The Faces of Mankind : We Glimpse Our Own Spirits in Santa’s Eyes

It is only one face, and yet it is every face we know.

Above that snowy cascade of beard, home-grown or store-bought, the eyes are always delighted and delightful, brown or blue eyes, bright young eyes or benign old eyes haloed by wrinkles.

We see in our Santa Claus precisely what we see in our myriad selves: that he is black or Latino, Japanese or Anglo, an old man or a young woman. He speaks Korean, or Vietnamese, or the sign language of the deaf. He reads the Braille letters of blind children.

He is enthroned in department stores and in centers for abused children. Youngsters can visit him for $5 photo sessions in shopping malls, and on street corners for free. He arrives by surfboard, by fire truck, by parachute or helicopter, by Marine Corps jeep with an escort of Leathernecks.

At a Coast Guard outpost on a lonely atoll, he arrives in a C-130, bearing burgers and fries. In the sad, scarred streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is frisked as he makes his rounds on foot. On Skid Row, he comes in a Cadillac Eldorado, handing out $10 bills.

Thirty years ago this week, Santa was sitting in a classified missile installation inside a Colorado mountain. The phone rang--the unlisted, top-secret NORAD phone--and Air Force Col. Harry Shoup answered the call of a child who had misdialed Santa’s request line. Yes, Shoup assured the child, this is Santa Claus. And he looked at the big board, the one that tracks the minuet of war and the bomber planes that dance it, and thought that for this one night the Air Force wouldn’t mind watching for Santa Claus as well as for enemy fighters. And for every Christmas since, NORAD has solemnly tracked Santa’s Christmas Eve progress from the North Pole.

We worry about our Santa. The stories say he is dangerously obese, what with all that eggnog, all those cookies. They say he is a high-risk driver in that clumsy sleigh that has no seat belts, and that he can’t get insurance. The cost of reindeer feed, we are told, is getting prohibitive. The price of the toy largess of his annual jaunt, one magazine calculated, is more than $5.6 billion, not including batteries.

No fear; he will outlast us all. As the Siberian’s Father Ice, as the Dutchman’s Sinter-Klaas, as the Englishman’s Father Christmas, he has endured through history, through religious persecution, through depressions, Santa strip-o-grams and a killer Santa movie. His magic endures, too, in a commercial age. It is not the bottomless sack of booty that enchants, but the man who so obviously enjoys emptying it. It is not that he can waft down the world’s chimneys, but that he cares to visit us at all. His is the legerdemain of the spirit, and when we look to him for the magic that makes him our talisman, we look, in fact, into ourselves.