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ECONOMY: Today, Santa Is the Saviour

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Dec 24 2008 (IPS) - This time, more than in years before, Christmas is so much more about Santa Claus than about Jesus Christ. Santa has after all, the power to move markets in ways that poor Jesus never contemplated.

And so, it is Santa who can be the saviour of the day for the recession-hit Christian world. Because you spend in the name of Santa, and the prevailing leaders of the Christian world have determined that their world can be saved by spending.

Daily now, government leaders watch in trepidation as reports come in suggesting how much people are spending this Christmas – or how much less than they might in a better world. It is these days that may present the first signposts towards recovery from recession. If recover, that is, means that most people go back to a continuing pattern of borrowing to spend.

In keeping their eye on the price tags attached to the socks and sacks that Santa might deliver, the one thing almost everyone seems to have forgotten – and certainly the ones who matter in the sense that they take decisions – is the basic beliefs of Christianity itself. The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, has asked that difficult question about the temptations being piled up to go back to that cycle of borrowing and spending; and he has asked fellow Christians to ask it.

Archbishop Rowan Williams said the financial crisis was a welcome "reality check" for a society driven by unsustainable greed. He told BBC Radio that the economic failing was in the first instance a "moral" failing. The call to people to go and spend was, he said, "a little bit like the addict returning to the drug."

The moral failing, he suggested, was also an economic failing in its own right. Britain, he said, had been "going in the wrong direction" by relying on financial speculation to multiply money, rather than "making things". Britain has long ceased to be much of a manufacturing nation, and relies on services for about 75 percent of its gross national income (GNI).

Dr. Williams asked also the most unfashionable of questions of a Britain of the spending kind. "I would like to think that in this sort of crisis people would be reflecting more on how you develop a volunteer culture, how you develop a culture of people willing to put their services at the needs of others so that there can be a more active, a more vital civil society." He asked the government to show the way "how the civil society is created."

No one is surprised that the government and the financial 'experts' have not listened. "When the Bible uses the word 'repentance', it doesn't just mean beating your breast, it means getting a new perspective, and that is perhaps what we are shrinking away from," Dr. Williams said. The Bible of the market now is the sales ledgers; the bigger the figures the better. There is little sign of a new perspective on this; only a desperation for the old one.

Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, believed to have taken his name from Saint Nicholas, is really a mythical figure who burst into the popular Christian imagination, unsurprisingly, in the capitalist growth of the United States in the 19th century. Many Christians have long said that Santa grates against the true spirit of Christianity.

Santa, they say, has grown to be more than a jolly uncle hiding gifts for good children on the Christmas tree. The gifting business around Christmas has not for some time now been about children any more; nor is it about the kind of gifts that would fit into socks. Experts pray now for the buying, if not gifting, of 'big ticket' items – cars, diamonds, holidays, all manner of goods electrical and electronic.

The Archbishop said that if such spending "is going to drive us back into the same spin, I do not think that is going to help us." People, he said, must not "spend to save the economy" but spend for "human reasons" – to provide for their own needs.

Oddly, the only brake on the push to borrowing to spend is not any Christian morality but the banks, which started off the financial crisis in the first place. Intoxicated by shopping malls, believing without hesitation in an ever brighter future that ever higher spending will bring, millions are restrained this Christmas only because banks will no longer lend them money. And that is because the banks are not sure if the real economy can sustain borrowers long enough for loaned money to be recovered.

To the extent there is still a shopping spree, it's a fairly compromised Santa doing the rounds this year. He's borrowing all over the place to fill our socks and sacks. By the time it comes to repayment in the spring and summer, Santa might have lost his smile, and his cheerful red coat. Eventually Santa Claus is only a credit card in disguise.

Someone, somewhere might think Christmas was about the birth of Jesus Christ. The one, remember, who was crucified, and asked forgiveness for those who crucified him, in the most moving idea of compassion that the world has known. It was the idea of compassion for humans, not passion for gadgets.