The old myth never dies. Not even in pandemic times. Santa can really only deliver his goods through a chimney, which means, naturellement, a fireplace. Of course, when placed within the context of this myth’s European origins, the notion doesn’t come across as quite so damned presumptuously bourgeois… on the surface, at least. Because yes, when Europeans do anything, it seems somehow, to Americans, slightly less overtly classist–being that the U.S. likes to make the sweeping generalization that the continent is a collective welfare state, equalizing everyone with socialized medicine and “early retirement.”
But no, lest one need be reminded, even as far back as the 1400s in Europe (most notably Tudor England), the chimney emanated not just smoke, but also implications of affluence, with “commoners” having to settle instead for their own improvisational methods, namely burning wood on a brick or clay base located outside at the back of their house. True to “ghetto life” form, the smoke still seeped into the edifice more often than not.
Trying to emulate the upper classes proved almost as detrimental as poverty itself to the plebes, what with opting for more cheaply made chimney routes like, say, a melange of straw, clay and dung often resulting in fires. The upper crust of England, meanwhile, decided they ought to reconstruct their own chimneys out of the more stalwart brick, and ensure that the top of the chimney was at least four and a half feet above the house’s roof.
As the uninformed and uneducated hordes of yore continued to misunderstand how heat and smoke worked, the same issues arose even with brick chimneys, with a large portion of smoke still getting trapped within the structure itself. And since Americans are just British people who had the gumption to flee an island, many of the same structural setups remained in the colonial U.S., and well beyond that time period. It was as early as the Middle Ages that this notion of the chimney being a portal between this realm and the supernatural one initially came to prominence. A belief stemming from the lore that witches were capable of penetrating through any solid wall of a house.
To mitigate the paranoia of the easily rattled masses, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (released in 1487) instead offered that witches and other magical beings could only enter through a chimney (or window–but where’s the bombast and flair in that?), thereby fortifying this belief that it was a bridge between the natural and the supernatural world. In this way, it’s easy to understand why La Befana rose to prominence in Italian folklore.
A fat old man with “rosy” (or is it just rosacea) cheeks with a penchant for milk and cookies, on the other hand, seems like more of a stretch than a witch, in terms of chimney entering. In fact, the American iteration of Santa (bastardized from St. Nicholas and immortalized by Coke ads in the twentieth century) doesn’t make him come across as “magical” so much as a bit “creepy” and, well, “pedophilic.” Not to mention his glaring Whiteness (witches, at the very least, are “green” or “sooty”–how the fuck don’t Santa ever get sooty?) within the framework of this commercial holiday.
With Santa also being a very literal embodiment of patriarchy (in physical appearance alone), the stuffing of himself through a chimney lends a palpable nod to class divide with the fireplace element at play, harkening, again, all the way back to the fifteenth century in Europe. It only seemed in post-civil rights America that people (read: white-brokered power) started to offer more freely as a consolation to non-whites and non-richies suddenly eye rollingly “given” more so-called “visibility” in the public arena, “Oh well Santa can enter any space, he’s magic. So don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if you’re a broke ass in a tenement building with no chimney/fireplace setup to be found. He’ll find you to deliver your jank toy.”
Because, goddamn, let’s be honest. It was kinda fuckin’ bougie for Santa to assume that every motherfucker on this Earth has a fireplace. Oh wait, every motherfucker “worth” something to the capitalist juggernaut.
