Selling Santa: How Miracle on 34^th Street Stole (And Rebranded) Christmas

ABSTRACT

American Christmas traditions developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an amalgamation of various communities’ customs, media representations of the holiday, and civic celebrations within the public sphere. One cultural touchstone throughout this period was within department stores where store Santas helped to streamline the identity of the national secular holiday. Miracle on 34^th Street, in portraying an updated version of the Santa Claus figure within Macy’s department store on film, rebranded the Christmas figure and his connections to commercialism through manipulation of his mythology. By emphasising the secular faith placed in Santa, Miracle on 34th Street contributed to a lasting connection between the American Christmas and an emerging commercialist religion.

KEYWORDS:

• Christmas mythology
• Santa claus
• commercialism
• film history
• miracle on 34^th street
• department store
• manipulation
• cultural history
• secularism
• civic holiday

Imagine a big outfit like Macy’s, putting the spirit of Christmas ahead of the commercial. It’s wonderful. I never done much shopping here before, but from now on, I’m going to be a regular Macy customer. – Macy’s Shopper

Christmas is built on customer loyalty. George Seaton’s Miracle on 34th Street Pressbook (1947) exemplifies this close connection between the holiday and its commercial suppliers with a brilliantly and deliberately misleading message for viewers. The film is a proclaimed American Christmas classic with an ostensibly innocuous and wholesome moral of goodwill to all, but when analysed more deeply and within context of the history of Christmas consumerism, Miracle on 34^th Street has much more complex motives for its portrayal of ‘the store with a heart’. As one customer states in the above quote, Macy’s has done the unthinkable: put the spirit of Christmas ahead of the commercial. What Macy’s – and the film – had actually done is hijack and steal Christmas – and particularly its most iconic figure, Santa Claus – for the purpose of rebranding the holiday not only on screen but also in a wider cultural sense that would have a lasting impact on the popular image of Christmas for decades to come. This article, in first exploring the development of the American Christmas holiday and Santa Claus figure throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, will then argue that the portrayal of the iconic man in red in the 1947 film Miracle on 34^th Street is a new Santa, an amalgam of traditions before rebranded into a manipulated mascot for consumerism.

Here Comes (The American) Santa Claus

‘Christmas’, here, refers to the American Christmas tradition born out of the consolidation of local and disparate community celebrations around winter, Saturnalia, and Christian holy days. Prior to the 1840s, historian Penne Restad argues, Christmas traditions ‘reflected a broadening sense of regional and cultural identity’ across the US (1995, 91). These local traditions, as Restad continues, began to consolidate and nationalise the holiday between the 1840s and 1870s for a number of reasons including the expansion of national media, developments of marketplace and industry, and the Civil War melding American cultures and promoting a more unified nationalised identity for the first time. These nineteenth century political, social, and cultural influences raising Christmas up as a prominent secular American holiday began its gradual progression towards its ultimate identity as a civic holiday in the early 1910s when over 160 towns and cities held public, communal Christmas festivities (Restad 1995, 156).

Throughout the nineteenth century, as these local celebrations began to meld in the public consciousness and as the streamlining of collective, public traditions developed, canonical imagery began to emerge as well. Iconography for the collective imagination of Christmas started to take shape with poetic and literary representations of the holiday. As Cara Okleshen et al. put forward in their 2011 examination of the formation of a collective memory of Santa Claus, it is important not to suggest a single trajectory of the development of his myth, image, or tradition (2011). Rather, the iconography becomes a sort of genre of Santa Claus: multiple identities with enough shared qualities to suggest the same character across writers, artists, filmmakers, and advertisers.

One such starting place for the development of the American Santa Claus figure in this same tradition of merging local customs and mythologies is within literature. Specifically, the classic American poem A Visit from St. Nicolas – more commonly known as The Night Before Christmas – published in 1823 gave us the iconic modern description of Saint Nicolas that would define his image for centuries:

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,

And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;

A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.

His eyes – how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow

And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,

And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;

He had a broad face and a little round belly,

That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf … ¹

This poem established for the first time that Santa Claus travelled by a reindeer-drawn sleigh, came on Christmas Eve, looked like a sweet, portly old man, and, crucially, removed the burden of Santa’s moral judgements of children (Forbes 2007). This image and character of Saint Nicolas was popularised with the poem in 1823 and became a mainstream version of him that would last in the public consciousness through today in part due to the comparably lasting illustrations that came to accompany this poem and other renderings of the man himself.

Thomas Nast’s illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly began in 1863 resembling the figure described by Moore in the earlier poem. This nineteenth century American portrayal of Santa Claus was an ‘amalgam of American, Dutch, and English traditions’ that reflected the complex identity of the US blending many immigrant communities and their traditions (Golby and Purdue 1986). J. M. Golby and A. W. Purdue argue that these representations of Santa Claus by Nast and Moore and the myriad others developing upon Nast’s physical depiction in the late 1800s lean heavily towards a modern Saturnalia rather than a Christian tradition. By omitting any reference to the nativity or Christian touchstones in the poem, they contend that modern Christmas might be ‘the Saturnalia of an increasingly urbanised, humanitarian, family-centred, and child-loving civilisation’ (Golby and Purdue 1986, 75).

Other such depictions of Santa Claus developed from these first traditions and either leaned into the secularism or highlighted the Christian elements of the holiday. As Richard Horsley argues in his ‘Christmas: The Religion of Consumer Capitalism’, however, the American Christmas and its traditions were ‘only very partially and superficially “christianized” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (2001, 167). These characterisations of American Christmas as decidedly secular in its portrayal led to, as Restad and Horsley argue, the formation of Christmas as a civic festival.

The idea of Christmas as a civic festival separate from religious connotations that could be associated with it – whether Pagan, Christian, or otherwise – is a complex question about American identities. The default naming convention for the holiday and its figures are most apparently associated with its Christian context. Despite the nature of the celebrations of Christmas becoming a civic holiday connected to patriotic emblems and a sense of American community across religions and backgrounds, Christian connotations are inextricable from the name and ostensible ownership of the holiday. Christmas, however, especially in American traditions and through the last two centuries, is a complex amalgamation of various cultural traditions and religious customs distilled into a standardised public holiday under the guise of Christian nomenclature. For instance, as Mark Connelly writes, the name Kris Kringle is ‘one of Santa’s pseudonyms, a mispronunciation of the German Lutheran term Christkindlein, meaning a messenger of Christ, a gift-bearer’ (Connelly 2000, 84) The Santa Claus traditions and the nineteenth century portrayals of him as the central figure of the holiday work to separate the Christianized version of the synthesised American holiday; however, it is still important to be aware of the tendency to default towards the connotations of the holiday as ostensibly Christian.

Among these varied and numerous origins and alongside Santa Claus imagery, depictions of other Christmas traditions were developing as well throughout the nineteenth century. The popularity of Dickensian villages and vague iconography of old English villages mapped onto the identity of American Christmas by tapping into a sense of false nostalgia for many adults. As Karal Ann Marling writes, the Dickensian iconography was the opposite end of the cultural touchtone spectrum from Santa by invoking ‘a universal good cheer, benevolence, and simplicity that stood in strong contrast to the commercial bustle of the modern, Santa Claus holiday’ (2001, 137). In the first half of the twentieth century, one such touchstone was Norman Rockwell and his illustrations on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell’s covers depicted a range of iconography including extensions on the Santa Claus and Dickensian mythologies and also more pointedly realistic portrayals of the commercialism of the holiday such as with his December 1947 Tired Shop Girl on Christmas Eve. With these covers, Rockwell helped to solidify the various angles of the public consciousness regarding Christmas for many Americans between the 1910s and 1950s.

The aesthetic of a standardised American Christmas developed out of these traditions of poetry and art and became the touchstones that they are because of repetition and various media building on the myriad intersections of smaller communities’ traditions that merged into a canonical national identity for the holiday. American Christmas is not just one thing, but rather a standard set of images, ideas, and icons that create a complex cultural phenomenon. This cultural phenomenon was then updated and adapted, amalgamating further for each subsequent generation and their modes of interacting with their own times and their own American identity. One particularly American influence on this mainstream vision of the man, the myths, and the legends of Christmas was the uses of them in commercial advertising, experiences, and entertainments from department stores to Hollywood.

The Commercial Claus

One of the most prominent locations in American Christmas nostalgia and iconography is the department store. In understanding how and why Christmas developed as it did in the American psyche and public traditions, the history of commercialism and consumerism is unavoidable. Specifically here, the history of department stores as they relate to the construction of a standardised American Christmas is crucial to bringing us forward from the early local immigrant populations’ communal traditions through the poetry that prompted the imagery to the stores that spread it nationwide and the film that eventually crystalised who Santa was at the centre of all of this.

Many social, cultural, and business historians agree that the first department store was Le Bon Marché, established in Paris in 1852; however, beyond this fact there is much contention about which stores elsewhere could also be categorised as ‘department stores’ (Ferry 1960; Resseguie 1965). Here, the department store is defined as a commercial centre within which specialist retailers using departmental units cater to many of the consumer’s needs all under one roof. As historian Daniel Boorstin notes:

The distinctive institution which came to be called the department store was a large retail shop, centrally located in a city, doing a big volume of business, and offering a wide range of merchandise, including clothing for women and children, small household wares, and usually dry goods and home furnishings. While the stock was departmentalised, many of the operations and the general management were centralised.

(1973, 101)

Boorstin, although conceding that the European department stores, such as Le Bon Marché, were the first to be established, argues that ‘if the department store was not an American invention, it flourished here as nowhere else’ (1973, 101). This flourishing of the department store in America can be seen in the sudden emergence of these grand complexes – ‘Palaces of Consumption’ as Boorstin terms them – in cities around the country. Some of the largest retailers founded in the nineteenth century were A. T. Stewart’s (established 1823), Lord & Taylor (1826), Arnold Constable (1852), and R. H. Macy’s in New York City (1858), Jordan Marsh in Boston (1841), John Wanamaker in Philadelphia (1876), Field, Leiter & Co. – later Marshall Field & Co. – (1852) and the Fair in Chicago (1874), and smaller but well-known local stores including Lazarus in Columbus, Ohio (1851), and Hudson’s in Detroit (1881) (1973). These palaces of consumption quickly became highly important economic centres in growing cities, impacting the metropolises and the cultures in which they were built and ultimately becoming a defining feature of metropolitan life.

As John Ferry wrote in 1960, ‘No city of any size in the world today is without its department stores. They are part of the make-up of urban areas just as are the churches, theatres, hotels, art galleries, and museums’ (1960, 1–2). Harry Resseguie wrote in 1965 that the ‘principal obstacle’ in defining what a department store is ‘has been its dynamism: its ability to change its characteristics while maintaining its outward form’. This ability to change is a necessary reminder in discussing the abrupt and enveloping evolution of commercialism between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. On this evolution, Resseguie continues, ‘The early department store, for instance, prided itself on its ability to sell national brands of merchandise at substantial reductions from the manufacturer’s suggested resale price’ (1965, 302). This price-competitive aspect of department stores and the ability to meet many of their customers’ needs in a single location helped establish and maintain their widespread popularity through uncertain economic times. Boorstin (1973), devoted a full chapter to department stores in the final instalment of his trilogy on the history of American society, The Americans: The Democratic Experience. In this chapter entitled ‘Consumers’ Palaces’, Boorstin argues that ‘the new department store grandeur gave dignity, importance, and publicity to the acts of shopping and buying – new communal acts in a new America’ (1973, 101).

With department stores acquiring such importance and status in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is not surprising that these commercial centres and their new communal activities were integral in the streamlining of American Christmas. Capitalising on the Christmas holiday shopping season, department stores nationwide began creating elaborate window displays for December and integrating Christmas into their marketing strategies. As Marling notes, window displays curated for the Christmas shopping season began in the 1820s ‘when the first recorded holiday decorations – evergreens, flowers, and “patriotic emblems” – appeared in the window of a New York City shop’ (2001, 83). These patriotic emblems highlighted an early form of the intense relationship between Americanism and celebrating Christmas as a secular, but patriotic, tradition.

Further melding these traditions of Americanism and Christmas with the emerging culture around commercialism, department stores turned to embracing Kris Kringle as an icon for this convergence of these identities. According to George McKay, ”historical antecedents of Christmas advertising in the USA show that, as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century, a Father Christmas-style character had been employed for seasonal marketing” (2008, 57). Stores began to put Kris Kringle figures in their shop windows as early as 1840 in Philadelphia and the 1870s in Boston. Gradually, as the popularity of dressing shop windows for Christmas spread across the country throughout the late nineteenth century, Macy’s began to emerge as one of the most iconic and best-known institutions for their elaborate and beautiful displays.

Owing in part to the large bank windows on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14^th Street at the main entrance of the original R. H. Macy Dry Goods store in New York City, Macy’s became synonymous with both the grandeur of design and Christmas celebrations. By 1924, following the lead of Gimbel’s in Philadelphia in 1920, the flagship Macy’s store in Herald Square on 34^th Street introduced their Thanksgiving Day parade ‘with Santa Claus presiding’ (Schmidt 1995, 145). Leigh Eric Schmidt observes that by introducing these parades with Santa at the helm, Macy’s and the like were co-opting ‘the domain of the street festival and street fair, colonising the mummers’ world and working-class celebrations with their own spectacles that were eventually staged more for the consumption of television audiences than for the folks on the avenues’ (1995, 145–46). Macy’s participation in these Christmas festivities helped to synthesise regionally specific Christmas traditions into a mainstream, standardised view of American Christmas traditions that ultimately was transferred to the small and big screens.

Simultaneously, as Macy’s developed their brand for Christmas, the department store industry capitalised on the benefits of children believing in Santa Claus. In 1897, New York Sun editor Francis Church received a letter from a young girl named Virginia asking if Santa Claus was real. Church published his response as an open letter, writing:

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to our life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance, to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment except in sense and sight.

(Waits 1993, 132)

This response echoed and encouraged the societal belief in Santa and without any reference to Christian elements of Christmas at all. The faith in Santa was distinct from a specific affiliated religious faith but emphasised as a net positive to make the world more tolerable. In a 2011 anthropological analysis of the role Santa plays in society, Ian Stronach and Alan Hodkinson suggest that Santa Claus functions as multiple forms of god-like beings in the minds of children, especially as a kind of pedagogic god (2011, 17). Accordingly, as Church’s response reflects and other cultural invocations of Santa support, the primary function of Santa in society is not only to inject some magic into the daily world, but also nourish that magic by inspiring moralistic behaviour, kindness, and love. Equating Santa’s existence with ‘love and generosity and devotion’, as Church does, feeds this anthropological view of the role of Santa as a societal good, not as a named affiliate of any one religion specifically, but as a secular god: a moral guide and arbiter of justice for the immoral.

The presence of Santa was seen as a collective imperative for parents to sustain with their children and for the rest of American adults to cultivate as much as possible. One manifestation of this societal responsibility was the establishment of the Santa Claus Association in New York allegedly for ‘the express purpose of preserving children’s belief in St. Nick’ (Waits 1993, 133). Ultimately, however, just as the image of Santa was co-opted by department stores and, most egregiously, Hollywood for commercialist propagandising and maximising corporate profits, the Santa Claus Association, according to the founder’s great-grand-nephew, devolved from its purportedly sincere foundations into a monetised grift (Palmer, 2015). Regardless, by the 1930s, a nationally standardisation of the Santa image became a necessity as he was being used more and more in person and in advertising. In response to this need, schools began popping up in major cities to train men on how to look, act, and be the perfect Santa Clauses (Restad 1995).

Macy’s remained a leader in the preservation of the myth and identity of Santa Claus perfecting the use of Santa as a wholesome character, consistent across all stores, and inspiring childlike faith. Simultaneously, however, this wholesome image of preserving the myth of Santa was not for the sake of children or the protection of their innocence; Santa was a marketing gimmick to get families into the store. As William Waits writes, ‘Santa was effective because, according to his myth, he did not use money and was not engaged in making profit’. Waits describes Santa as a ‘decontaminator of manufactured items’ and continues that, ‘he made no trip to the toy store to buy the toys, nor even a trip to purchase raw materials. Santa’s motivation for his monumental undertaking was free of market considerations’ (1993, 25). Because of Santa’s purity from manufacturing, he was used in advertising nationwide for a range of products. As the posterchild for Coca-Cola and a figure in over 20% of toy ad campaigns in Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, by the 1930s, Santa became the official spokesman of commercialism, especially when marketing toward children (Restad 1995).

This idea of Santa as pure of the commercialism that increasingly was tainting the American Christmas in the early twentieth century led to even more complex manipulations of the figure. Macy’s used Santa and his clean image, decontaminated of manufactured items, to sell manufactured items. This ostensible innocence, the use of Santa’s long and storied image as a jolly, sweet figure, a grandfatherly type whose image Americans honed for years as an ethereal saint denoting positivity and generosity was the perfect image to exploit for corporate profits in the palaces of consumption themselves.

Macy’s department store itself became a symbol of the shopping season incorporating much of the iconography associated with the idea of an American Christmas. The connection between the store and the holiday grew organically from the importance of department stores to their local culture and the increasing attempt to captivate an audience of all classes who could stare into shop window displays and live a fantasy in relation to the items in the tableaux (Marling 2001). With Macy’s deeply entrenched connection to the holiday and its increasing commercialisation of Christmas via their advertising resources including the parade, window displays, and store Santa Clauses, Macy’s became the perfect backdrop for Valentine Davies’s 1947 novella and the subsequent George (Seaton 1947) film, Miracle on 34^th Street.

Miracle on 34^th Street Steals Christmas

Department stores in the mid-twentieth century were well-established cultural centres integral to the identity of a city. Their Christmas displays, merchandise, and gimmicks helped to streamline the commercial view of what a mainstream American Christmas looked like especially for the cities in which they were located. Just as department stores helped to standardise the public consciousness of Christmas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hollywood cinema took this process to a new level. Santa had been depicted on screens a few times prior to the 1940s, but no film did more for the nationalising of the image of Santa Claus and the updating or modernisation of him than Miracle on 34^th Street (Myers 2001).

One oft-cited article on Miracle on 34^th Street suggests that the film ‘showed America still ripe with hope in consumption and family’ and that it ‘affirms the value of faith (in Santa), family, and “the system” represented by big business, the courts, and the post office’ (Belk and Bryce 1993, 293 & 283). While these are certainly some of the achievements of the film, there is also a much more coordinated effort within the film to subvert each of these values by rebranding that child-like innocent faith in Santa as faith in commercialism. In many ways, Miracle’s success in presenting a wholesome, secular faith-based story with a loveable, familiar character at the centre is equally a success in indoctrinating the audience into a religion of commercialism by manipulating their established faith in and emotional connections with the iconic character and twisting him into a glorified, well-dressed salesman.

Miracle on 34^th Street is a masterpiece of evasion and manipulation of the audience, of Santa Claus and Christmas imagery, and of straightforward messaging. In the first example of this complex manipulation, the film was originally billed as a romantic comedy, downplaying in all of the promotional materials, at the time, the film’s central Christmas spirit and plot. As the concept of a Christmas film was not an established genre and because the film was releasing in June 1947, the marketing for the film emphasised the romance between Maureen O’Hara and John Payne’s characters in all of the posters and publicity. Even in the five-minute trailer for Miracle on 34^th Street, the Christmas elements of the film were entirely evaded.

The trailer describes the film as ‘Hilarious! Romantic! Delightful! Charming! Tender! Exciting!’ In a meta spin, the trailer pans back to a producer watching the trailer for Miracle on 34^th Street, enraged at this characterisation of the film. He exclaims:

That won’t work – it’s no good. What do you make a trailer for? To give the public an idea of what kind of a picture to expect. Hilarious! Romantic! Tender! Exciting! Make up your minds. It can’t be all of those things. Tender, exciting, why they’re practically opposites. You’ve got to decide what kind of a picture this is. Is it a romantic love story? Is it an exciting thriller? Is it a hilarious comedy? Make up your minds. Now go to work and fix it up.

He subsequently leaves the viewing room and encounters a number of celebrities on the studio lot and enquires if they have seen Miracle. None of these stars are in the film but are used in the promotional materials for it. Anne Baxter very nearly gives away the Christmassy elements of the plot and that there is even a Santa Claus in the film at all but stops herself saying ‘no, I’m not going to spoil it for you’. The trailer is brilliantly self-referential and as evasive as the film in refusing to deliver a straightforward message.

This evasion of purpose and manipulation of the audience even prior to their seeing the film is an excellent marketing strategy for Miracle on 34^th Street specifically. Without even acknowledging the actual plot or subject matter of the film, the studio and distributor marketed the subplot to attract viewers. As will be seen below, the film itself does the same thing with the surface-level plot and messaging of the film that becomes much more complex and even sinister with deeper analysis. The ostensible image of the Santa figure in the film as anti-commercialist, the image of him as a ‘decontaminator of manufactured items’ very quickly become manipulated with 1947 commercialist needs for the character.

George Seaton’s Miracle on 34^th Street is a film about a sweet old man who believes himself to be the real Santa Claus and the lengths he goes to convince a young girl and the city of New York that truly knowing is not as powerful as believing. Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) is hired by Macy’s to be the store Santa Claus after a drunken imposter is fired on the spot for being inebriated at the Thanksgiving Day parade. His hiring manager, Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara), her daughter Susan (Natalie Wood), and their lawyer neighbour Fred Gailey (John Payne) become central figures in Kringle’s life between Thanksgiving and Christmas as accusations against Kringle’s mental health emerge. Kringle enacts a goodwill policy at Macy’s, telling customers to go to another store if the price is better or a toy they want is in stock elsewhere. His policy causes a complicated stir at Macy’s and prompts a legal battle in which it ultimately is declared on a technicality by the US Postal Service that Kringle is in fact Santa Claus and his goodwill shall remain.

This film has many complex layers and leans into manipulations of ostensibly innocent scenes. For instance, Susan does not believe that Kringle is truly Santa Claus as he claims. She expresses her distrust by being quite vulnerable and telling him that: ‘That’s what I want for Christmas … a real house. If you’re really Santa Claus, you can get it for me. And if you can’t, you’re only a nice man with a white beard, like mother said’. This ultimatum is not a traditional request for Santa Claus. This house is not something that can be made in the North Pole and put under the Christmas tree. Instead, Susan is picking up on a different mode of materialism in the identity of the American Christmas: commercialism. If he cannot provide her with the house she truly wants for Christmas, then there must be no Santa Claus and Christmas must not be the ‘magical time of year’ some adults around her claim it to be.

This connection between Kris Kringle and the commercialisation of Christmas is the driving force of the plot. Susan’s insistence that Kringle can only acquire the house of her dreams if he is the real Santa Claus is deeper than a child’s ultimatum. Susan’s mother Doris is a single, working divorcee who allows her previous relationship with Susan’s father to spoil her own imagination and hope for fairy tale endings and love. In asking for the house, Susan is expressing that she wants to move out of the city and into the suburbs via the symbol of the American family. If Kringle cannot deliver a happy American ending, then he has no role. Specifically, if he cannot purchase the exact house in the listing Susan showed him, his magic is not real. Susan’s request and ultimatum equate the magic of Santa Claus and the Christmas spirit with the purchasing power of commercialism and underscore a more sinister idea that a happy American ending can, and ideally should, be purchased.

This equation of the Christmas spirit with commercialism is also more emphatically made in the central plot of the goodwill policy. The goodwill policy causes Kringle to clash with his superiors as he independently introduces this honesty policy for helping parents get their children the gifts they want instead of the gifts their parents think they want. The goodwill policy works by encouraging shoppers to find the best deals for the items they are looking for, even if that means buying from a Macy’s rival. In doing so, Macy’s customers are shown as becoming more loyal, ultimately driving profits up for the store. As one customer exclaims, ‘Imagine a big outfit like Macy’s, putting the spirit of Christmas ahead of the commercial. It’s wonderful. I never done much shopping here before, but from now on, I’m going to be a regular Macy customer’.

In crafting this idea of the goodwill policy to promote good publicity for department stores, the film forefronts the consumer rather than the customer. The consumer of the toy section at Macy’s is not the buyer necessarily, but especially at Christmas, the children receiving the toys as gifts. The film first has the store manager explain to Kringle that the job of the store Santa Claus is to suggest certain toys that are harder to sell, toys or items that happen to be overstocked, hoping to push these products onto a child consumer who will then inform their parents that they want that particular item for Christmas. Kringle becomes irate at the manipulation of a child’s desires, scoffing, ‘Imagine, making a child take something it doesn’t want just because he [the store manager] bought too many of the wrong toys. That’s what I’ve been fighting against for years. The way they commercialise Christmas’. Kringle’s on-screen acknowledgement and disgust at the premise of commercialising Christmas masterfully sells to the audience the idea that Christmas is not about buying anything for the sake of buying it, but rather about buying precisely what a child wants, all while maintaining the outward appearance that the commercialisation of Christmas is a negative interpretation of the holiday. Miracle on 34^th Street, in a paradoxical way, ostensibly condemns the commercialisation of the holiday while also promoting this goodwill policy suggesting again that not only can you commercialise Christmas, but also that you should by manipulating the role of Santa from generous toy bringer to business savvy salesman.

In one scene, a child on Kringle’s lap asks for a toy fire engine while his mother attempts to discourage this request. Kringle promises the boy he will get a fire engine and then calms the angry mother by telling her she can get the exact toy at a rival store, giving her the location and price while assuring her they are still in stock. When she expresses disbelief at his honesty, Kringle quips that he keeps a close eye on the toy market and says, ‘Well the only important thing is to make the children happy and whether Macy or somebody else sells the toy doesn’t make any difference. Don’t you feel that way?’ Bewildered, she responds that she certainly feels that way but didn’t know Macy’s did.

This exchange exposes one of the most apparent adjustments Miracle on 34^th Street makes to the Santa Claus image. As mentioned above, the image of Santa prior to his twentieth century rampant commercialist exploitation – and the reason for it – was as a ‘decontaminator of manufactured items’, as one who does not purchase his toys and who is free of market considerations (Waits 1993, 25). In popular mythologies around him, Santa Claus has a workshop at the North Pole in which elves make the toys that he delivers. However, in Miracle on 34^th Street’s Manhattan, Santa Claus isn’t producing the toys, but rather relaying customers to department stores to purchase them while he keeps ‘track of the toy market pretty closely’. This portrayal of Santa as a moderator of well-priced toys is a dereliction of his role up until this point. He had been used in advertising prior to sell a company’s own products, but never before had Santa been such a public agent of general commercialism promoting any sales as long as profits were made for Christmas. Santa here is no longer the decontaminator of manufactured items, but rather their direct dealer.

Relegating Santa Claus to the role of keeping track of the best deals on commercial goods removes him from the previously established myths of Christmas and places him as nothing more than a signifier denoting that it is the season of buying. In key, brief instances, audiences are treated to the ‘real Santa Claus’ character Kris Kringle is portraying. In the first scene of the film, Kringle is walking past a shop clerk decorating a window display for Christmas on Thanksgiving morning. Here, as Leigh Eric Schmidt observes, this opening scene of Kringle looking through a shop window sets up the idea that ‘commerce frames the story’ and symbolically and literally places Kringle directly in the middle of it (Schmidt 1995, 171). Kringle, stopping to admire the display, notices that the reindeer are out of order as he would have them. Addressing the shop clerk, Kringle corrects his placement of the reindeer with such lines as ‘Dasher should be on my right-hand side’, and ‘I don’t suppose anybody would notice except myself’. This quick scene establishes for the audience in the opening sequence that whether he truly is or not, Kringle believes that he is Santa Claus, and further, that he is willing to use his identity to help vendors properly and accurately commercialise Christmas.

This portrayal of Santa Claus as an economically wise market-watcher giving cost-effective advice to parents is a stark deviation from the publicly accepted version of Santa as the toymaker and gift-giver. To normalise the actions and behaviours of Kringle’s deviation from the ‘traditional’ depictions of Santa Claus, the film makes a concerted effort to portray Kringle as the real mythical figure complete with a certain magical quality. At one point, when a young, newly immigrated Dutch girl sits on Kringle’s lap in Macy’s, her adoptive mother apologises profusely that the girl doesn’t speak English yet she insisted on meeting him regardless. Kringle waves the woman off and speaks perfect Dutch to the bemused girl, learning exactly what she wants for Christmas. This moment feels as though it is magical, giving a glimpse of the more traditional ‘Sinter Claes’ as the girl calls him, all witnessed by Susan who begins to believe that Kringle may truly be the real Santa Claus.

Immediately following this magical scene, Doris asks Kringle definitively to tell Susan that he is not Santa, which he refuses to do. Doris decides to discreetly fire him and is subsequently praised in another meeting with her superiors for hiring him in the first place, as Macy’s customer loyalty and, more significantly, profits have gone up as a result. These three scenes happen in quick succession: Kringle displaying perceived ‘Christmas magic’, his firing for proclaiming himself to be the true Santa, and his rehiring for increasing profits. The film seems to be signifying that the real Santa Claus is no longer marketable if representing such traditional, magical elements, but is marketable when turning a profit for the company.

The film endorses a complex message rebranding not only Santa Claus but also commercialism through him as positive American figures. The film mixes iconography of traditional Santa Claus – bestowing gifts, embodying kindness, being worldly and welcoming – and the for-profit commercialist structure of the post-war department store. By abandoning the traditional Santa and literally firing him for believing in the ideals and existence of the more ‘magical’ aspects of the holiday, Macy’s hires the version of Santa they wanted in the first place: the one who will inspire better sales, higher profits, and more loyal customers by exploiting those innocent associations with his name and image.

Playing Santa Claus in Miracle on 34^th Street is not only for Kringle. There are two other Santas in the film: the drunk Santa whom Kringle replaces in the Thanksgiving Day Parade and subsequently at the store, and the young janitor at Macy’s, Alfred (Alvin Greenman), who dresses up as Santa for the children at his local YMCA. The first, drunken Santa, is immediately scorned as he fits neither the traditional Santa myth nor the role of the good commercialist icon that Kringle will later fill. The second, Alfred, is a case study for the same changes affecting Kringle without the added element of allegedly truly being Santa.

Alfred and Kringle form a relationship around both of their interests in the Santa figure. Alfred claims that he loves playing Santa for the look on children’s faces when he gives them gifts, reassuring Kringle that he also disapproves of the commercialist angle of Christmas. Alfred states,

Yea there’s a lot of bad -isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism. Make a buck, make a buck. Even in Brooklyn it’s the same. Don’t care what Christmas stands for; just make a buck, make a buck

. Despite the possible pass at communism in the first line, Alfred is affirming to both the audience and Kringle that, even outside of the department store, he believes in the goodness of the traditional role of Santa Claus: giving gifts for the joy of children. Shortly after, however, Alfred informs Kringle that he will no longer be playing Santa at the YMCA because the store’s mental examiner, Mr. Sawyer (Porter Hall) has diagnosed him with a guilt complex and subconscious hatred of his father. Sawyer contends that the only reason someone would want to give gifts to strangers for free would be that he must have done something bad in his childhood for which he is trying to forgive himself. Mr. Sawyer also interviews Kringle and diagnoses him with ‘latent maniacal tendencies’. This diagnosis is used later in the film to set up the climactic court hearing to decide whether Kris Kringle is insane or truly Santa Claus.

Sawyer’s diagnoses on behalf of Macy’s are complex reflections of distrust towards generosity. In both instances, Sawyer, as a representative of Macy’s, cannot fathom the desire to do something selfless, especially when it pertains to giving material possessions away for free. Macy’s executives, likewise, do not understand the goodwill policy as an intrinsically honest policy, but see it rather as a way to exploit customers from an emotional angle. Adding the external storyline of Sawyer misdiagnosing Alfred, an average person with a kind heart, brings in a deeper layer of not only the more understandable challenging of the mental state of an old man who claims to be Santa, but also challenging anyone’s desire to give gifts solely for the purpose of giving without added incentive. Centralising this concern in Sawyer also allows the film to introduce this idea of the absurdity of selflessness in juxtaposition to the Macy’s executives who are using that selflessness to increase profits.

In a meeting concerning Kringle’s performance, Mr. Macy himself applauds the new policy. He exclaims that over 500 parents, including the governor’s and mayor’s wives, expressed their gratitude for the new ‘merchandising policy’. He suggests that every department should employ the strategy, proposing ‘No more high pressuring and forcing a customer to take something he doesn’t really want’. Macy continues, realising the profitable potential of this scheme should they lean into emotional manipulation: ‘We’ll be known as the helpful store, the friendly store, the store with a heart, the store that places public service ahead of profits’, before adding with a snide smile, ‘and consequently we’ll make more profits than ever before’. This misuse of the goodwill created by Kringle is an exploitation of the Christmas spirit, and it is never condemned within the film because it is, in the film’s estimation, a good commercialist practice.

On the contrary, other department stores, namely Gimbel’s, Macy’s fiercest competitor, also employ the strategy, and both expand the policy nationwide. In one scene, Santa is literally stood between Mr. Macy and Mr. Gimbel as they shake hands for a photo-op. In front of the photographers and journalists, Macy gives Kringle a sizable Christmas bonus with which Kringle says he will purchase an x-ray machine for a doctor friend, leaving Macy and Gimbel to argue over who will cover the rest of the costs. Again, the film is displaying the notion that the department store only gives value to the monetary benefits of performative philanthropy, concerning itself principally with the publicity of grand gestures. This performative philanthropy is not criticised in the film.

Alternatively, Sawyer’s character is rebuked. The film is very careful in whom is made the villainous character, not wanting to frame the department stores negatively. While the department store executives embracing the goodwill policy are superficially engaging correctly with the commercialisation of Christmas, following Kringle’s own lead, Sawyer is the embodiment of the critiques Kringle makes of the rampant commercialism he is supposedly challenging. Later in the film, Kringle is admitted to a mental hospital and says openly to his lawyer and friend, Fred, that Sawyer is ‘contemptible, dishonest, selfish, deceitful, vicious’, continuing, ‘yet he’s out there and I’m in here. He’s called normal and I’m not. Well, if that’s normal, I don’t want it’. Gailey reminds Kringle that ‘what happens to [him] matters to a lot of people’ and offers hope that one day things may change with the Sawyers of the world being ‘in here, instead of out there’. Ultimately, the inclusion of this scene is to commit the film to the message of the correct approach to commercialising Christmas. Framing Sawyer as the villain, the character who cannot fathom kindness and selflessness, as the antithesis and threat to Santa reinforces the idea that giving gifts is good, and that those gifts can and should be purchased from ‘the store with a heart’. What happens to Kris Kringle happens to Santa Claus: he and his myth are co-opted by the department store for an exploitative commercialist scheme to sell more products and increase customer loyalty without rebuke.

This ostensibly positive portrayal of commercialism in the film creates a paradox of acting selflessly for the sole purpose of driving personal profits up. Despite acknowledging it is the right thing to do to be honest with customers and help them get the right toys for a good price, the department store executives admit alternative motives. The executives explain how embracing the goodwill policy will boost customer loyalty and ultimately manipulate the consumer into thinking a selflessly generous approach to commercialism is what Macy’s and other stores are striving for. As in the evasive trailer, more promotional material reflects for reality the manipulation within the film. In the pressbook material for Miracle on 34^th Street, there are instructions detailing how real store owners could capitalise on the goodwill policy as portrayed in the film. The pressbook reads:

NOT JUST FOR MACY AND GIMBEL, BUT FOR ALL STORES

WHY? BECAUSE THE DEPARTMENT STORE IS DEMONSTRATED AS A COMMUNITY INSTITUTION – WITH A SOUL! STORE PERSONNEL ARE NATURALLY AND HUMANELY PORTRAYED, AND THE PART PLAYED BY DEPARTMENT STORES IN THE LIVES OF CHILDREN AT CHRISTMAS CARRIES A MIGHTY PUBLIC RELATIONS MESSAGE …

THE PICTURE DOES A POTENTIAL PUBLIC RELATIONS JOB FOR ALL STORES EVERYWHERE.

… even though this benefit is really part of the entertainment and was not planned that way. (1947)²

This section of the pressbook explains that all stores in conjunction with 34^th Street in Manhattan would be participating in the tie-ins for the film with window displays, perpetual showings of the trailer for the film, and themed histories of their stores to show the humanist side of the shops.

This approach to the tie-ins possible for Miracle on 34^th Street is exploiting the same Christmas spirit as shown in the film. By enlisting the real-world department stores in this ‘public relations’ campaign of advertising, the stores are hoping that the good press from the film’s portrayal of Macy’s as the ‘store with a heart’ will increase their own profits and customer trust. The added insistence that this positive portrayal of department stores is a happy by-product of the film’s story echoes the words of R. H. Macy in the film, delivered with a snide grin and chuckle: ‘We’ll be known as the helpful store, the friendly store, the store with a heart, the store that places public service ahead of profits. And, consequently, we’ll make more profits than ever before’.

Conclusion

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a consolidation of iconography and synthesising of cultural touchstones created the public consciousness of Christmas and its central figure of Santa Claus. The mythology around Santa was manifold and complex, honouring other traditions of him while creating a singular American Santa in advertising, entertainments, and commercial campaigns outside of traditional routes. By the 1940s, the image and idea of Santa as a cultural purity who happened to also peddle products was ubiquitous; however, it wasn’t until Edmund Gwenn’s Kringle was fired and rehired in Miracle on 34^th Street that the façade was publicly addressed. Miracle on 34^th Street steals the backdrop of Christmas and the publicly known character of Santa Claus and reimagines them, rebuilds them for its own uses, and rebrands the holiday by way of its most iconic figure as a commercialist venture. Miracle’s Christmas is ostensibly a lot of things: pure, wholesome, anti-commercialist, and secular. However, ultimately, the film is a very successful rebranding of the civic holiday in favour of the religion of commercialism, recasting the central figure himself not as a secular god of morality and justice, but as the god of the best bargains and right purchases.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vaughn Joy

Vaughn Joy is a PhD candidate at University College London studying the portrayals of political, social, and cultural elements of the post-war period in innocuous media via a case study on Christmas films. She is the host of multiple podcasts including Impressions of America and Hollywood in Focus.

Notes

1. Although the poem is most commonly attributed to professor of divinity Clement C. Moore, the descendants of American Revolutionary War veteran Henry Livingston Jr. contend that he was the rightful author. The Livingston argument claims that the poem was composed in 1808 and recited to his children. Regardless of authorship, the popularisation of the poem, and therefore the imagery within it, did not come about until 1823 when it was anonymously published in the Troy, New York, Sentinel. Cf (Forbes 2007).

2. All emphases and underlining from original source.