It’s time Santa developred a new set of ethics
Vicky Allan
ONE of the things we parents often neglect to tell our children about is the working conditions under which many of Santa’s elves labour – particularly those in other parts of the world, like China, which is one of the locations where the real people who make many of our children’s toys slave.
Not many of us, for instance, choose to mention investigations like that published by Solidar Suisse and China Labor Rights recently, which found workers in one Chinese factory were being paid only about 1p per doll for their labour in making the popular Disney Ariel toy, which retails at £35 here. Because, well, that would just be busting the Santa myth, right? And we wouldn’t want to do that.
Rarely do we peer over the Christmas lists of our children and say, “Uh-oh. I don’t think you can ask Santa for that. His elves will have to work so hard they’ll probably fall asleep at their work tables and get blurry vision, and all to take home less than a living wage. Maybe you should just ask for some Fairtrade, deforestation-free chocolate coins, or a locally-sourced oatcake?”
Stay with me. This isn’t going to be all bah humbug.
I do believe there is still a place for Santa – it’s just this Santa we currently have isn’t doing any of us a lot of good. For, when the tat arrives, sometimes produced under illegal labour conditions, or using unsustainable resources, no-one is really to blame, because it didn’t come from us mums and dads, and it wasn’t produced by real people, it was just a magical gift from Santa, fabricated from the ether, so immaterial it could fly through the air on a sleigh and squeeze down a chimney or through a vent in the window.
It often seems this modern Santa, one of consumerism’s greatest marketing strategies, could be a metaphor for our relationship with much of what we buy in the shops or online. Things arrive in our world, as if by
sleigh, made somewhere out there, perhaps by elves, and it’s as if it were all manufactured by magic.
I have, of course, done Santa with my own children, but he has been a pretty miserly one. He only ever delivered the wee presents in the stocking and was particularly enthusiastic about obscure Christmas list requests, such as washing-up liquid and ketchup (yes, these did make younger child’s list one year, and not because he was a keen dishwasher).
The thing is, I actually do like the fun of Santa. But I can’t say I don’t feel some unease about the grip he has on us. I don’t, for instance, like the stories we tell that he gives his presents only to children that are good. How can we tell this tale, when there are clearly kids out there who don’t get these gifts, wellbehaved or not, because their parents don’t do Santa or can’t afford to?
It seems to me, therefore, it’s about time that Santa developed a new set of ethics, a new idea of what’s “good”. I’m not proposing anything very drastic. He could perhaps just start with a little letter in the stocking on Christmas Eve, something along the lines of: “Dear child, this year, you’ll see there is not quite so much plastic tat in your stocking. We at the North Pole did a sustainability audit and decided certain toys were bad for the planet and humanity. Some of them were on your list. From now on we are only giving sustainable toys and also encouraging reuse, which is why you’ll find, rewrapped at the bottom of the stocking, that robot kit you got last year but haven’t yet bothered to construct.
“I’ve also declined to give you the second item on your list, since, according to the most recent report into workers’ rights, the elves who made it were treated abominably. Don’t blame me! I’m just the delivery service.
“And while I’m on about worker’s rights – do you call this a living wage? One carrot and an already half-eaten mince pie?”