Why Santa Lives On
Even skeptical and religion-averse younger Americans see something worth passing on in the jolly avatar of the Christmas holiday.
SANTA IS HAVING A MOMENT—well, the same moment he has every year. This once-obscure fourth-century saint, a bishop fancifully alleged by medieval hagiographers to have physically attacked the heretic Arius for opposing orthodox doctrine, is known to millions of children and their parents around the world today as a mythical bringer of gifts, a man who can fit through any chimney, a reindeer pilot, a manager of magical toy factories, an omniscient judge of character, and a devotee of Coca-Cola.
But while for many Americans Santa is synonymous with Christmas, this hasn’t always been the case. For much of early American history, Santa was nowhere to be found, and in places like Puritan New England, Christmas itself was viewed with suspicion as a vestige of Roman Catholicism; in some cases, it was actively suppressed. As historian Stephen Nissenbaum shows, throughout the colonial era and well into the early republic, December 25 was commonly treated as an ordinary workday, with courts, markets, and schools operating normally. During these years, when Christmas was observed at all, it was largely on the margins of American society: Anglican communities in the South celebrated it, for instance, as did Catholic Maryland, and members of German and Dutch settlements in Pennsylvania and New York.
Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas began to gain broad social acceptance, and as the holiday was reimagined as a celebration of family life, children, and gift-giving, the saint behind Santa Claus—Nicholas of Myra—was himself refashioned into a singularly modern American figure.
Although much of what we know about the historical St. Nicholas comes through fragments and later tradition, he is remembered in early Christianity for his pastoral care, his defense of orthodox faith, and his generosity toward the poor and vulnerable. In one of the most enduring stories of medieval Christendom (fictional heretic-slapping narratives aside), Nicholas secretly provides dowries for three impoverished girls whose father faces social and moral ruin for being unable to afford their marriages. By giving anonymously (traditionally under cover of night), Nicholas became a lasting model of discreet charity. As Adam C. English, author of The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus, emphasizes, it was precisely this legendary story of generosity that secured Nicholas’s role as the patron saint of children. Over centuries of cultural adaptation, he became a natural foundation on which to erect the legend of the gift-giving figure in red and white at the heart of the modern Christmas tradition.
Much like early American Christmas celebrations themselves, veneration of St. Nicholas during the antebellum period was largely a regionally and ethnically delimited affair. But through the cultural work of early nineteenth-century writers, poets, and illustrators—especially in New York City—the generous saint was plucked out of his context in the early church and reset against the background of the United States. Through the revisionist imaginings of literary figures such as Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore, St. Nicholas was transformed from an austere religious personage into a genial domestic visitor. The new man for one season was not dogmatic at all, but he carried a broad and sentimental moral message, encouraging children to be well behaved and families to spend time together.
Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” proved decisive in the success of the cultural rebrand. It fixed him as a jolly, nocturnal gift-giver who entered the home rather than the church and addressed children rather than congregations. Santa started to become the holiday’s unifying symbol, capable of sustaining wonder, inculcating generosity, and offering moral instruction without running a risk of causing offense along sectarian theological lines. By the late nineteenth century, as Gerry Bowler shows in his cultural history of Santa Claus, Santa had come to dominate the celebration of Christmas, and belief in Santa—and its eventual loss—was emerging as a rite of modern childhood.
REINFORCED BY THE JOLLY OLD MAN’S ubiquity in Christmas movies, holiday advertising, and yuletide family rituals, belief in Santa Claus remains a staple of American childhood today. A YouGov poll published earlier this month found roughly 80 percent of respondents believed when they were young.
What makes Santa’s persistence among younger parents remarkable is that it runs counter to several features of contemporary family life. The millennial and Gen Z cohorts are marked by historic declines in church attendance, doctrinal belief, and institutional loyalty; nontraditional marriages and family arrangements are also becoming more commonplace. And yet, amid these trends in religious disaffiliation and social experimentation, Santa remains remarkably durable as a matter of both childhood theory and parental praxis.
Among parents with children under 18, YouGov found, 56 percent said their kids still hang stockings for Santa, and 55 percent reported leaving out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve. Nearly half of families (about 46 percent) plan to take their children to visit Santa in person, and significant shares also uphold other classic rituals, from leaving food out for Santa’s reindeer (44 percent) to writing letters to the North Pole asking St. Nick for presents (44 percent). Another YouGov survey conducted last year shows that while liberal and conservative families often project their own politics onto Santa, he remains a largely nonpartisan figure enjoyed by families across the political spectrum.
This bipartisan and ecumenical enjoyment of Santa is striking, as it represents one of the few remaining pieces of American culture widely shared at a time of declining commonality in other areas. So what explains the durability of the Santa mythology among younger generations known for their skepticism? The short answer is that while millennial and Gen Z parents may be warier of organized religion than their parents were, they still value aspects of religion like wonder, ritual, and moral instruction enough to have continued looking for them outside the church walls.
As Tara Isabella Burton notes in her 2020 book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, recent religious decline has not coincided with a rise in disenchantment so much as a more general reconfiguration of forms of meaning. For many, stories and symbols are the order of the day rather than bodies of propositional doctrine. And the stories can come from anywhere: Many younger parents reach for Harry Potter to teach courage, superheroes movies to demonstrate virtue, and Pixar films to supply a moral vocabulary.
Santa endures for similar reasons. He offers a form of benign enchantment that is playful, non-dogmatic, and edifying. He can be read as an avatar of religious formation unencumbered with belief. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox put it to me, “The human heart and perhaps especially the child’s heart longs for mystery and meaning. Incorporating Santa Claus into the Christmas experience injects that mystery and meaning into kids’ lives, which helps explain its perennial appeal, even or especially in a world that has grown more officially secular in recent decades.”
Belief in Santa does seem vulnerable to the same kinds of problems that affect other beliefs parents seek to instill in their children. Debates about how far parents should take the story never end, and there are numerous approaches to the issue: Advocating belief for as long as possible, rejecting Santa from the get-go, and even using the historical example of St. Nicholas to replace the jolly holiday invention of poets and advertisers.
Of course, we can’t lose sight of the fact that the Santa story is one that kids are meant to grow out of while they are still children. The date of Christmas remains the same, but the meaning of the day changes profoundly as children discover the impossibility of the Santa story. And even so, for most Americans, Santa seems to still hold a kind of magic they are reluctant to give up. Perhaps he can be read as a synecdoche for the childhood imagination itself, the fresh and magical view of things that grows duller and more mundane as we age.
But children offer parents a vicarious experience of the more colorful world we depart when we grow up. And for secular millennial and Gen Z parents who seek out forms of wonder, ritual, and moral imagination in the world beyond institutional religion, allowing Santa to feature in the domestic pattern of the holidays is a natural expression of their own spiritual orientation. Santa persists as a child-scaled representation of the quest for meaning. In this way, as our world loses its sense of the sacred, even the secular household can still make room for magic, if only for one night a year.
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