24 December 2024. Santa | Music
Lying about Santa // The search for off-centre seasonal songs [#624]
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Have a good holiday, if you celebrate it. There might be a Just Two Things between Christmas and the New Year, depending on how things go.
1: Lying about Santa
Probably only The Conversation would run an article by a philosopher explaining why it was wrong to lie to your kids about Santa, and then publish a retort by another philosopher a couple of days later. But since this is a pressing and divisive issue in many households, and one which will peak in the next 24 hours, I thought that Just Two Things could perform the public service of rehearsing the two sets of arguments.
(Royalty free image from Pickpik)
In the red corner—lying about Santa is just plain wrong—is Joseph Millum of St. Andrews’ University. In the blue corner—chill a bit—is Tom Whyman, of the University of Liverpool. And now I’ve written this out, it is just the most Conversation thing ever.
Joseph Millum starts by pointing out that in general, parents try not to lie to their children:
[P]arents everywhere raise their children to be honest and fret if they start telling lies. For new parents, the myth of Santa Claus then poses a dilemma. Should you practice what you preach and tell your children the truth? Or is there something special about Santa that makes this lie OK?
And a bit more here: in general there are also good reasons for not lying to children.
First, lying undermines autonomy. Of course, young children don’t have the capacity to make important decisions for themselves, but still, telling children lies to make them behave is manipulative.
It’s manipulative because it stops children from making decisions for the right reasons—and certainly telling children that they won’t get presents unless they behave themselves is pretty manipulative—unless it’s a threat that you’re planning to follow through on.
Second, many philosophers think deception is wrong because it breaches trust... In healthy parent-child relationships, children trust their parents. Young children may have absolute trust. That’s why a lie as preposterous as Santa can endure for so long, even in otherwise sceptical children.
There are arguments for lying here: parents sometimes lie to protect their children from unpleasant truths if they judge that they don’t yet have the emotional capacity to deal with them. But Santa definitely doesn’t come into that category.
It turns out that“parenting by lying”, generally has poor outcomes when compared to parenting by not lying. There’s research on this:
“Parenting by lying” is associated with lower relationship satisfaction between adult children and their parents, as well as other negative psychological and social effects on the children when they grow up.
There are specific studies on lying to children about Santa (we’re in academia here, after all). The two studies cited have similar results. Once children discover that Santa doesn’t exist, about half were sad or angry, the other half were happy. The ones that were happy were mostly relieved they’d still get presents or that their suspicions about Santa’s non existence had been proved right.
In short:
There seems to be no solid evidence that believing in Santa is important for enjoying Christmas, developing a child’s imagination, or improving critical thinking... If you have the choice, consider having a magical Christmas where everyone knows Santa is make-believe. But if you’re already knee deep in fibs, don’t worry – just work out how to break the news gently.
(This cover up goes all the way to the top. Screenshot of Google’s Santa Tracker)
And although we’re way beyond this stage in our household—although stockings do still get put out—I suddenly read all of this and felt like an irresponsible parent. So thank heavens that Tom Whyman popped up a couple of days later with a different account. But then, one of the things you can reliably trust philosophers to do is to disagree with each other.
Whyman reveals the moment as a child when he realised that Santa didn’t exist, and then admits that he’s telling the same stories to his kids:
Our culture expects parents, basically, to lie to our children that their presents were left by a jolly fat man who flies in a sleigh pulled by reindeer through the sky. And so of course one might ask, is this OK?
And the answer he gives is a big yes. Not only is it OK to lie about Santa, it is a good thing:
It is morally OK, to the point of being actively morally good, for parents to participate in the grand Santa lie.
In effect, he positions the Santa problem not as being a question of lying, but of participation in a shared cultural myth, and its associated rituals:
When you think back to your first experiences of Christmas, do you really think they would have been improved if your parents had been honest about Santa? Without that sweet embellishment, there would be no ritual of writing to him, of leaving out sherry and mince pies, of waiting desperately to see if “he’s been” on Christmas morning.1
And the fact is, we don’t tell our kids everything. We’re not fully honest. And Santa is an expression of a larger moral framework:
As we’re growing up, we probably do on some level need to believe that the world is good and just: the sort of place where a jolly man runs a workshop staffed by elves, rewarding the nice children and (lightly) punishing the naughty.
Whyman’s only advice is this: when your kids finally ask if Santa is real—when they have worked out that he might not be—don’t lie to them then.
2: The search for off-centre seasonal songs
This is a slightly updated version of a post that first ran here in 2021. In short, I compile an ‘off-centre’ playlist of seasonal songs each year where I look for songs that are either unfamiliar seasonal songs, or are unfamiliar versions of familiar songs. This year’s playlist is on Spotify here.
Obviously, this is an attempt to escape from the overly religious or overly commercial songs we usually hear at this time of year. As I wrote in a post at the folk site Salut! Live, where we’ve run a series called 12 Days of Winter over the last two weeks:
It’s easy to be dismissive of Christmas songs, and with good reason. These days the popular repertoire includes too much schlock, too much schmaltz, far too much over-sentimental dreck, and not much schmerz.
It turns out that there are more of these off-centre songs than you’d expect—I’ve got through something more than 300 in my playlists, but I have a reservoir of several hundred more. People do keep adding to the reservoir, often smuggling out seasonal records as singles in November. (Links will mostly take you to Spotify).
There’s really three sources for our current Christmas song repertoire: in reverse order, commercial songs out of Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building (‘White Christmas’ or ‘Santa is Coming to Town’); the religious carols; and the midwinter folk songs (things like ‘Gaudete’, for example), which also includes songs which are basically about being cold (‘The Snow It Melts The Soonest’). There’s some cross over between the last two.
Elvis
The idea of doing Christmas records is pretty much as old as recordings, but the Christmas-themed long-player largely started in the 1950s, as the LP started to become the commercial recording medium of choice. Elvis, for example, did his first Christmas record in 1957, a mixture of commercial Christmas songs and religious ones, including some gospel.
The first Christmas concept album is probably Phil Spector’s. It’s problematic today, since Spector was a controlling, abusive man, and the knowledge of that takes much of the pleasure away from the zest the artists and the production bring to the songs. Incidentally, the record didn’t do well initially: it was released on the same day that Kennedy was shot and didn’t match the public mood.
Since then, pretty much every significant label has felt the need to release a Christmas album at some time (Motown, Stax), and it is easier to find recording artists who haven’t done one than who have.
Optimism and realism
I think it was Auden who said that poetry is the exact expression of mixed emotions, and that is certainly my experience of Christmas. ‘Christmas must be something more’, as Taylor Swift sings. As holidays go, it is caught on the cusp of optimism and realism. Yes, the light will come back, and it will get warmer, and we’d like that to happen in our lives as well, but we know that’s not always true.
The off-centre songs I tend towards tend to be the ones that catch some of this. There are several types.
There are the ones that turn Santa into a social fact, with, sometimes, the regrets that go with it, such as Alison Krauss’ ‘Shimmy Down My Chimney Chimney’.
There are the ones that use the idea of Santa to make a social comment: ‘There Ain’t No Chimneys In The Ghetto’, by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, or Poly Styrene’s cover of ‘Black Christmas’.
(And more recently, on the principle of ‘Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner’, some feminist versions too.) This year, for example, I stumbled on Viv Albertine’s ‘Home Sweet Home’, which is a fine example of this.
Christmas sentiment
There are songs that contrast the sentiments of Christmas with the contrasting emotions of their own situation, of which the supreme example is Joni Mitchell’s ‘River’, covered endlessly and with good reason.
There are those that are about the seasonal misfortunes of others—in jail, for example. See John Prine, or, on a similar theme, The Toasters. Or more broadly, Lindisfarne’s ‘Winter Song’.
And some just hate the whole holiday and everything in it. ‘Let’s skip Christmas this year’, sings Rodney Crowell.
But it’s not all gloom. There are also songs that are just fun—that play with the idea of Santa, or of Christmas. The one about Elvis as Santa in Sears, or Kate Rusby’s desire for a hippo for Christmas. (She may not have read the health and safety warnings: there are also other versions of this song).
And there are songs that are really more of a commentary on the whole Christmas season. Some of these are just descriptive, such as the lovely ‘Christmas in Killarney’, or, more sardonically Loudon Wainwright’s ‘Christmas Morning’.1 Nick Lowe made an entertaining record of these types of songs which starts with ‘I’m At The Airport For Christmas’.
Versions
My final category—and this isn’t quite a complete list—is versions of the existing repertoire that do something new with it. Obviously #TimesUp for the original version of ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’. It’s unlistenable now. But John Travolta and Olivia Newton John reversed roles in their version, and John Legend and Kelly Clarkson bring it completely up to date.
And I’m a sucker for songs that play around with the official versions of the songs—which might include a classic like Charlie Parker’s ‘White Christmas’ (was he really playing live on Christmas Day?)—or Kaskade’s version of ‘Jingle Bells.
I tend to be more patient with the traditional repertoire, partly because it’s under-represented, partly because there’s generally a toughness to these songs. A favourite record here is the Waterson’s Frost and Fire, which replaced Phil Spector on our Christmas morning journey, or John Fitzpatrick’s Wassail.
And to my surprise, the recent seasonal record that hits many of these notes is Strange Communion by Thea Gilmore. It is a fine and under-rated record. I wrote about this as part of our Salut! Live season.
But my favourite off-centre Xmas record is still Ze Records A Christmas Record, released in 1981. Ze was a hip and left field New York label, which you’d have thought would have stayed away from such festive froth. But no:
I found it hard to imagine John Cale and Lou Reed sitting around a Christmas tree exchanging gifts with Nico and tucking into a turkey dinner, the same goes for the members of the Stooges or MC5... Only the painter Guy Peellaert could have imagined such a scene. And yet my teenage heroes all took part in the Christmas song tradition: Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Elvis.(...) In 1981 and 1982 ZE Records published its own Christmas album under the supervision of Michael Zilkha. All the American artists on ZE answered the call and came up with a Christmas track.
The Ze record is the source of ‘Christmas Wrapping’ which has become a classic. And also of the best single Christmas record ever, by Davitt Sigerson, seen at the top of this post. As he says:
It’s a big country
Merry Christmas everybody
Just a word from me and Ann to say we’re fine.
j2t#624
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.
All the same, I have to say I admired the commitment of a colleague who admitted recently that when her kids were young she used to nibble the carrots they had left out for the reindeer as proof that Santa had visited.