The Death of Santa Claus

“The Death of Santa Claus” is a poignant narrative poem about a child’s realization that Santa Claus is a construct rather than a reality. The title regarding Santa’s demise immediately creates a juxtaposition (a side-by-side comparison to reveal contrast) pairing the iconic image of Santa Claus as a jolly old elf with the darker theme of death. The poem is divided into two parts. The first seven stanzas take place at the “North Pole” (Line 3) in a third-person point of view, close to Santa Claus. The last three stanzas shift to first-person narration as the speaker remembers the moment that Santa figuratively died in his mind when he was a child in “Houston, Texas” (Line 23). Charles Harper Webb grew up in Houston, so his choice of using this location in “The Death of Santa Claus” can be interpreted as autobiographical, especially given the use of the first-person pronoun “I” in Line 23—“I’m 8”—which indicates that the child speaker is a young Webb.

The poem begins with a description that puts the mythic Santa into a realistic situation. Rather than his usually immortal self, Santa is only a human who has had “chest pains for weeks” (Line 1). We rapidly learn that he has been ill for a period of time and has put off seeking medical assistance. Santa reveals the excuses he’s made for not taking care of himself. First, it would require extra effort since “doctors don’t make house / calls to the North Pole” (Lines 2-3). Previously confident in his endless good health, Santa has also “let his Blue Cross lapse” (Line 4). Without this insurance, visits to doctors are much more costly.

Yet, the biggest reason for not seeking help is that Santa is fearful of hospitals and medical testing. His own mortality, once he realizes it as a possibility, makes him uncomfortable. He doesn’t like the “blood tests” (Line 5), “hospital gown[s]” (Line 6), or the “waiting rooms [that] upset / his stomach” (Lines 7-8). He justifies his avoidance, too, by self-diagnosis, dismissing his symptoms as “only / indigestion anyway” (Lines 8-9).

This avoidance has serious consequences. Santa has a massive cardiac arrest, which “feels as if a monster fist / has grabbed his heart and won’t // stop squeezing” (Lines 11-13). He loses consciousness as “the beautiful white / world he loves goes black” (Lines 14-15), and he collapses dead in the snow. That the heart attack is fatal is implied by the fact that “Rudolph’s / nose blinks like a sad ambulance” (Line 20-21), that the “elves wring / their little hands” (Lines 19-20), and that “Mrs. Claus […] [is] wailing” (Lines 17-19). There is no hope for recovery.

Up to this point, the poem has focused on the events in the North Pole as if they are real, with a close focus on Santa and his demise. The narrative has immersed itself in this world populated by the people and places central to the Santa Claus myth, particularly as expanded by the holiday television specials created by the production team Rankin/Bass from 1964 to 1974. These stop-motion animation specials were popular, and shown yearly, and rounded out some of the details established by Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, in which familiar tropes regarding the American conception of Santa Claus were built. The “beautiful white world” (Line 14) is a world children know, and the Christmastime details in Stanzas 6 and 7 are familiar to many Americans. Because Santa’s world is so familiar, his fatal ailment becomes all the more real.

However, it turns out the actual location of the poem is not the North Pole’s reindeer-feeding station but “a tract house / in Houston, Texas” (Line 22-23). This brings the narrative into the real world, and into a landscape devoid of snow. The speaker, Webb, is in second or third grade, and he is being teased by the “stupid // kids at school” (Lines 24-25) for believing in Santa Claus. Convinced that the other children are incorrect, the speaker looks to his mother for support. However, the mother realizes she now must tell her child the truth regarding Santa’s nonexistence. She “takes [the speaker’s] hand, tears / in her throat, the terrible / news rising in her eyes” (Lines 28-30). The other children are right, Santa is a ruse. This “terrible news” reveals that the previous depiction of Santa’s death is what occurred figuratively in the child’s mind as he registered his mother’s acknowledgement of the truth.

The beloved figure is felled by a heart attack, a symbol for the attack upon the child’s emotions as he realizes Santa is fiction. The mother’s response shows she knows—and feels empathy for—the ending of her child’s innocence, as well as her sad duty of confirming that truth. The speaker paints the metaphorical scenario of Santa’s death as realistically as possible to underscore how seriously the child felt the revelatory moment was—and how it destroyed a beloved ideal.