Santa Spelled Sideways

by digby

The War on Christmas is getting complicated:

Christian soldiers, marching as to war in the pitched battle for the meaning of Christmas, worry that Santa is a tool of the vast Satanic conspiracy. To be sure, the similarity of their names, identical but for one transposed letter, is provocative. Didn’t Mia Farrow use a Scrabble board, in Rosemary’s Baby, to expose her grandfatherly neighbor with the flyaway eyebrows for the warlock he was, shuffling the letters of his name to reveal his true identity? Could the Religious Wrong be right, just this once? Is Santa the Deceiver’s way of hijacking the Christ child’s birthday? Kriss Kringle is a corruption of the German dialectal Christkindl, “little Christ child.” Were Satan and Santa separated at birth?

Consider the evidence: Santa wears red; the Devil is red. Santa is known, alternatively, as St. Nick; one of the Devil’s jocular pseudonyms, in England, is Old Nick. Both are associated with the element of fire (by way of the chimney, in Santa’s case; a little closer to home, in Satan’s case); both live in the far antipodes. (Incidentally, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the ninth and lowermost circle of hell where Lucifer is imprisoned for eternity isn’t the Mother of All Barbecue Pits, as in the pop imagination, but an icy wasteland—just like the arctic Santa calls home. Oh, and Dante’s Devil is seriously furry, calling to mind the Santa of Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” who is “dressed all in fur from his head to his foot.”)

If this sounds like yet more secular-humanist hatin’ on Christmas, don’t take my word for it. Outing Santa as a Manchurian Candidate for the Satanist agenda is a cottage industry among hardline evangelicals like the folks over at CuttingEdge.org (“Spiritual Insights into the New World Order so Startling You’ll Never Look at the News the Same Way Again!”). Dearly Beloved, they’re just wall-eyed with fear at the thought of the Boy Scouts’ hidden ties to Freemasonry and the “encroaching mind-control of the Illuminati” and—oh, dear god, it’s almost too mind-shrivelingly monstrous to mention—the “genetic scientists” who are “creating a super hybrid man/beast, eradicating death so man can live eternally without a savior!!” They know the Awful Truth about Santa, too, and they’re exposing this “counterfeit Jesus” for the Satanic sham he is: “Together with the numerous other signs of the End of the Age,” says a page on the ministry’s website, “this love of the Pagan (Druidic) Santa Claus is just one more clear sign of the end.” America, awake!

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