I would like to preface this with a content warning, as this article does allude to suicide, given the topic of Camus's work. Take care of yourselves.

Let’s talk Christmas and Camus (something I thought I’d never in my life say, to be honest). 

Today, we continue our trek through philosophy and philosophical concepts as we celebrate ourselves as the meme once more. Our design features one ripped Santa pushing a giant present up a wintry mountain, with the festive words, “We must imagine Santa jolly” emblazoned in the foreground. Wait, what?

Meet Albert Camus, Existentialist

Let’s travel to 20th century Algeria, where a boy of French descent was born. A second generation of settlers who left France for Algeria in the 19th century, Albert Camus (1913 - 1916), a poor kid meant for a working class future, would become a Nobel Prize literary recipient and one of the biggest philosophical names of his generation.

Most of us know Camus for his novel, L’etranger (The Stranger/Outsider, depending on US or UK translation, 1942), where the protagonist Meursault, a French settler in Algeria, lives in a world of indifference and alienation, ends up killing an Arab man, and spends the rest of the book waiting his inevitable execution. The book is a hard, bleak read, full of the worst of human nature and the absurdity of it all.

But Camus, while slapping us with the stark absurdity of L’etranger, is not limited to it. Until his premature death from a car accident, Camus wrote a philosophical work, a novel, and a play for each of his thematic “cycles.” For L’etranger, the theme of this cycle was the mythological Greek figure, Sisyphus. The philosophical essay attached is called The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and boy is it a banger.

Sisyphus: Doomed to Eternal Fitness

Greek mythology is something else. In these stories, people are given such neat little punishments for whatever crimes against the gods they commit. And these gods are very vindictive. You get Arachne, who gets turned into a spider for daring to think she could weave better than Minerva. You’ve got poor Prometheus, who gets chained to a boulder while an eagle continually eats his liver (that regrows to be eaten again) because he gave fire to humans. And then, you’ve got ya boy Sisyphus.

Sisyphus is a king who just wanted a nice spring for his people. I mean, you gotta love a good water source. So, he hits up a river god, who tells him, “I gotchu!” if he can let the river god know where one of his daughters ran off to. Unfortunately, Zeus totally abducted her because he’s a creepazoid, and this complicates matters.

The middleman here, Sisyphus throws up his hands, but faces the king of the gods nonetheless. He tries to be wily, avoids his impending demise a few times through subterfuge, cunning, and sheer strength. But when you die, you die. And Zeus does not forget. 

So, when Sisyphus snuffs it, he ends up in the underworld, like everyone else. Except, he pisses them off down there, and obviously Zeus is mega ragey, so he’s charged with a task. He gets a nice giant boulder. Which he then gets to lift. And roll up a large, large hill. Which will then inevitably roll down juuuuuuust as he gets to the top. And he will have to chase after it and repeat the process. Forever. Ad infinitum. They see him rolling, they hating.

It’s not a pretty punishment, hubris, that is, the human pretension of being better than the gods. Unfortunately, when you make the godsfather mad, it’s what you get. 

What Are We Imagining and Why?: Here Comes Camus

In his philosophical companion essay to L’etranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus addresses one key question that he says is central to philosophy and to human existence: the question of suicide. Why, he asks, should someone take their own life? He spends time addressing reasons why, including philosophical reasons as to doing violence to oneself, basically saying, “I see this life before me and I want to unsubscribe.”

It’s some very, very hard stuff to read, but Camus contends that this ontological (“study of being”) question is central to all the others. Why care about truth or reason or logic or any of it, really, if there is no reason to live? And this essay culminates to the myth of our rockstar.

Life, Camus contends, is absurd in nature. Human existence, human experience, all of it, is absurd. In other words, there is no meaning to it. Whether you do one thing or another, it’s meaningless. You get different results, sure. But in the end, there is no overarching meaning to any of it. None. And you can do two things with this: you can choose to despair over your outcome, or you can accept the absurdity and roll with it. (Pun totally intended.)

Because, while the knowledge of the absurdity can become tragic, in the sense that our awareness of it can cause an internal, existential dread or pain, it does not necessarily follow that this must be the mandatory consequence of such knowledge. So, Camus suggests that Sisyphus, when the rock rolls down, after he’s ascended the hill, may pause and consider, in that brief pause, that, though he is doomed to go back and forth doing this over and over, he was the one who got himself to this place. It was his actions.

And just like many other existentialists, Camus emphasizes the point of actions. Since there is no overarching meaning or god, “the point of living is to live.” Don’t stay stuck in that moment of despair, but rather keep living, keep being the actor in your own life. And so it is this hope that Camus has for Sisyphus, rolling his rock toward a zenith for it to crash down into a valley. Imagining him happy can help us imagine ourselves happy, in the face of our own absurd burdens.

But Santa? Why, why, WHY?!

Let’s wrap this up like a present together. I’ll get the paper. 

If you think about the modern character of Santa, he is somehow supposed to make deliveries for every kid around the world over one night. There are those  who have calculated what that would take outside of some time machine, and it's insane. According to the lore, of course, he then maybe takes a day’s break after, puts up his feet, orders some pizza, then gets back to directing the elves to make next year’s gifts. And then he’s got to return to the task of being the arbiter of kid morality.

In our shirt, he hefts his sack of presents up the mountain, clad in a Greek-style garment (which kind of makes sense, in a way, because the saint he’s based off, Nicholas of Myra, was from Greece. It’s a grueling task, to be sure. As if having a sleigh full of eight (or nine, if you like marketing) wasn’t harsh enough in that kind of weather! 

And having to do Christmas for every kid every year until forever has got to be rough business. But we must imagine him jolly, because otherwise we’re left with some cranky old man who throws candy canes into kids’ faces, or worse yet, krampus. And we don’t want to do that, do we?

In fact, why do we tell children that Santa is real in the first place? 

I will admit, when I was a kid, I believed in Santa until the fifth grade, which is much later than the other kids. Growing up, we were quite poor, and sometimes things like food or heating were hard to come by, in favor of other things like rent. My mom always made sure that my sister and I had an amazing Christmas, though, with what she could do. She arranged it like magic.

Being the proto-philosopher I was, I was slightly skeptical about Santa, and I wondered why he was the only one who got to eat, if he had eight (nine?) reindeer. What did they eat? And what if they were hungry? So I came up with an idea. I would give them salad! 

My mom helped my sister and I each year put down bowls of salad for the reindeer in addition to the cookies and milk for Santa. I went to sleep the first year, pretty satisfied with myself. I was kind to those tired reindeer!

On Christmas morning, not only were the cookies eaten, but there were dirty tracks all in the kitchen! They had all eaten their salad, and we got presents! Santa and his reindeer came and ate what we gave them! I was thrilled! And because of this empirical evidence, I believed in Santa for a lot longer than I ever would have otherwise.

Santa, like some things, can be a useful myth, a useful imagining. It can be nice to give children something to look forward to each December, even if they don’t have very much in the way of material possessions. And of course, so many of us grow out of these myths, and many more besides. But it can be necessary sometimes to hold onto our own truths, even if, as Camus contends, truth isn’t really a thing.

Therefore, we must imagine Santa jolly, and keep some joy in our work-worn hearts, even if only during December. And that’s the bow on the present.