Christmas 1951 in Dijon received an unusually gloomy prelude when, around three o’clock in the afternoon, a large group of children — several hundred according to French media at the time — hung an effigy of Santa Claus on the gates of the Gothic Cathedral of Sainte-Bénigne and set it on fire. In a press photo, the cloaked and long-bearded Santa figure is seen dangling helplessly and surrounded by children in wool coats, while a white blaze envelops him as the flames illuminate the excited children’s faces.

This ritual burning of Santa Claus was not due to dissatisfaction with the previous year’s gifts but came after prolonged protests among the city’s Christians. The Christians believed that Santa was a usurper and heretic who represented a growing paganism that threatened to overshadow the true message of Christmas: the birth of Jesus Christ. The episode was a dramatic instance of a near-universal conflict between the commodified world created by capitalist markets and the need of many people to preserve a sphere of life free from economic logic.

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who wrote about the fiasco shortly after it took place, saw it as a conflict between an older understanding of the world in crisis and the rise of a new, growing cult, with all the tensions that this might naturally bring. Ironically, Lévi-Strauss observed, the Christians of Dijon achieved exactly the opposite of their intentions. Rather than destroying the pagan challenger, they confirmed his mystical status by treating him as worthy of ritual sacrifice.

Twenty-four years later, anti-Santa activism took yet another form. Danish radicals from the left-wing theater group Solvognen, recognizing that a head-on confrontation with St Nick was unlikely to succeed, opted instead to remake the image of the hero of Christmas. In 1975, a hundred activists from the group descended on a number of fashionable malls in Copenhagen dressed as Santas; disguised, they grabbed various goods from the stores and gave them to the bewildered customers as gifts, sabotaging the logic of the market. Unsurprisingly, like the Christians in Dijon, Solvognen lost its battle against commercial society: try as they might, Santa could be neither killed nor changed.

More than seventy years since the burning in Dijon, Santa Claus stands imperious, his dominance near total. He is everywhere in December. In commercials, films and music, and every self-respecting mall across the Western world, which has its own Santa Claus to ask the children what gifts they would like for Christmas. What the Christians in Dijon quite rightly sensed was that they were up against a dangerous adversary who had only grown stronger and stronger in a postwar consumer society that relegated Jesus down the ladder of divine hierarchy. Santa Claus does not need the church; the church needs Santa. If Santa Claus on his sleigh did not sprinkle a little magic over the holiday, there would probably be even fewer people attending services.

It has become a Christmas tradition for religious leaders to question Santa’s legitimacy. It rarely ends well. A Catholic bishop in Italy learned this the hard way last December when he told a gathering of children in Sicily that Santa did not exist. The bishop attempted to explain to the children the difference between the Catholic Saint Nicholas, who gives to the poor and needy, and the Christmas of the market with Santa and gift mania, which are only intended to encourage consumption.

The bishop’s message was not well received by the congregation; angered parents forced the diocese to issue an apology to the angered parents. The fact is that most people can easily imagine a Christmas without Jesus — but not without Santa Claus. Jesus has almost become a troublesome supporting character in that story.

But what is the secret of Santa Claus’s apparent invulnerability to attacks from the right as well as the left? Here the writing of Lévi-Strauss may again prove helpful. With all of the rigor of twentieth-century structuralist anthropology, he attempted to place Santa Claus in a religious typology and concluded that he belongs to the family of gods — as characterized by his single and limited function and his periodic return.

Lévi-Strauss, in his characteristic way, goes through a series of historical and ethnographical parallels with which Christmas and Santa Claus share traits — from the Roman feasts in December in honor of the god Saturn, to the ancestral cult of Native Americans, to Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra. His conclusion is that modern Santa Claus is an amalgam of all of these disparate religious motifs.

Unlike the activists from Solvognen, Claude Lévi-Strauss does not attach much importance to Santa’s seamless integration within the capitalist market economy. But perhaps Santa’s greatest magic trick is that he conceals the reality of global industrial production. Anonymous, mass-produced goods made under hideous conditions are transformed into homemade gifts made by elves in a cozy workshop on the North Pole.

Santa received his current guise as early as the 1800s as a mascot for various American products and businesses. One of the most well-known and influential campaigns is American advertising illustrator Haddon “Sunny” Sundblom’s Coca-Cola commercial from 1931, where Santa Claus’s glittering, pop-cultural expression was firmly established. An immortal patriarch with white hair and beard, dressed like a king. That image has survived to our time and is still used by Coca-Cola. However, the interesting thing is not the commercial origin of Santa Claus but that this inherent phoniness is not a weakness. In fact, it is almost a strength.

Santa Claus is a copy of a copy, and he belongs to consumers who continue to write his story with the irony and lightness that characterize postmodern contemporary storytelling. Every year, there is a new book or Christmas movie that contributes to the universe, and, like other great American franchise stories, it proliferates in all directions. A kitschy and ironic god who does not have a written testament, church, or clergy, but educates children to be good little consumers, associating needs with commercial objects.

Out of the flames of Dijon emerged Santa Claus, the postmodern god of capitalism. The god who at once represents the total dominance of the market economy in the Western world and, at the same time, sends precisely the opposite message of love, the sanctity of family, and freely given generosity. It is these incomprehensible contradictions that, more than anything else, characterize Santa Claus.

Under global capitalism, Santa Claus hides the link between the collective joy of the holidays and the disgrace of industrial exploitation. Well-meaning motives are realized at the expense of the anonymous others who are forced to work under the threat of poverty and starvation.

In the end, however, as Lévi-Strauss wrote, one must still look on this deeply suspect and kitschy figure with a certain tenderness and try to understand the lengths parents go to afford to make Christmas special for their children, frantically protecting the myth of St Nick — even long after the children have stopped believing in it. Perhaps this is because, Lévi-Strauss continues, somewhere deep within us there is a profound longing for generosity without limits, for kindness without hidden motives, for a time, however brief it may be, when fear, envy, and bitterness are put to one side.