Merry Christmas!

Suspend Time to Dream

Lights for Everyone!

By Marie Ange Barbancourt

Editor-in-Chief and Director of Development, Diamont History Group

Santa Claus has always stirred our imaginations and passions. In many places today, people no longer speak of “Christmas” but simply of “the holiday season.” Yet I still love the warmth of that original greeting — Merry Christmas!

While it is true that Christmas is tied to the birth of Christ, it also carries a kind of magic that transcends religion — something timeless and mythical that connects us to our own story and shared humanity. Christmas is a celebration of inclusion and generosity, a chance to slow down, to breathe in and out, and fill our minds with light. It is the festival of lights, colors, truth, and compassion.

Santa Claus has always fascinated us, and this year we wanted to offer you something special: The Christmas Madness, a delightful column by our contributor Imanos Santos, who takes you on a captivating journey through the myth surrounding this beloved figure.

On behalf of our entire editorial team, I wish you all a Merry Christmas filled with happiness and health.

Par Rémy Bonnin

Publishing Director

Santa Claus just texted me. He confirmed that you have all been good enough this year to deserve a message filled with sparkle and joy. So may your stockings overflow with chocolate, your dinners never run out of melted cheese, and your Wi‑Fi stay strong all through your Christmas movies.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas full of smiles, big laughs, and magical moments (even if it is just in front of a good hot chocolate!). Sending you all the good cheer in the world.

By Serge Leterrier

Founder of Diamont History Group

Creator of the magazines 

At this time of year, when time seems to slow down, we wish our readers a Christmas shaped by meaningful silence, chosen reading, and renewed perspectives.May these days offer the space needed for reflection, curiosity, and the pleasure of discovering things differently.Merry Christmas to everyone for whom culture remains a place of shared meaning and connection.

SANTA CLAUS

Chronicle of a Man Sentenced to Eternal Resurrection

By Imanos Santos

“Or how a pot-bellied old man in scarlet red was condemned to the stake by princes of the Church—only to rise again as the hero of French chimneys.”

Martyr. Impostor. Immortal.Three words to describe a figure we all think we know—when his true story defies belief. Martyr, because he was hanged and then burned alive before hundreds of children on the forecourt of a French cathedral, sacrificed by those who preach love and forgiveness. Impostor, because the Catholic Church accused him of stealing Christ’s place in children’s hearts—turning a sacred feast into a mercantile carnival, diverting Christmas from its original meaning. Immortal, finally, because the more they tried to erase him, the more brilliantly he returned, proving one ruthless truth: you don’t kill childhood dreams with a bonfire—you turn them into indestructible legends.

This paradoxical trinity defines the very essence of modern Santa Claus: a global symbol born from the ashes of a heresy trial that could have stepped straight out of the Middle Ages. Because the story I’m about to tell you is not the softened one served to children on December 24. It is the story of a ferocious ideological clash, a cultural war that set France against itself—sacred against profane, tradition against modernity. It is the story of a chubby little man who, in the space of forty-eight hours, went from death sentence to messianic figure.

There are dates that shape History with a capital H: July 14, 1789; June 6, 1944; September 11, 2001. And then there is December 23, 1951, in Dijon, when Santa Claus was hanged and burned alive on the forecourt of Saint-Bénigne Cathedral, before 250 stunned children. A three-meter effigy turned into a living torch—offered as a holocaust to the god of Christianity by a scandalized clergy. That day, France witnessed one of the most absurd heresy trials of the twentieth century. In his spectacular immolation, Santa Claus—without knowing it—performed his first act as a martyr.

The Saint-Bénigne Railings Affair

Birth of a Martyr

The story begins in the freezing streets of a Burgundy city, where Abbé Jacques Nourissat, 34—later nicknamed the “priest of the tramps”—watches the advertising parades of the department stores with contained fury. Men dressed as Santa Claus, red and white, jovial puppets of American commerce. For this young priest working in Dijon’s poorest parish—where women sell themselves to survive and men come out of prison—this spectacle is an insult. Santa Claus, in his original spirit, embodies free love and the gift. But this one, the one used to sell merchandise, is an imposture. An usurper profaning the sacred.

With the approval of his hierarchy, he organizes the unthinkable. On December 23 at 3 p.m., in broad daylight, before hundreds of children from the parish youth group, the giant effigy is hanged from the cathedral railings—then handed over to the flames. The statement that follows leaves no doubt as to intent:

“Santa Claus has been sacrificed as a holocaust. In truth, a lie cannot awaken religious feeling in the child.”

The vocabulary is not accidental. Holocaust. Usurper. Heretic. Santa Claus is not merely criticized—he is tried and executed, the way witches were burned in the Middle Ages.

The French episcopate supports the symbolic action without ambiguity. In France-Soir on December 24, the Church’s spokesperson denounces an infiltrated enemy:

“Santa Claus and the Christmas tree have slipped into public schools even though they are the remnant of pagan ceremonies with nothing Christian about them, while—under the banner of excessive secularism—the Nativity scene is scrupulously banned.”

The message is clear: Christmas belongs to Christ—not to a pot-bellied old man handing out gifts. The accusation of usurpation is officially made.

Canon Kir’s Counterattack

First Resurrection of the Immortal

But the affair takes an unexpected turn. Because the mayor of Dijon is none other than Canon Félix Kir—a priest and member of parliament known for his social Catholicism, and incidentally for lending his name to the famous blackcurrant-and-white-wine aperitif. Favoring a less rigid relationship to faith, Kir immediately distances himself from the local clergy and stages a spectacular response.

The very next day—December 24, in the middle of Christmas Eve—a firefighter climbs onto the roof of City Hall dressed as Saint Nicholas. Under floodlights, before an astonished crowd, Santa Claus is resurrected. The local press, sly and amused, headlines:

“Santa Claus has won the second round! Victim of the bonfire on Sunday, he confounded his detractors on Monday by appearing at nightfall on the rooftops of City Hall. He was fresh, and showed no sign whatsoever of suffering from the Inquisition-like treatment inflicted on him the day before by a handful of hotheads.”

This theatrical resurrection becomes tradition. Since 1951, every December 24, a Santa Claus descends by rope from Dijon’s Philippe-le-Bon Tower before hundreds of children—this time delighted. Santa’s failed execution turns into an annual celebration of his victory. The martyr becomes immortal. His suffering, ritualized year after year, seals his invincibility.

When America Divides France

The Trial of the “Impostor”

The affair makes national and international headlines. The New York Times runs a dispatch under the evocative title: “A French City Shaken by Conflict Over Santa Claus.” The Christian-democratic weekly Carrefour organizes a debate on December 26, pitting the devout writer Gilbert Cesbron—for whom “the Nativity comes before the chimney”—against René Barjavel, an outspoken anticlerical who defends “the old bearded magician of childhood wonder.” François Mauriac and Jean Cocteau join in. France’s intellectual world erupts over a man in a red suit.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, fascinated, turns it into an object of study in a masterful essay published in 1952 in Les Temps modernes: “The Tortured Santa Claus.” He observes how American customs took root in France with disconcerting ease:

“All these practices that seemed childish and bizarre to the Frenchman visiting the United States have acclimatized themselves in France with an ease and generality that offer a lesson worth pondering for the historian of civilizations.”

And he adds, ironically:

“In trying to put an end to Santa Claus, the Dijon ecclesiastics did nothing but restore a ritual figure, and—under the pretext of destroying it—proved its endurance themselves.”

The paradox is total. By burning Santa Claus like a heretic, the Church inadvertently grants him mythic status. He becomes a martyr—victim of an institution too solemn to withstand childhood magic. The Dijon clergy, by repeating the gestures of the Inquisition, only anchors more deeply in the collective imagination the idea that Santa Claus is immortal. The accused “usurper” becomes, against his will, a Christ-like figure—sacrificed to save our cherubs’ wonder.

The Invention of a Legend

Genealogy of the Immortal

But who is this Santa Claus everyone is debating? Contrary to a stubborn urban myth, Coca-Cola did not invent him. The bearded old man who brings gifts existed long before 1931, the year Swedish illustrator Haddon Sundblom painted him for the soda brand. As early as 1881, cartoonist Thomas Nast was already depicting him in red and white in Harper’s Weekly. And further back still stands Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century Archbishop of Myra, renowned for generosity toward children and the poor.

When the Dutch settled in America, their Sinterklaas became Santa Claus. In 1821, poet Clement Clarke Moore wrote “The Night Before Christmas,” featuring a jovial character pulled by reindeer. In 1939, Rudolph, the ninth reindeer with the glowing red nose, was added to light the way.

So what did Coca-Cola do? It fixed the image. For three decades, from 1931 to 1964, Sundblom painted ads showing a warm Santa enjoying an ice-cold bottle during his rounds. He first used his friend Lou Prentiss, a retired salesman, as a model; after Prentiss died, he painted himself from a mirror. The public scrutinized these images obsessively. One year Sundblom forgot Santa’s wedding ring: a flood of worried letters asked what had become of Mrs. Claus. Another time the belt was reversed—probably because of the mirror—sparked yet another uproar.

Coca-Cola did not create Santa Claus. But it turned him into a planetary icon, standardizing his image worldwide. In 2013, the CEO of Brand Finance valued the “Santa Claus brand” at $1.6 trillion, far surpassing Apple. A mythological character turned marketing product—exactly what Abbé Nourissat feared in 1951. And yet commercializing him only strengthened his immortality. The more he is commodified, the more he roots himself in consciousness. The more he is criticized, the more indispensable he becomes.

The Immortal in Red

Triumph of the Bearded Phoenix

Today, Santa Claus reigns over the night of December 24. He survived the Dijon bonfire, the Church’s reproaches, the accusations of mercantilism. He has become that universal figure even non-believers celebrate—the modern myth that crosses borders and cultures with disarming ease.

The story of Santa Claus is a collective construction: the fruit of a millennial syncretism between Saint Nicholas, Scandinavian traditions, American literature, and twentieth-century marketing. It is also the story of a resounding defeat for those who tried to erase him. Because you cannot burn childhood dreams with impunity. You cannot hang symbols without making them eternal.

Next December 24—as every year since 1951—a Santa Claus will rappel down from Dijon’s Philippe-le-Bon Tower. Children will look up, eyes wide with wonder. And somewhere, in the beyond of immortal characters, the bearded old man will smile at the thought of the priest who believed he could annihilate him by turning him into a torch.

For Santa Claus understood what the Church forgot: in the modern world, whoever survives the stake becomes legend. Martyrs become saints. Usurpers become kings. And legends—legends never die.

Santa Claus is all of it at once: martyr of childhood, usurper of the sacred, and triumphant immortal. Like a phoenix rising from its ashes, he turned his public execution into the foundation of his eternity.