With Halloween barely behind us and Thanksgiving plans still to be made, some will argue it’s far too early to seize upon a Christmas theme. Raised in a Thanksgiving-must-come-first household myself, I sympathize. But if premature yuletide talk is in violation of some sort of timeline, surely there’s one pop culture conversation that remains a century or two overdue. It’s time we spoke of a theme often left unexamined in the mainstream holiday lexicon: the figure of Mrs. Claus.
Santa Claus’ wife is a late addition to contemporary imaginings of the Christmas season. Born out of a fascinating amalgamation of Byzantine history, European legend, the American suffrage movement and consumerist customs, she made her debut in holiday storytelling nearly half a century after her husband began to gain the status of cultural icon in the U.S.
Her presence in the social conscious serves as a statement on how we value her contributions, and the contributions of women like her.
Notably, unlike Saint Nick, Mrs. Claus has no historical parallel. Nevertheless, the strength – or weakness – of her presence in the social conscious serves as a statement on how we value her contributions, and the contributions of women like her, to one of the most celebrated seasons in America.
A brief Santa Claus origin story
Saint Nicholas was born somewhere around 280 AD in Patara, in modern-day Turkey, and probably served as the bishop of Myra in the fourth century. Although very little is known about his life, it appears unlikely that he ever married or had children.
Despite the absence of offspring, Saint Nicholas developed a reputation as a father-figure to all children, whose legendary generosity and kindness served the poor and helpless. By the Middle Ages, he had become the Patron Saint of Children and one of the most popular minor saints across Europe. Dutch colonists brought this tradition of St. Nicholas, known as Sinterklaas in Holland, with them to New Amsterdam (now New York City) in the 1600s, where he gained popularity as Santa Claus. His mythos as a benevolent elderly man was merged with old Nordic folktales of a magician who rewarded “virtuous youth” with presents and punished bad behavior. Santa Claus achieved his fully Americanized form in 1823 in Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, A Visit from Saint Nicholas, commonly known as The Night Before Christmas.
As the Christmas holiday season became more heavily commercialized in the 19th century, so was the image of Santa Claus crystallized alongside gift-giving traditions and the prerequisite purchasing habits. Stores across the U.S. began to advertise Christmas shopping as early as 1820, and by the 1840s, newspapers had created dedicated sections for holiday advertisements, which often featured images of Santa Claus.
Mrs. Claus enters the scene
Mrs. Claus was first officially introduced to the American public in 1849 in a short story entitled “A Christmas Legend” by James Rees. In the story, the elderly Claus couple is granted shelter on Christmas Eve by a poor family who wake up the next morning to find that Mrs. Claus is in fact their long-lost daughter in disguise. She has become wealthy since her disappearance and now showers the family with gifts.
From these magic-infused origins, Mrs. Claus steadily began appearing in magazines and other stories. She continued to grow in popularity, culminating in the strong woman who serves as Santa Claus’ dynamic partner today. Mrs. Claus helps Santa run his North Pole workshop, build his toys all year long, care for the reindeer, and manage his elves, and she also holds down the fort while her husband delivers Christmas gifts across the globe.
So why did it take Mrs. Claus five decades longer to gain traction in the U.S. compared to her husband? Why did she appear at all, when the original Saint Nicholas figure was, in all likelihood, celibate? And rather than allowing her to languish in relative obscurity as the cookie baker and reindeer tender of Christmases past, how can we best appreciate her today?
Changing with the times
Over the last two hundred years, Santa Claus has served as the jovial, ever-evolving canvas upon which Americans have projected the pressing cultural matters of their day. He was a kindly gift-giver and a symbol of prosperity from the 1700s into the 1800s, when the working class struggled through the Industrial Revolution and impoverished immigrants grasped at the American Dream. In the twentieth century, he became a commercial symbol, featuring heavily in department store advertising, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (think Kris Kringle in the 1947 classic film Miracle on 34th Street), and a global emblem of American hegemony through the Coca-Cola Company’s worldwide campaigns from the 1930s through today.
It wasn’t until Santa Claus made inroads into popular culture that the American public required him to adapt to contemporary norms. A husband with a supportive wife made for a more palatable, more realistic, Claus couple – one capable of appealing to the masses. After all, as a manifestation of the American imagination, the Clauses are what we ask them to be. Thus was the figure of Mrs. Claus gradually conjured, from short stories and illustrations to “live” holiday appearances, memorabilia and, finally, fleshed-out feature-length film characters.
As a manifestation of the American imagination, the Clauses are what we ask them to be.
In many ways, Mrs. Claus represents the aspirational side of the American subconscious. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a poem by Katharine Lee Bates (writer of America the Beautiful) featured an assertive Mrs. Claus who bucks the Victorian model of demure, submissive women. It’s surely no coincidence that her initially sparse mentions in the 1800s gained momentum alongside enlightenment concepts and the abolitionist movement, nor that her first major appearance in literature occurred just a few months after suffragists held their landmark 1849 Seneca Falls Convention. Her rise traces the trajectory of women’s rights, embodying new forms of participation in both public and private life.
In Mrs. Claus’ portrayal in later twentieth century media, she increasingly assumes feminist values, such as in Phyllis McGinley’s 1963 book How Mrs. Santa Claus Saved Christmas, the 1974 film The Year Without a Santa Claus, all the way to the 1990s-2000s film franchise The Santa Clause. In her, storytellers have found an opportunity to infuse an age-old tale with clearer-eyed visions of marriage and partnership, and to liberate the portrayal of women from tired archetypes.
A Mrs. Claus for today and beyond
If, as pop culture history indicates, Mrs. Claus’ figure contains an element of the reflective, our current reality is mirrored in her representation. So how do we envision Mrs. Claus now, in the 2020 holiday season, in society as it is today, and into the future?
The Pew Research Center found that women are the primary or only breadwinners in 40% of American households with kids under the age of 18 – an increase of 30% since the 1960s, when Christmas imagery featured an apron-clad, rosey-cheeked Mrs. Claus in front of the oven. Today there are nearly 13.6 million single parents, the majority of whom are women, raising over 22 million children. Despite their workloads, these heads of household continue to prioritize making the holiday season a festive time where loved ones feel seen and valued. Women’s roles today are anything but narrow, and they last all year long. Much like the Mrs. Claus girl-boss who runs the workshop and handles the personnel, today’s woman is, at the very least, VP of Operations, if not the COO.
While Mrs. Claus was once confined to the domestic sphere, now she occupies the spaces of her choosing. She’s free to move between her home and her workplace, the classroom and the boardroom, each with equal value so long as the decision is hers. We don’t need a new Mrs. Claus for the twenty-first century; in revisiting her story, it’s enough to look beyond the way bygone epochs have cast her to see her instead for who she has become in contemporary America and who she has inspired around us.
We don’t need a new Mrs. Claus for the twenty-first century; it’s enough to look beyond the way bygone epochs have cast her to see her instead for who she has become and who she has inspired around us.
Championing others takes work. Amplifying moments of joy and meaning, of faith and ritual, of love and togetherness, may appear spontaneous but if you look carefully, there’s always someone bringing intentionality and infrastructure to our cherished moments. We can all aspire to be that figure, to show gratitude when we encounter her in others, and to usher her from the sidelines to the spotlight. Where once she was treated as a peripheral character, today we should celebrate her as a protagonist.
