Christmas Notes: “I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus”

From the book “Note di Natale” by Davide Pezzi (with a preface by Arturo Stàlteri) published by VoloLibero we are currently publishing some of the 95 songs covered by the author in the 300 pages of the volume; we tried to choose the least “predictable”.

A Christmas song that for once was written by an Englishman, and which has troubled several generations of listeners. We are at the beginning of the fifties. Tommie Connor, a songwriter from Bloomsbury, a neighborhood in London’s West End, receives a strange commission: to write a song to promote the annual Christmas card of the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in New York. For about twenty years Connor has been an appreciated author of successful songs – among others his
English lyrics to “Lili Marlene” in 1944 – and he is indeed no stranger to Christmas songs, having already written “The Little Boy that

Santa Claus Forgot” in 1937, and “I’m Sending a Letter to Santa” in 1939. Connor decides to follow a different path than the usual Christmas songs, and in the lyrics he describes a scene in which a child comes down the stairs from his room from bed on the eve
Christmas and sees his mother kissing Santa Claus under the mistletoe. The song ends with the child wondering how
his father will react when he feels the kiss, unaware of the truth, namely that Santa Claus is actually the father in the red costume.

Once completed, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” was recorded in July 1952 by a very young red-haired boy of just thirteen, Jimmy Boyd, who liked the song, but said he didn’t think anyone would buy it. the disk. After all, the song was created for advertising purposes. Instead, in December 1952 the album reached first position in the “Billboard” charts, an exploit that he would repeat the following year. The Saks greeting card will feature the song’s lyrics accompanied by a Perry Barlow cartoon showing a young woman kissing Santa Claus next to a decorated tree, with bags of presents strewn on the floor.

What neither Connor, nor the client, Saks Fifth Avenue, nor even the young Boyd can imagine is that the song and cartoon will arouse bitter controversy.

Some church groups object to a text that suggests a woman has an adulterous relationship under the eyes of her son. Even Boston radio stations, influenced by officials of the local Catholic Church, ban the song from their programming, although to be fair it must be specified that the Archdiocese of Boston has always maintained that there is no trace of such a ban in its archives , but we know: as we have often written, legends always have faster legs than reality. Whoever started the campaign against “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, Columbia Records intervenes by explaining what evidently seemed obvious to the author: .
Santa Claus is none other than the child’s father, as happens at Christmas in the homes of thousands of families. Yet for decades the idea of ​​a mother’s sinful relationship (with Santa Claus!!) will disturb the sleep of thousands of Americans.

Several artists recorded their version of the song, including the Ronettes in 1963, and especially the Jackson 5 in 1970, with the lead vocals of a twelve-year-old Michael Jackson: the album entered the charts in both the United States and England.

We conclude by pointing out that kissing under the mistletoe – as in the song – remains a popular cliché in Christmas songs, even though the majority of Americans, when asked about it, admitted to having never seen the plant in real life. The origin of this custom is very ancient, and has roots in many cultures, from the ancient Greeks to Norse mythology, although the custom of hanging mistletoe in the home during Christmas celebrations and New Year’s Eve dates back to England of the late nineteenth century, and it was Charles Dickens who made a written reference to the kiss for the first time in 1836, in “The Pickwick Papers”, recounting a mass scene under the mistletoe: the girls «screamed and shouted they squirmed, they hid in corners, they made of
everything except leaving the room, until… all together they understood that it was useless to resist any further and they willingly let themselves be kissed.”

As you can see, when we talk about Christmas as we know it today we always return to the work of the great English writer.