By Sianna Zewdie (Y12)
With Christmas just around the corner, I began to reminisce on the days when my mother would set out a paper and pen for me to write up my Christmas wish list to Santa. Although they ended up being less of an actual shopping list for her and more a way to keep me busy for an hour, I would devote myself to coming up with an extensive catalog of unnecessary items and fleeting fads that I desperately coveted. Unfortunately, nine-year-old me couldn’t care less about concepts like ‘class consciousness’ and ‘consumer exploitation’—unlike Josh (above), who correctly recognized Santa in all his bourgeois glory.
The ironic part is that, as a concept, Santa Claus is the communist dream. In the traditional narrative, the altruistic Father Christmas spends his days giving gifts to all children—regardless of race, class, or sex—for the collective good, not private capital gain. He is the complete antithesis of the capitalist system, where good deeds are often done to create a public profile as a ‘philanthropist’ or score a tax write-off. He is a champion for the poor, a light for those in need, all without the expectation of recognition or rewards.
But then, considering society’s disgust for all things socialist (thank you, McCarthy), why is Santa Claus still so prevalent in Western culture? Well, because capitalists were smart (for once). They weaponized Santa Claus and turned him into an agent of commodification, allowing him to retain the Good Samaritan image of yore while (not so) secretly pushing you into the consumerist mess that we today call Christmas.
It all started with the infamous Coca-Cola campaign that created the Santa we all know and (have been conditioned to) love today. The company’s advertising attempt to boost sales during the Great Depression standardized Santa’s image as a jolly, larger-than-life figure decked in a suit of red and white—colors that just so happen to correspond to Coca-Cola’s branding. By tapping into the warmth and nostalgia of childhood years, the company not only loosened people’s hearts but also their wallets, and sales shot up almost immediately. Santa Claus went from folkloric icon to corporate frontman, conditioning children into becoming relentless consumers, and cementing capitalist indoctrination from an early age.
So there you have it! Your beloved Christmas figure is nothing more than a puppet for the bourgeoisie to stir us, the lowly public, into a frenzy come December every year. Santa has industrialized: his elves are children working in sweatshops in China and Vietnam; his reindeer are cargo planes that spew carbon into our atmosphere; and his North Pole is company headquarters, where CEOs lounge in piles of cash.
Under Santa’s heavy-handed rule, consumerism is not just encouraged—it’s mandatory. Gift-giving, buying the latest fads, and spending exorbitant sums of money are now the societal norms, enforced by the collective fear of becoming the neighborhood Grinch. Through engineered demand, Santa drives forward mass consumerism, justifying plunging families into debt by the good of seasonal cheer.
Much like every other aspect of capitalism, Santa Claus relies on the proletariat not just for consumerism, but for its labor too. We participate in a cycle of producing goods for the bourgeoisie, only to purchase them back at inflated prices. Santa’s ability to create and distribute gifts is presented to children as magic—but that glosses over the invisible hands that toil behind the scenes: the elves in factories, the warehouse workers, and the laborers in supply chains across the globe.
The North Pole is the bourgeois dream: the first 100% capitalist nation, built purely in the interests of industry and service. There are no pesky laws to protect workers’ rights, and elves toil around the clock to meet the quotas set by their over-demanding boss. This metaphor isn’t just me being dramatic—we see how the societal bonding that Christmas may bring in the West often comes at the expense of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in the East. We happily unwrap our gifts, oblivious to the sweat, debt, and ecological cost embedded in every shiny toy, proving that even seasonal cheer is thoroughly commodified under capitalism.
Not only does Santa Claus wring us of our money and our labor, but he also has the nerve to lecture us on morality too! His naughty and nice lists are nothing more than exercises in capitalist morality, designed to discriminate by class. Children are rewarded or punished based on behavior, but the system is inherently transactional: good behavior earns material gain. This encourages us once more to lean into the materialism and overconsumptious nature of today’s society, as to have material gain is a positive reflectment on your behavior and ethics. Yet because lower-class families have fewer resources to buy gifts, Santa ensures that we internalize the idea that poverty equals immorality, placing the blame for structural inequity on individuals rather than the capitalists and the corporations that created the conditions in the first place.
Santa Claus is capitalism in a red suit: a world where the wealthy sell the illusion of equality and holiday cheer and then profit off the chaos as everyone else tries to meet their impossible, idealistic standard.
But hey, anyway, have a great winter break!