Christmas, like most holidays, is a retreat into the past, to a previous way of doing business which survives in residual culture. In Christmas we retreat to the gift economy, in which we balance accounts. Santa is the King of old, and we are his serfdom. We keep Santa around because when we requantized society after overthrowing the King, we could not quite cover all the King's liabilities. So our new division of labor carries with it a small imbalance, an inability to cover some portions of the King's liabilities, which grows over the year. So we have a planned deflation, a return to the simpler production once a year, a time in which the old rules apply and we can settle this residual account of the King.
It is our children, because when we overthrew the King, we partially abandoned the children with our new duties. So we bring back the kindly King for the child in us.
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