The Christmas Grotesque

With the arrival of the holiday season, a new and strange feature has appeared on the British cultural landscape: Santa's Grotto. As was intimated in the previous images from the "Eskimo fiesta" in Croydon, these spaces are installed in shopping malls, in community centers and so on. But why, so Old Ken found himself asking, should Santa Claus inhabit a grotto? And what do grottoes have to do with Christmas?

Obviously, some fieldwork was necessary to get to the bottom of these mysteries. So, Old Ken set out for one of the West End's busiest shopping centers to see Santa's Grotto in action.



What becomes rapidly clear is that whatever exactly Santa's Grotto is, it certainly is difficult to see. Installed below ground level in the bowels of the department store, a truly circuitous path must be followed to arrive at the Grotto; one clerk in this particular store described the path to the Grotto as "maze-like." I think she is right—there is something labyrinthine about Santa's Grotto and, more generally, about the Christmas Grotesque.



Alas, here the fieldwork foundered. For, manned by several officious, clip-board carrying guards and the hulking baby carriages visible in the photograph above, our entry into the Grotto was completely blocked. All we were allowed was the small peek depicted in the previous image. But where exactly was Santa? And what happened in this grotto? Turning to our friend the internet, Old Ken found some answers from a surprising place. Apparently, in the Cambodian village of Arey Ksach, the grotto shown above was constructed to mark the Christmas season. According to http://www.parish-without-borders.net:

"Outside the church the villagers had erected a large grotto to represent the cave where Christ was born. It was almost as large as the church itself and seemed to be made of piled fish traps covered with plastic rice bags stitched together and spray painted a mottled green. After mass the whole congregation went outside to pray before the grotto and then to go in to kiss the statue of the baby Jesus."


As wonderfully weird as this mixture of cultural traditions is, a certain consistency can be observed. That is, according to one tradition, Jesus was actually born in a grotto below the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (reputedly constructed by the mother of Constantine, the emperor who converted the Roman empire to Christianity) and then moved to a manger nearby. By this tradition, below the marble floor in the image above—just visible through this hole perforated in the silver, fourteen-pointed star—lies the grotto in which Jesus was born. Accordingly, what has happened in this Cambodian village is that a grotto is created to house sculptural representations of the characters from the Nativity scene.

But, what are we to make of these British people who place into this grotto Santa Claus—a figure who certainly had nothing to do with the Nativity in the Bible? And what does any of this have to do with the grotesque? Let's take that second query first. As we know, grotesque is etymologically derived from grotto. The English term "grotesque" comes from the early modern French "crotesque," an adaptation of the Old French "crote" or Italian "grotta" (meaning cave)—a corrution of the Latin (and ultimately Greek) "crypta". The Renaissance in Italy was a time of extensive excavation as ground was cleared for rebuilding and ancient remains uncovered. Promptly thereafter, the word "grotesque" seems to have entered numerous modern languages. As the Oxford English Dictionary explains: "The etymological sense of grottesca would be ‘painting appropriate to grottos’. The special sense is commonly explained by the statement that grotte, ‘grottoes’, was the popular name in Rome for the chambers of ancient buildings which had been revealed by excavations, and which contained those mural paintings that were the typical examples of ‘grotesque.'"

But, "grotesque" has come to mean much more than this. It connotes the exaggerated, the absurd, bizarre, and ludicrous—that which is fantastically strange, and not a little spooky. As literary critic Geoffrey Harpham has claimed: "The groteque is a structure, the structure of estrangement. Suddenness and surprise [...] are essential elements in this estrangement; the familiar and commonplace must be suddenly subverted or undermined by the uncanny or alien."


Now, I would suggest that popular culture has produced many recent versions of this Christmas grotesque. From Billy Bob Thornton's filthy-bearded, hard-drinking, anal-sex-loving "Bad Santa" ...


... to the elongated, furry fingers of Jim Carrey's "Grinch." Yet, as the student of popular culture will readily recognize, these modern Christmas grotesqueries come from a long and storied past.


Social historian Ronald Hutton has admirably described how the "ritual year" of late medieval England began with the run-up to Christmas—a season of revels, when houses would be decked with the greenery and the work-a-day cycle of life interrupted by excessive behavior. Overseeing these festivities were a cast of playful miscreants—Lords of Misrule and Boy Bishops (children who acted as the leading religious authorities of the land). But, like the aesthetic of the grotesque itself, these figures of excess were transitory, serving to puncture holes into the fabric of everyday life, which would then be repaired once the decorations had been taken down and the Christmas season was over.

And so it is at the shopping malls. That is, the grotto structures in which British children visit Santa Clause are not permanent. They are temporarily erected for the holiday and typically taboo behavior—such as taking pictures in malls, as Avid Vermont Reader has keenly noted—is positively encouraged. Thus, Old Ken wonders if the Santa's Grotto and the Christmas grotesque really superimpose two fantasy structures upon one another. On the one hand, you have some random guy who, for a period of three weeks, is hired to dress up like a buffoon in brightly-colored clothing and to exaggerate (by means of prostheses) his girth and hairiness, thus signalling his appetitive, excessive nature. During this small segment of time, such a temporarily-transformed man is not only allowed but paid to do what otherwise would be completely taboo (at least in Britain): hang out all day in a mall wearing funny clothes as one stranger after another pays to place their child on his lap. In his grotto, Santa Claus is surely an exaggerated figure of this jolly, seasonal relaxation of taboo and, thus, centerpiece of the Christmas grotesque.

But, surely there is (at least) one other fantasy operating here. I think it works something like this: down into the depths of a structure we track, following a labyrthine pathway, seeking a hidden and closely-protected cave. From such a cave, we know, once came a divine being. Now, we need not draw upon psychoanalysis to observe that such a passage brings us to a kind of womb—a point only underscored by the strange, Medusa-like tendrils surrounding the Sancta Sanctorum in Bethlehem visible in the photograph above.

So, what are we doing if - - imagining ourselves here as the Grotto's ideal visitor, the parent with child - - we bring our young being to this womb's replica. What is the purpose? Is it a sacrifice? Is it some sort of initiation rite? Although Old Ken's first-hand fieldwork is admittedly limited here, neither of these possibilities seem terribly convincing.

A more compelling option is suggested by comparison with the standard "Santa encounter" in the US. There, children are simply brought to the mall to sit on Santa's knee in full, public view. By contrast, isn't the implication of placing the child in a re-creation of the birthplace of Christ that he/she could be the second-coming embodied? Perhaps, this helps us to understand the seemingly-incomprehensible presence of Santa Claus in this primal scene. In this reading, the frightening, apocalyptic possibilities of this grotesque revelation about one's own child are mitigated by the reassuring presence of Santa who effectively functions as a fetish. In Santa's Grotto, we meet and embrace both possibilities of the Christmas Grotesque.