Psychiatric Bulletin (2004) 28: 457. doi: 10.1192/pb.28.12.457
© 2004 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
Psychiatric Bulletin (2004) 28: 457
© 2004 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
What if Santa died?
An invited response
Mark Salter
Consultant Psychiatrist, Homerton Hospital, London E9 6SR. E-mail:
mark.salter{at}elcmht.nhs.uk
From late October each year, bleary-eyed postal workers all over the UK sit
in shifts, sifting through some 120 000 children’s letters addressed to
a rubicund, septuagenarian, airborne logistics expert living in the frozen
Arctic. In accordance with guidelines, every letter is screened for signs of
neglect, abuse or some other singularity. Every year, several escape the
shredder. One year, a thoughtful 10-year-old wrote:
‘Dear Santa, you live at the North Pole and come to the house of good
children every year. I asked Mr Randall my science teacher about this. There
are six billion people living on this planet and two billion of them are
children. Not all of them are good. I know you don’t deliver presents to
Muslims, Jews, Hindus or anyone else like that which means 600 million
children living in about 190 million houses. I know you only come when all the
children are asleep which on Christmas Eve is about nine o’clock. So if
you work your way west ahead of the dawn that gives you about 31 hours which
means 1390 houses every second. How you park your sleigh, get down our chimney
and back up again so fast is really amazing. Mr Randall says there are three
explanations. One is that your sleigh travels near to the speed of light so
that you must influence time and space and mass and energy in a way that is
beyond our understanding. The next is that you are magic, and Mr Randall says
that that is what we call anything beyond our understanding. The third is that
you don’t exist except as some sort of myth made up by my Mum, which
can’t be true because every year your reindeer eats the carrot and my
mum hates carrots....’
The writer has moved well beyond Piaget’s concrete stage of
operations, but whether she has fulfilled Breen’s ‘hallmark of
mature reasoning’, namely to distinguish fantasy from reality, is less
clear. Not so long ago, a heliocentric solar system, or the notion of
universal human rights, belonged more to the world of fantasy than reality. A
more useful, if dispiriting, definition of this mental rite of passage would
be an acceptance of conformity of thinking. One of the most striking
differences between child and adult styles of thought and action appears to be
freedom from disinhibition, playfulness and imaginative style. For adults,
‘childish’ as a descriptor of thought and action is negatively
valued and often met with the rejoinder to ‘grow up’. Those who
persistently act in such a way are often stigmatised, given haloperidol or, if
they are lucky, labelled as ‘creative’.
Breen’s reification of the ‘powerful tool’ that is Santa
Claus, a 17th Century Dutch corruption of St Nicholas, does not really have
the jolly old fellow at its heart. Santa, as she notes, is just another
marker, along with the decorated home and the tree, of the fact that a certain
cultural event is underway. Santa no more fosters benevolence than an infinity
of other social acts involving ‘the other’, nor does writing to
Santa help to foster attention and concentration any more than a thank-you
note to Grandma. Rather, Breen is offering us a seasonally flavoured warning
of a deeper issue. At its very bottom, she is asking us to contemplate not the
death of Santa, but the death of imagination.
Philosophers have observed that what people really want is not knowledge,
but certainty. Uncertainty is terrifying. Daily, we are reminded of the
weakness of our rational efforts to resist this terror, yet we go to
ever-greater lengths to use the same methods to banish it. In this struggle,
the human imagination, with its infinite repository of uncertainties, is
viewed by most of us as a region where only mythical figures, the mentally ill
and children are allowed to tread, rather than as a world wherein we may find
lamps to light the dark that frightens us. Increasingly, in a society that
unwisely holds rationality above all else, the significance of myths and
magic, complete with eight reindeers capable of cruising in hyperspace, are
being slowly and very subtly eroded. Many apparently plausible, rational, but
totally unimaginative, arguments are nowadays mustered to this end; the need
for evidence-based approaches to everything; the rights of the many overriding
the values of the few; the need for guidelines, benchmarks and inquiries where
we have failed so far. In her closing paragraph, Breen mentions how our most
obvious rational tool, technology, stands in direct opposition to the power of
imagination. Why should any child running The Sims on the home PC
need to believe in Santa Claus, when he or she can actually be him? Breen is
telling us a home truth: our imagination is like any other part of our body -
we use it or lose it. If Santa died, we would hold a Serious Incident Inquiry.
If we have any sense, we should ask the Tooth Fairy to chair it.
