Italo Calvino’s Story: ‘Santa’s Children’

“Merry Old Santa Claus,” 1863, by Thomas Nast. Santa giving gifts takes a new meaning in Calvo's short story. Public Domain

As soon as December comes around, the Christmas season bends everyone’s thoughts towards the end of the month and sparks a month-long preparation for the holiday festivities. But what ought to be a period of excitement and anticipation often seems a crescendo of panic and stress.

As one of my friends just observed, there are so many presents to be bought, so many people whom one can’t forget in the gift-giving, and so little time to accomplish everything. It’s stressful trying to find nice things that don’t cost too much, she told me, but then if she doesn’t spend that much money on someone, she feels guilty and goes out to buy more. Then she feels even more stressed over the strain on her bank account.

Hapless Marcovaldo

While hardly improving with time, the Christmas consumerism conflict isn’t a new phenomenon. Italian author Italo Calvino (1923–1985) wrote about the topic in “Marcovaldo: Or Seasons in the City” (“Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città”) in 1963. This collection of 20 stories chronicles episodes in the life of Marcovaldo, the hapless protagonist who works in the city and struggles to provide for his family while longing for the beauty of nature and the peace of rural life.

The stories depict the clash between industrial Turin, Italy of the 1950s and 1960s and the natural world. Marcovaldo’s drab existence against the backdrop of the cityscape sets the stage for comical errors and absurdities within sorrowful circumstances.

In “Santa’s Children” (“I figli di Babbo Natale”), the approaching Christmas season signals the time when companies concern themselves with spreading joy and cheer in the hearts of men. This is, of course, all for the sake of maximizing profits. Firms begin distributing presents to other firms and individuals in a competition “to see who can present the most conspicuous and original gift in the most attractive way.”

Santa Dash in Liverpool, UK, 2009. Ben Kidlington/CC BY 2.0

To this end, the Public Relations Office at Sbav and Co., where Marcovaldo works, decides that they want someone to dress up as Santa to deliver the presents. Marcovaldo is chosen for the job. Before long, every department has the same idea of having Santa deliver their presents, and countless Santas are dispatched throughout the city to make the rounds.

Marcovaldo decides to stop by his house and visit his children first, excited with the prospect of surprising them with a visit from Santa. However, he’s disappointed to find that not only do they recognize him immediately, but they’ve already received visits from half a dozen other Santas from other companies. The children’s interest is drawn from the Santa visits to something they read at school: They insist that they have to find a poor child and give him presents.

His Family

Marcovaldo notes the irony of this situation and refrains from telling his kids that they themselves are poor children. He’s further dismayed by the irony that he has to leave and can’t give his children presents yet, because in order to do so he must work overtime and deliver presents to other people. Despite being surrounded by excess and abundance, there’s scarcity in his own home, where Marcovaldo is desperate to give anything at all.

His son Michelino agrees to go with him to deliver presents on the chance that perhaps he’ll find a poor child. As Marcovaldo makes his deliveries, he notes that everyone else, like his own children, lack the wonder and joyful gratitude that would be expected from someone receiving such a visit. Rather than continually receiving, they have been robbed of gratitude.

“Christmas pictures” by Raphael Kirchner. Public Domain

At last, Marcovaldo and Michelino arrive at a luxurious home lavishly decorated for Christmas, and within they find a morose young boy surrounded by presents. Marcovaldo adds the 312th present to a hoard of toys, and the boy doesn’t even bother to look up. His unhappiness leads Michelino to ask his father if the boy is poor, to which Marcovaldo replies that the boy is the son of the president of the Society for the Implementation of Christmas Consumption.

Michelino runs off without explanation, and upon arriving home, Marcovaldo learns that his son had gone back to gather his siblings and go deliver presents to the “poor child.”

Poor Little Rich Child

Michelino reports that their three presents delight the young boy: He uses his new hammer to destroy his other toys, a slingshot to shoot ornaments off the tree, and a box of matches to set fire to the house. Marcovaldo resigns himself to a certain fate of being promptly fired.

Instead, the next day Marcovaldo is approached by the three respective directors of Public Relations, Advertising, and Sales like the industrial version of the Three Magi. They inform Marcovaldo that they have to switch out the presents being delivered.  The president of the Society for the Implementation of Christmas Consumption has had the sudden inspiration of marketing the “destructive gift.”

Said inspiration, they report, came from an incident the previous day when the president’s son received several modern (perhaps Japanese) gifts and used them to destroy the house, enjoying himself for the first time in a great while. One of the directors notes that the important thing about the destructive gift is that it will “speed up the pace of consumption and give the market a boost … All in minimum time and within a child’s capacities.”

The vague echo of the Three Wise Men in the three gifts (to a spiritually poor child) and the visit from the three directors points to the spiritual vacuity of modern society. Marcovaldo adjusted poorly in his transition from rural life to city life. He confronted, as Italian art publisher and magazine editor Franco Ricci (1937–2020) observed, “the transcendent question of what it is to live in an increasingly complex society and the impossibility of establishing a meaningful rapport within its circumscribed labyrinthine existence.”

“The Adoration of the Magi,” 1609, by Peter Paul Rubens. Public Domain

Production Versus Products

As we see in the story, Christmas, which ought to be abundantly meaningful, is instead sapped of all meaning. Society spirals into a frenzy of attempting to manufacture ever greater contentment until at last it descends into a level where destruction is a gift because it enables them to increase production. Production itself becomes the good rather than the products, and human beings become means of production rather than recipients of gifts.

Christmas decorations and products at the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris, France. The Christmas season is the busiest trading period for retailers. Benh LIEU SONG/CC BY-SA 3.0

As Ricci observes, Marcovaldo “must breach the gap that capitalism has opened between society and its means of production and attempt a reintegration (if possible) of both man and nature in a new reality.”

In our age, we have a similar task before us in preserving the wonder that Marcovaldo saw drained from the eyes of those who endlessly received but were never given anything of true substance. The danger lies in following the empty rituals of the season without imbuing them with any deeper meaning, adopting the costumes of festivity without appropriately adorning our hearts.

Vapid though the modern interpretation of Christmas may seem, the culture isn’t entirely destructive. Rather, it fails to get to the heart of the matter. Our pastor starts his Christmas homily the same way every year, reminding us what Christmas is all about. It’s more than getting presents. We have to learn to receive the gift which the season offers to us—that is opening our heart to the deeper meaning of the Christmas season.

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