Daddy's turn

Thirteen year-old Jimmy Boyd’s 1952 classic “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” covered by bands such as the Ronettes and The Jackson 5, remains a consistent classic on our Christmas playlists. Many dismiss little Jimmy's lurid description of late night lip-locking as fun and games between a married couple, silly old Daddy dressed up as Santa Claus kissing his wife. This interpretation, however, is roundly rejected by the academic community. Not a shred of evidence in the text supports that conclusion. In fact, the more lascivious interpretation has always been the correct one, and its implications are both familiar and frightening.

In this narrative we see the same themes that bear out time and time again when analyzing these allegedly harmless stories. Once again, we are reminded that a doting mother is still first a sexual object. Once again, we find a helpless woman at the mercy of a profound power imbalance. And once again, we are shown that the true meaning of Christmas only ever was to reinforce the same old ideals of money, power and of course patriarchy.

This isn't a narrative about a loving, if kinky, relationship between mother and father. It's about another shameless authoritarian power broker putting his dick where it shouldn't be. Santa's not some jolly old man washing down a chocolate chip cookie with a glass of milk and a belly laugh. He's a predator. And some modest midwestern mom certainly isn't his only conquest of the night, let's be real. You think that gluttonous, licentious fuck is passing up a piece of ass in Sweden and Brazil on the biggest night of the year? His night? Please. We know what he represents.

It's time to recognize that despite the song's nasally soprano and the childlike innocence it purports to proclaim, its fundamental purpose is far from benign, predicated upon normalizing the Cosby-like coercion employed all too often by our most cherished, trusted and irreproachable celebrities. So it goes that Claus, a formerly festive folkloric figure, is disfigured into something far friskier, fondling married mothers beneath the mistletoe while their husbands slumber in their dead bedrooms and their starry-eyed children spy from the stairs. What a devastating thing to sing about.

However, as you all know by now, the purpose of this blog has never been to kick our traditions to the curb like a shriveled up Christmas tree (which actually should be replanted). The answer has always been to rewrite and rework these important and heralded narratives in a way that make them better reflect the equality of the times. How do we do that with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus?” We make it gay.

There are only really only two options here (unless you wanted to get real adventurous), both of which would be picture perfect tweaks to the narrative. The first option is to make it so Daddy is the one kissing Santa.

Gay men get no representation during the holidays. Yeah, they have the month of June, but not all of them enjoy the privilege of sipping margaritas and strutting about P-Town in a speedo. What about the gay man living a quieter, closeted life? Where is his representation during the holidays? There are fathers out there—married fathers—who would absolutely swoon if that snowy white bear came sliding down the chimney with that big sack of his but nobody will ever know, because nobody can know. What a statement would it be if Daddy were the one sitting on Santa’s lap slipping him some tongue fireside? How powerful of an image would that be in the land in which Clarence Thomas reigns supreme?

I get a something so antiheteronormative can be difficult accept but it doesn't have to be anything too earth-shattering for the God-fearing country bumpkins who will no doubt protest. It can be a natural, heartwarming depiction. Maybe Santa and Daddy share a few winter warmers from the beer fridge and they don't realize they're 8 percent and whoops. Maybe they find themselves under the mistletoe and they giggle and then kiss like as a joke and then it just kind of happens. Maybe Daddy was on the naughty list and there's only one way to get off. I'm just spitballing here but the point is there are other stories here: new stories, inspiring stories—stories that don't involve yet another power-drunk plutocrat forcing himself onto a defenseless woman.

But we can go the other way too. We can take inspiration from another post of mine. Readers will recall how I advocated for Mrs. Claus to take over the duties of her husband as a way to reset and reenergize the culture in a post-Roe world. One, it negates the problem of power dynamics inherent in the first song. Two, it will likely be better received by the Bud Light boycotting regimen of our electorate who recoil at the thought of two men sharing a smooch but celebrate (among other things) two women doing the same.

Just to make it even more palatable to these heathens we don't have to make it so it's old, wrinkly Mrs. Claus coming down the chimney, either. We can go the Belichick route and knock a few decades off looks-wise and nobody will bat an eye. To make such a reinvention even more inclusive, we can recast Mrs. Claus as say, I don't know, an attractive Latin American woman. We can just decide to do this in the name of progress. From now on, not just in this song but in every form of media, we depict Mrs. Claus is an attractive Latin American woman. This would be a deft move considering the number of Spanish speakers in the United States and its increasingly less-white demographic makeup. Coke could even kick the campaign off.

This is crazy, some may argue. You can't work all of this newfound context into the song. It would be impossible, not to mention unrecognizable from its original form. But of course I can. It doesn't take more than a single line alteration:

She didn't see me creep

Down the stairs to have a peek

She was too busy feeling up on that J-Lo physique

Either of these iterations is preferable to the dated, misogynistic drivel that constitutes the1952 hit. It's time to change our narratives into ones that do not celebrate, reward and excuse influential men. We can start buy giving the LGBTQ+ community the holiday representation they so rightfully deserve. Nobody but the Evangelicals could possibly object to this but luckily they only listen to "O Holy Night."