ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Santa Claus, American supernatural. As such, Santa seems to be a minor piece of the major effort of American myth-making that surrounded the War of Independence and its aftermath, and created the ideological charter for the newly-founded nation. Santa thus exemplifies Hsu's dictum that "in summary, American parents face a world of reality while their children live in the near ideal realm of the fairy tales where the rules of the parental world do not apply, are watered down, or are even reversed". The children trade moral behavior for goods; and it is Santa Claus who guides the input and output of this economy. In Santa Claus, this commodity fetishism has found an appropriate collective representation. The chapter shows that the outward mask of jollity hides a veritable prophet of regression to an individual childhood that never was, to a collective infancy that offers no guidance to the realities of tomorrow.
