods and the truths those gods represent, but the people who do treat god as real have never met whatever physical being they see as their god. They know the gods’ existence to be real and they follow the guidelines provided by the gods through the stories told by representatives of their place of worship or old scribes. Gods are higher powers providing meaning and values to the lives of people, and they exist within the minds of the group of people that follow them. Even concepts such as sounds and emotions can be thought of as perceptual concepts. These are some of many examples of “social realities”, and those are every bit as real as the sheet of paper I am reading from. The label of reality is applied to money and gods for the reasons put out, and those reasons apply to Santa Claus as well. He should be deemed just as real.

            The TV show Westworld dove into the concept of reality, life, and humanity a lot and one of the quotes that recurred over the course of the show was “You live only as long as the last person who remembers you.” This was first said by a character named Akecheta who dealt with this question of life and reality, and it was repeated by other characters who also questioned whether they were truly real, alive, and free. If an entity is currently present and influential in the minds of many humans with breathing, physical forms, they are as existent in the world now as they were with a physical human body. For example, Walt Disney still lives in the minds of everyone who visits the theme parks named after him and see his name everywhere, or the many who see his image and name all over work that influences them. He is just as real and present today as perhaps anyone else in present time, despite having lost his physical human form a long time ago. People of many religions believe the human soul lives on long past the duration of their physical form, and this lasting life is something many work for through their actions and creative work. If spirit and stories extend the lives of human beings past the duration of their physical form, why then does it not apply to Saint Nicholas?

            Christmas has become larger than Christianity, and the need for Santa Claus to exist has thus more importance today than ever before. Christmas historically celebrated the story of Jesus’ birth, but it also has an important part of the lives of many people who may not believe in that origin story. Christmas does tell that story, but it also represents human kindness, generosity, and a sense of a larger community feeling bonded over a grand tradition. Thus, Christmas is enjoyed by many humanists as well as Christians, with the former group specifically enjoying those human characteristics. While Jesus Christ is the symbol of the Christian aspects of it, Santa Claus is the symbol of those human characteristics. Although Saint Nicholas is of course tied to Christianity, the modern representation of Santa Claus serves as the figurehead of those human characteristics of Christmas. With the idea of Santa comes this sense of kindness, generosity, and decoration. Santa Claus encourages being kind and sharing with others, and people bond over mass decorations with his presence all over it, often with the hopes of impressing him. Those who listen to the stories of Santa are told that if they are kind, feel Christmas spirit, and believe in him, he will visit, and many follow those guidelines seeking his approval. Santa’s role can be seen as a religious symbol for humanists, and his guidelines are shared the same way those of other religious figureheads are and followed by a large amount of people around the world in the same way deity religions are followed.

Since Santa is so tied with those human characteristics of the holiday, he needs to live in order for those qualities to stay as associated with the holiday as they are in the present day. In order for the stories and traditions of Christmas to continue, we need to keep up this representation of Santa Claus. While Santa is as real as any of us, he can vanish just like anything else as well. His story is crucial for a holiday and culture that represents joy and the good in people, and we cannot let the incomplete picture of one of the details in his story get in the way of his existence. That hasn’t stopped us with stories of religious entities that we as a society accept as real, and that can’t stop us with this one either. If you live only as long as the last person who remembers you, we have to make sure we have many people who remember Santa Claus for as long as possible in order to keep the joy that Christmas brings to our society.