Santa Claus is Coming to Town – Uninspired semireligious dystopian imagery in a major key

Santa Claus is Coming to Town (SCICTT), the 1934 holiday anthem penned by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie, is a dank and terrifying morass of Western religious child terror, wallowing in the threadbare banality of Orwellian paranoia.

The first strains of this well-worn dreadnought of a carol set an appropriately hopeless tone: “You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry, you’d better not pout…”  Children — ostensibly the intended audience of this misanthropic musical melange — are put on notice. They are to be observed, measured, and managed. Not only their behavior but their mental and emotional states will fall under the purview of a merciless overlord in red and white fur. A cheerful melody and jaunty accompaniment lay a whistling-in-the-dark veneer over the lyrics, which summon a haunted existence so unoriginal as to numb the mind.

SCICTT is steeped in the early Twentieth Century’s unbounded optimism for the young science of behavior modification. Reward, punishment, and association were the royal road to utopia, with only the most obtuse of observers failing to see the totalitarian nightmare lurking just out of sight. This song plays to the cheap seats in this domain: toys and candy — veritable nicotine and heroin for children — are both carrot and stick in the dyspeptic dirge. The omnipresent, omniscient, jolly-faced reindeer god is implacable. The Arctic overlord’s unfathomable brain is continually recording and bifurcating every child’s action into categories of “good” and “bad,” with no hint of moral gradation. The inevitability of mind control is absolute, because there is no time, no place, and no area of morality not overseen by The System. Even actions taken in the depths of innocent slumber are subject to censure.

The annual midwinter tally of socially-acceptable versus unacceptable thoughts and behaviors determines each “child’s” punishments and rewards, with no exceptions. Submission to the program is non-negotiable. Individuals have no hope for peace except in lives of quiet conformity, desperately striving for “niceness,” and minimizing their “naughty” intentions, a la Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

SCICTT‘s repressive regime demands not only complete subjection to social norms, but also a sort of cognitive vacuousness. “Children” are not to conform out of a sense of justice, or an understanding of morality, or even devotion to the rosy-cheeked, Buddha-esque demon himself; they are to do these things merely “…for goodness’ sake.” No one will rest easy in this Stalinlesque world until their motivations are recursive and reflexive — no motivation at all, in essence. These are moral and logical contortions of Orwellian proportions, indeed.

A key question is whether this song is truly directed at children or is, rather, a warning to all of us, as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The answer to this question is even more uninspired than the wannabe-Andrews-Sisters harmonies in the chorus.

The dismal but misguided portrait Coots and Gillespie paint of a suffocating quasi-Judeo-Christian regime is dark and desperate enough; no complaints there. However, the song fails in two main areas: First, the songwriters need to do their homework; the details are often contradictory. Is this “Saint” Nicholas merely a Saint, or is he a god? He is painted as omnicient and even omnipotent, with the power to simultaneously reward or punish billions of children during one twenty-four hour period each year. The songwriters’ basic research skills are clearly lacking. Perhaps they should interview an actual Christian before attempting their next religiously-themed project. Similar omissions are noted in their portrayal of Santa’s thought-control regime. To explain its universal coverage, we long for details. Where is the bureaucracy? Where is the mechanism of this hellish slavemaster? Where is the system?

The second major failing of this song, and the most serious, is that, even in the 1930s, depressing extrapolations of a future gone wrong were beyond passé. From the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment, we have been told campfire tales of our horrendous legacy since time began. Hobbes, Machiavelli, et cetera, et cetera.  Even Huxley’s Brave New World was published just a couple of years before SCICTT. There has been no relief from the crashing waves of literary darkness. Originality is not just absent from this party; it is lying in a ditch on the south side of town, with its teeth removed to prevent dental identification of the body. The song aims for greatness but arrives at mediocrity, alongside The Terminator and Battlefield Earth. Coots and Gillespie should stick to writing Tin Pan Alley bromide tunes and avoid the domain of seriousness. Nevertheless, if all you want this holiday season is a banal jingle reminiscent of 1930s pop, with Christmas-themed imagery, this is your song, a sugary confection of empty calories and bleached, refined cultural flour. As Llewellyn Sinclair famously intoned, “Would anyone else like a bite of banality?”