Explainer
Christmas culture
Creed
5 min read

Santa Claus and how not to give gifts

John Barclay unpacks the nature of gift-giving and finds Santa’s list is moralising in comparison to an older unconditional way.

John Barclay is Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University. He researches the history and thought of early Christianity and early Judaism. 

A Santa tiptoes in a darkened room carrying a lamp and holding up a finger in a gesture of silencing
Anderson W Rangel on Unsplash.

Christianity is a religion centered on the notion of gift.  It is no accident that Christmas, linked with what Christians consider the ultimate gift - the birth of Jesus, is a festival of gift-giving.  All sorts of historical and cultural traditions have accumulated around this festival, for good and ill, but one, it seems to me, has become especially problematic: the myth of Santa Claus.  The form of giving we associate with Santa Claus is the very opposite of what counts, in the Christian tradition, as a good gift. Here’s how. 

In the English-speaking world, Santa Claus (originally St Nicholas) is the man in the red coat and white beard to whom children address their requests for presents.  For many, he becomes a bit like God, and as such, shapes their image of God as normally absent, occasionally useful, and generally benign.  But if Santa is the distributor of gifts at Christmas, two things mark his giving: first, he gives according to merit; second, his giving is one-way and one-off, creating no relationship of trust, love, or obligation.   

The famous Santa song is better known in North America than in the UK, but it has lasted long in the popular imagination. It has also shaped our ideas of gift-giving.  Santa, you will recall, has a list of who’s been ‘naughty or nice’, and is using that list to direct his gifts. He is all-seeing and all-knowing (‘he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake’), so his merit-judgments are unfailingly correct: he ‘knows if you’ve been bad or good’ – so ‘be good for goodness sake’!  Santa’s gifts, in other words, are merited and conditioned.  At one level, this is an adult ploy to get children to behave at Christmas.  But at another, it reflects a remorselessly moralizing society, quick to judge who is deserving of praise or blame.   

As Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in The Tyranny of Merit, we have allowed the notion of ‘merit’ to govern so many aspects of our society that those who miss out on social and economic success are led to believe that it is really their fault. Santa is the projection of our sense that nothing good comes our way unless we somehow deserve it. 

The other feature of Santa’s giving is that it is all over in a trice: it creates no relationship and establishes no long-term connection.  The children who write letters asking for presents are not encouraged to enquire after Santa’s wellbeing during the rest of the year.  There is no friendship, no commitment, just one-way gifts that arrive without reciprocity or interpersonal depth.  That fits Western individualism, where we dislike the constraints created by long-term relationships. We will take a gift ‘with no strings attached’ because thereby we retain our autonomy, our power to choose, our independence.   

This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves. 

he Christmas event was originally understood as a gift of a very different kind – in fact the inverse of the Santa-gift.  What the early Christians celebrated about the gift of Jesus was that it was completely unconditioned: it was given without regard to merit or desert.  Even in ancient times that was an unusual, even a bizarre, form of gift: surely it would make better sense to give to those who were worthy of the gift?  But what the Gospel writers and St Paul celebrated was that the gift took effect in unexpected, undeserving places – with uneducated fishermen, with women as much as men, with non-Jews as well as Jews, with the social underdogs and the morally dubious.   

This was a gift that had nothing to do with merit: it was given irrespective of worth and in the absence of worth.  Paul the persecutor received this gift; so did Mary, a village teenager; so did Peter, who let Jesus down time after time; so did idolatrous non-Jews; so did Zacchaeus (a tax-collector – about as popular as a loan shark today)).  This was not because the gift was given randomly. It was a strategic policy to make the gift available to all.  As an unconditioned gift, not dependent on gender, cultural background, social level, or moral achievement, the gift of the ‘good news’ belonged to no-one – and could go to everyone.  

As a result, the early Christians formed new kinds of communities that crossed most social boundaries, and excluded no one on the basis that they were not good enough to join.   

And was this a ‘Santa gift’ in the sense of creating no relationship, no ties, no expectations?  Far from it!  The gift of Christ was understood to transform those who received it, because ultimately it was the gift not of a thing but of a person.  Where Santa disappears for eleven months of the year, the Christians found that Jesus stuck around, not as a threat but as a transformative presence (in the form of ‘the Spirit’), who slowly, subtly, but definitively made them different than what they were before.  This was a gift ‘with strings attached’ – not unwelcome new obligations that forced them to do what they hated, but strings of love that enabled them to be better and fuller versions of themselves.  The Christ-gift drew its recipients, as theologians would later say, into the life of God, which is the best imaginable place for humans to be. 

So, how might you give gifts differently this Christmas?  Well, you could go beyond ‘the usual suspects’ and include some you would not normally include on your giving-list; why not reach out, with some gesture of goodwill, to someone with whom you have had a difficult relationship this year?  You could try to make your gifts more personal, as a token of who you are and who they are, and you could make an effort to continue the friendship beyond the ‘once a year’ gesture.  And if someone gives to you and you haven’t thought to give to them - a common source of embarrassment - no problem: take it as an invitation to friendship, to which you can always respond at some other time and in some other way.  There is always an opportunity for change and growth. 

An unconditioned gift that changes who you are - liberating and transformative, underserved and perpetually effective.  There might be reasons why we prefer the ‘no commitment’ gifts of Santa Claus, but we also know that the most meaningful gifts are personal; they create or sustain ties of friendship; even if they are things, they represent an interpersonal commitment of love.  Christmas is always a mixed blessing, but it is not helped by the Santa songs (or, indeed, by some terrible lines in Christmas carols!).  But at its origin it carries the tune of a different kind of gift, which takes no account of desert but changes its recipients in ways they can never forget. 

Column
Books
Culture
Music
Space
6 min read

Magnificent or mundane: how do you react to the overview effect?

Creators of a book, an album and a game, can’t agree.
A small white space capsule orbits around the earth.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule orbits above Earth.
NASA.

As I write this, two Nasa astronauts – Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore (possibly the most USA-sounding name imaginable) – are preparing to leave the International Space Station to return to Earth. They were supposed to stay on the space station for eight days, but a technical problem with their spacecraft meant they’ve been stranded in space for nine months.  

Nine. Months.  

It sounds like the premise for a horror film. Two stranded astronauts slowly descend into madness as they become increasingly isolated and cut off from humanity. Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, probably. 

That’s a lot of time to be stuck orbiting Earth, gazing at the pale blue dot, contemplating our little corner of the universe. There’s a phenomenon called the overview effect: a shift in thinking astronauts go through when they see Earth from space. Putting the planet into the wider context of the entire cosmos leads observers to rethink humanity’s place in the universe, and what it means to be human.  I imagine Suni and Butch have had quite a bit of time to do just that in recent months.  

And the overview effect is currently having a bit of a moment in wider culture, too.  

If you went into any bookshop in the weeks before Christmas, you likely saw stacks of Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital. It tells the story – although there’s not much by way of traditional ‘story’ in Orbital – of six astronauts on the International Space Station, pondering the nature of humanity from their lofty vantage point. 

Having won the booker prize, booksellers were keen to encourage readers to buy Oribtal. Praised by the Booker Prize judges for its “beauty and ambition”, I was looking forward to reading it, when I could. (And, let’s be honest, it’s a short book, which probably helped sales. Who has the time to read Ulysses or Infinite Jest in between school runs and weekly shops?) 

When I finally read it in January, I was left disappointed. I found a surprising lack of humanity in Orbital. With the exception of one astronaut – who spends her time mourning her recently deceased mother some 250 miles up in the sky – the characters feel somewhat paper thin; barely human. As the story meanders from person to person, never really settling on one character long enough to really develop them, it feels a bit … insubstantial?  

Maybe it’s a victim of its own hype. Maybe the not-quite-humanness of the astronauts and the listless quality of the narrative are intentional, designed to capture the ungrounded nature of life in space in both form and content. Maybe that’s being generous. Either way, I was left closing the book and shrugging my shoulders. If Orbital was supposed to offer a glimpse into that overview effect, it left me nonplussed. 

By coincidence, Steven Wilson has just released his eighth solo album: The Overview. Who is Steven Wilson, you ask? Only “probably the most successful British artist you've never heard of” according to The Daily Telegraph. With Wilson’s album currently sitting at #1 in the UK album charts, it doesn’t seem an unwarranted title.  

In The Overview, Wilson explores the overview effect across just two lengthy pieces of music. In the first, Wilson contrasts the mundanities of life on Earth with the chaos of space, calling us to attend to miracle that is humanity, thanks to lyrics written by the annoyingly talented Andy Partridge of XTC: 

“And there in an ordinary street  

A car isn't where it would normally be  

The driver in tears, about his payment arrears 

 Still, nobody hears whеn a sun disappears in a galaxy afar.” 

With Partridge’s help, Wilson manages to capture that humanity so sorely lacking in Orbital. Amid a sea of seemingly barren space, there is life here on this small, pokey planet, and the dramas and stresses of a man fretting about his debts don’t seem out of place, even when compared to the implosion of a star on the other side of the universe.  

All this makes a recent interview with Wilson all the more odd.  

When speaking about the overview effect, Wilson says “Your life is futile, it’s meaningless – and isn’t that a wonderful thing?” before doubling down: “And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective.” 

For Wilson, this perspective – this overview effect – is liberating. It allows to stop navel-gazing, to pick our heads up and to realise our freedom to do whatever we want. After all, everything’s just matter in varying different arrangements:  

“The clouds have no history 

And the sea feels no sorrow 

The oxygen recycled 

And the atoms are just borrowed,”  

At the climax of the album’s second epic, Wilson sings – with more glee than it warrants –  

“There's no reason for anything  

 Just a beautiful infinity 

 No design and no onе at the wheel.” 

 Cheery stuff. 

It's easy to see why, in the same interview, Wilson rails against the concept of religion: “Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo … To even understand even the very simplest, most basic facts about space, should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion of God. But apparently it doesn’t.” 

It all sounds a bit like an angsty teenager encountering the New Atheists for the first time. And this edge to Wilson’s work jars uncomfortably with the humanitarian streak that runs through his music. Wilson wants (rightly) to celebrate the mundane, the ordinary, and the human. And simultaneously wants to tell us that we’re just … stuff. Just atoms arranged in one way or another. Wilson pays lip-service to the humanity missing from Orbital, but it’s superficial.  

And all this reminds me of my favourite video game ever: 2019’s The Outer Wilds. (Not to be confused with 2019’s also-space-based-but-decidedly-mediocre The Outer Worlds). In The Outer Wilds, you play as an alien with a ramshackle spaceship who sets off to explore their solar system. Except every 22 minutes, the sun explodes. When it does, you wake up on your home planet and start again. 

You use these 22-minute loops to explore the solar system, flying manually from planet to planet, and exploring every nook and cranny of them in the process. You see awe-inspiring sights and are confronting with the absolute otherness and horror of the vastness of space.  

And yet. As you explore, you come across notes left by long-forgotten civilizations. Mundane lists and frustrated exchanges between colleagues. You come across life, in other words, even if you don’t meet many other actual people. I can’t say much more than this without ruining the game: The Outer Wilds depends on your real-world knowledge to progress, and so, the more I tell you, the more I ruin.  

But, suffice it to say that this is exactly what is missing from Harvey and Wilson’s work. While they both ostensibly want to remind us of the value and the miracle of humanity, both leave me feeling cold. Both leave me with the impression that life is little more than atoms arranged one way and not the other. Just stuff.  

But in The Outer Wilds, the sun’s implosion – and all that is lost with it – is a genuine heartbreak every single time. I think about all the stories I’ve read, and the people I’ve met, and how it’s all about to be lost as a bright supernova washes over me. And then I wake up again at the start of the cycle, relieved that all is not lost.  

If you can, you should play The Outer Wilds. It’s beautiful. Really, really beautiful. More so than Orbital or The Overview. Our place in the universe can be overwhelming; we’re small, and the universe is strange and scary. But we’re not just insignificant stuff. Our stories and the people we share them with matter. And Outer Wilds captures this tension impeccably. Only it captures life’s miraculous nature in the way it deserves. 

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