Santa is Satan, after all the clue is right there in the name.
But why?
What reason would the font of all evil and the generally unpleasant one have to pretend to be a jolly fat man and give away presents to make people happy for one day each year?
Answers will be judged based on plausibility. Would a very powerful evil being of corruption and darkness actually think that's a good plan?
If he did not provide happiness at the darkest time of the year, nobody would want to bother living. A lot of people look forward all year to Christmas, even though it is generally the coldest and darkest time of the year (especially when it doesn't snow).
If people didn't have Christmas, they wouldn't have very much to look forward to. This would mean that a lot of people just coast through life. They wouldn't feel very happy, but they wouldn't feel very miserable either.
Satan hates this. He wants to see people at their worst.
This is why, for a single day every year, he provides us with hope. We get one day every year to look forward to in order to receive gifts, have time off work, and generally relax and have fun. Then the other 364 it's back to the regular grind.
If humans did not have anything to look forward to, nothing to hold on for, then we could never feel the depression of January when we realize it's still cold and dark, but now we have to wait another year for presents and time off.
If we didn't have Christmas to look forward to, we could never feel the sinking feeling of disappointment when we receive terrible gifts that we have looked forward to receiving for months. We would never have the abject terror of thinking loved ones will realize we hate their gift, so we rush to plaster fake smiles onto our faces.
He gives hope, for the sole purpose of then getting to rip it away.
The American Psychological Association even released a memo on holiday stress; the top three negative emotions experienced were fatigue, stress, and irritability. 38% of people polled responded that the level of stress in their lives increased around the holidays; lack of money was the second leading holiday stressor.
People have even been physically injured or killed as a result of attempting to best fulfill Santa's dastardly holiday. Additionally, it robs the focus of the holiday from spirituality and shifts it towards the receiving of material goods. It can also increase feelings of isolation and loneliness for those who are forced to work on the holiday to perform services for consumers or to earn wages to pay for gifts, when they could otherwise be spending quality time with loved ones.
Therefore, it is inevitable that we must conclude... the real war on Christmas is being led by Santa.
Stealing attention from Jesus
While Jesus represents the religious meaning of Christmas, Satan Clause represents the secular aspects. By shifting peoples attention away from seeing Jesus as the symbol of Christmas and to worship a secular symbol instead, he turns people away from faith.
Making people more materialistic
Satan Clause doesn't reward people for good behavior with absolution for their sins and an eternity in heaven. He rewards people with material goods. But Jesus told us, craving materialistic wealth is wrong (Matthew 6:19-21). People should be nice for niceness itself, not just for their own benefit.
When Satan Claus gifts to the poor, others don't need to
Charity is one of the seven virtues of Christianity. According to the bible, giving to those in need is important to receive salvation. But when Satan Clause gives presents to the poor, rich people will no longer feel the necessity to do the same. Rich people are already a main source of souls for Satan (Marc 10:23-25). But by discouraging rich people further to be charitable, it becomes even more likely that their souls will become Satan's after judgment day.
The seven deadly sins are greed, envy, gluttony, sloth, pride, wrath, and lust.
The entire point of Christmas is to encourage greed, envy, and gluttony. The tradition of giving gifts encourages the first two, and feasting encourages the third. Santa just oversees it all, and gives the gifts that will best fan the flames of these sins.
Greed: People asking for, hoping for, wishing for big expensive gifts. Retailers going to ever more excessive lengths to boost sales. Commercials encouraging even little children to beg for impossible toys. Greed is everywhere this holiday season.
Envy: Some people can afford more than others. The nice things on TV or on the shelves that only a few can afford encourage huge amounts of envy. It's a fact of life, but in the Christmas season, it gets rubbed in the face of the have-nots.
Gluttony: Who hasn't gone to a Christmas party and come home drunk, stuffed, or both? It happens to most of us several times over the Christmas season.
To a lesser degree, Christmas fuels sloth, pride, and lust.
Sloth: Christmas is a day when people do not go to work, and many take the day to do nothing. Sure, there are others hosting their family's Christmases, but I'm talking about the people who open gifts in the morning, then do nothing else for the rest of the day. Not to mention all those gluttons sleeping off their excess.
Pride: So much of Christmas is about excess: showing off with parties and lights, buying expensive gifts to prove you can. All this pride is not good for the soul.
Lust: Have you watched the commercials lately? They use sex to sell everything these days.
The season doesn't encourage wrath in particular, but Black Friday has filled some of the gap. You haven't seen wrath until you've seen a dad who missed out on the last must-have toy on the shelf to some over-aggressive grandmother.
Also, by constantly monitoring children to see who is 'naughty' or 'nice', and letting them know it, Santa is psychologically grooming the world to become a surveillance state. Why not let businesses and governments monitor us at all times? The wonderful Santa does it already.
In addition, Santa enters people's houses without their permission or even without their noticing, thus normalizing home invasions as a tolerable or even a desirable activity.
Clearly Santa is attempting to usher in (sweetened by the giving of gifts) a future dystopian corporate-government surveillance state. Nothing would give more joy to Satan, er, Santa.
Because (almost) everyone loses faith in Santa
Well, everyone knows Santa isn't really real, right? I mean, sure, when you're a kid you believe in him, but then, one day, you find out he's not really there, that it was just your parents all along. You, know, if Santa's not real, there's probably no such thing as magic, after all. There's just people and rocks and space, and nothing special or magical or spiritual out there.
And, you know, if there's nothing spiritual about the world, then we surely don't have souls, and God probably doesn't even exist. And, well, "if God does not exist, everything is permitted".
"Would you like some candy, little girl?"
Satan wants to encourage dependency and entitlement from a child's earliest moments of sentience. He can build on this through the elementary-school years, encouraging a demand for things things things, and now, dammit. He wants those kids to grow up thinking the world owes them, but he has to start with one fat guy in a red suit owing them. Just as candy from strangers is the first step to drugs and gangs, toys from strangers is the first step to teen years filled with petty crime to support one's online-gaming habits (the Warcraft mods on eBay are so attractive, and really not that expensive all things considered!).
How does this serve his purposes, you might ask? When he gets lucky he'll create the next wave of teenage thugs and criminals, but the real payoff is with the ones who stick with school, go to college, and end up on Wall Street. Satan is hoping to draw everybody with a tendency toward greed, materialism, and the desire to play with other people's life savings to one place, where he can hang out with people who understand their priorities in life.
Sure, he figures he'll get them later in another place, but you can't beat the night life in New York City and Satan gets lonely down in the firepits.
1) Santa doesn't pretend to be good, Satan pretends to be bad. Due to how the universe works, God needed an "evil" counterforce to his "goodness", so he selected his most trusted angel, Lucifer Santa di Angelo, to become Satan. As part of the deal, Santa may show goodness one day each year.
2) Santa is so good, and so powerful an entity that for 364 days each year he is sealed away by a pantheon of other gods who do not wish to cede control over humanity. They tried to frame him for all the bad things "he" does, but unfortunately registered the wrong trademark when casting the sealing spell. (inspired by ESV:SI)
3) Satan is a bad boy, but even a bad boy can treat his woman to a nice dinner once in a while. He is the manipulative, abusive boyfriend of humanity, and we forgive him every year when he showers us with presents.
4) Satan uses a once-per-year chance to install surveillance devices in gifts. This started in 1933, when the then fledgling NSA approached him in his holiday home at the north pole (similar temperatures and all that). In return he would receive souls, which would be later covered up using CIA resources, including the "MANHATTAN PROJECT", "MKULTRA" and the "VIETNAM WAR". In recent years this operation has unfortunately not borne any fruits due to religious nature of the NSAs target audience.
Santa is not Satan, but an equivalent opposite of Jesus (with some differences regarding origin). Santa is to Jesus what Satan is to God. However, this does not make him less demonic, evil, or corrupted. Let's explain this:
Santa and Jesus had a fight since the 300 A.D. when Nicola (Say, Nicolas) from Bari had a strong desire for increasing power. Indeed, he -helped by the Devil- gave even more power to the uprising Church over whole Rome to manipulate what Jesus told us about sins and virtues.
The first concept to be twisted was Charity, both in the spiritual and / or material aspects. Several texts were told by him to be destroyed, including texts from Origenes telling about reincarnation, which would be lately (553 D.C.) replaced by latin analogues of greek's hell. People had no motivation to praise God but the ultimate reward: a place of eternal joy, instead of a place of eternal fire.
Christianity, which was designed to fit in a context where other gods commanded the lives of the upper social classes, quickly turned on being a selfish, aggressive and stalking religion against others, since he reinforced the concepts on Deuteronomy 13:9.
People who testified enough -and lived to record it- called Nicolas as Satanica Clavis, since they feel their community was invaded by the sin, and since Peter has the key to the Heaven -under the new doctrines- Nicolas had the key to the hell (by telling people to behave like that). Since that people belonged to lower classes, they were a minority and had no access to records (writing books was quite expensive), so the name was... mangled over the time, and turned into Satan Clauis and finally Satan Claus.
Church itself was invaded and later declared Nicolas as saint (In spanish he is called San Nicolas de Bari since he was born in Bari, or San Nicolas de Mira since he died in Myra), the name was mangled once again to be Saint Clauis, and finally Santa Claus (today, some english texts refer him as Satan's Claws since it's a joke on his name when he was the main consciously servant of Satan in the Earth).
The red suit came as a requirement from the Devil itself, so since he was well-accepted and established figure in the christian pantheon, he did not need to use his white-golden clothes (or green clothes) anymore, and switched to the well-known demonic red we know. His transport (originally based on this God-proof chariots), however, was pulled by infernal goats (those usually used as focus icon on satanic rituals), but he switched to deers because:
By doing this, Santa Claus would gain immortality, while being forced (or say, under agreement) to do actual Satan's Commandments.
Satan's commandments were as follows:
Finally, houses and everywhere would be decorated with hellish-red for their furnitures.
It is told that Santa is the actual owner of Coca Cola, which continuously releases commercials telling about opening happiness, which showing the idea that happiness is caged in a bottle of brownish liquid, instead of the happiness offered by Jesus.
From the christian point of view, giving is more important and noble that receiving, and Christmas is that time of the year where this is more evident. If "Santan" fulfills everyone's wishes and gives everybody gifts, then people would stop to care about being generous to others (because there's already someone who takes care of that) and instead would just expect to receive things. This removes a crucial aspect of Christmas.
Also, as mentioned in another answer, this draws attention away from God and Jesus; but apart from that, it (ironically) draws attention away from the devil itself. It is stated that one of his greatest achievements is for people to stop believing in Satan so he can make people do evil stuff easier.
Did you ever notice that the children of rich families get more presents than those of the poor? That's great for instilling even more envy against them than there is anyway. Also, while it is claimed that good children get presents, but naughty children only get coal, the reality clearly looks different: Lots of naughty children get presents. Thus they are encouraged in their naughtiness, which clearly is a goal of Satan.
Then there's the whole materialistic aspect. You know, the bible says you cannot serve both God and Mammon. But Christmas presents are ultimately a celebration of Mammon (in the form of the stuff you can buy with money). So Satan turns a celebration of Jesus into a celebration of Mammon.
And finally, with carefully selected presents, he can also foster discord between the children, especially if there are several children in one family, and one gets more than the other (or gets something perceived as more by him/her). Therefore bringing presents can also be a great tool to turn a celebration of love into a source of conflict. Note that conflict between the children will inevitably cause stress also for the parents, and is likely to produce a negative feedback loop.
You see, bringing presents is the best way for Satan to bring evil into the families, and to pervert and thus devalue Christmas.
The presents are positive reinforcement to keep being loyal consumers: succumbing to greed, coveting their neighbor's stuff, and living in excess.
Being a true capitalist, Santa resides outside the countries he does most of his work in. He works the local population every day of the year with no semblance of a living wage or even merely gratitude. He's paid through the small traces of gold in the cookies (placed by the corporations he produces toys for) left out for him. It's all a grand-scale advertising campaign paid for by slave labor.
Rise up comrades! Down with the toymaker!
Greed is good
This world has totally bought into the idea that Independence is everything; that the only purpose of existence - the only moral good - is to fulfil your own desires. To do anything else reduces your level of self- actualization; it betrays your destiny and thwarts the evolutionary drive towards improving the human race. The God of this world embodies those values precisely.
In this world Santa's values are the exact opposite. He encourages people to give without expecting anything back, increasing someone else's happiness rather than your own. He represents rebellion against the values of the world - the anti- God or 'Satan'. No wonder he hides in the most remote part of the planet for 364 days a year.
Satan is a supremely powerful being. However, one must suspect that there are greater powers. In the Abrahamic religions we see themes of darkness conceding to light, righteousness triumphing over treachery. If Satan represents an all-mighty, unstoppable force of darkness he would have control over the universe. By his sheer power alone, he would be able to overcome God.
From this one might wonder if even Satan himself must obey a set of moral guidelines so as not to displease the higher powers. Why does Satan get to avoid Judgement Day? Satan consistently causes pain and suffering. Furthermore, he loves it, he relishes the opportunity. He must have a way to balance his morality.
How does he do so? The answer is in his name: Santa. By performing such a far-reaching act of kindness on one night he makes up for a full year of sinning. While some gifts may be materialistic, Satan is responsible for the magic of christmas. Families reunite, people fall in love. Satan loathes performing such a virtuous act, but he must do so or else fall to a greater authority.
Satan is not in fact evil, but a propetant of human enlightenment and freedom against a tyrannical god. He just wound up on the wrong side of "the winners write the history books".
It's in the good book:
And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.
2 Corinthians 11:14
Just for the sake of appearing good, Satan will have to do some good.
If Santa really did manage to deliver millions of presents in a single night all of a sudden, how are humans going to react?
The most likely reactions:
Jesus exists, and has given Santa powers for good.
There exist alien species on our very planet with highly advanced technology.
Somebody living on the planet possesses advanced technology, such as teleportation, or a quantum photocopy machine, etc.
Magic that defies current science does exist, and is being used either by some humans or some alien species.
There will be chaos, as world leaders and common people struggle to reach a consensus with their own rationality, let alone the rest of the country or the world.
Massive investment in investigating the presents will follow, and the source of every single present will be traced down. Businesses that supplied the presents will be questioned, transporters will be questioned. Different countries will want to conduct their own investigations that will come into conflict with each other.
Scientific methods will be discarded by millions, maybe billions of people. This is essentially a degradation of civilisation.
It takes only a bunch of lunatics to cause a riot, or even fire a nuclear weapon. Governments may fall, religious conflict will ensue.
"Santa" will now be viewed as a curse, not a saint. People will no longer feel safe in their homes. If a man can enter millions of homes in a single day, what else can he do?
One could also argue that if such a powerful man was indeed benevolent, he could use his powers for much greater things, such as combating poverty and sickness, as opposed to presents to rich kids, and a wave of confusion. This proves that "Santa" is manipulative and a potential threat to humanity.
Satan can then use his other powers to possess people and take advantage of the confusion to destroy the world.
Satan is the devil, he tries to make our lives painful and even worse when we die. If our world is only pain and evilness people will "adapt" to survive and support this and they won't suffer anymore (or at least they will suffer less) and Satan doesn't want that.
If he every year makes gifts to all the people in the world he increases the hopes of people and also brings them happiness to survive in this world. I think this is "good" to him because he can make their lives even more painful. Think about this: you are a poor person who lives in an abandoned building. One day this building is destroyed and you lose your "house". This person won't suffer much because he is already suffering, but if this person was rich and one day he lost everything he would suffer a lot. The "fall" would be bigger and Satan wants that. He brings hope and happiness to us to suffer more and have a bigger "fall" when we die and go to hell.
Also, he can play with the "coal" gifts: you were waiting all year long for your gift and on Christmas you get coal. This would be very disappointing.
Also, you can use Christmas to make people sad indirectly. I am not sure but Christmas is the day with the most suicides because people suffer when they see happy families and they are alone.
Satan uses Christmas to increase the sins of people and corrupt their souls.
On Christmas people are very:
[..] lust could also mean simply desire in general; thus, lust for money, power, and other things are sinful.
People want material things.
When Santa gives presents to poor people other people (like rich people) don't give presents because they already have one and charity is one of the seven virtues of Christianity. Satan is trying to eliminate one of the seven virtues of people.
Satan is evil. Sorry, I didn't read The Holy Bible so I don't know if this is true, but God is all mighty, right? So... Why didn't He destroy Satan? My idea is that Satan isn't so bad. Every year Satan regrets his sins making gifts to all the people in the world and bringing them hope and happiness. This way God can't "purify" or destroy Satan, because he regrets his sins every year.
Christmas is the birthday of Christ but Satan creates the "Santa" character to make Christmas about him and not about Christ. A lot of people don't know that Christmas is the birthday of Christ but they know about Santa.
Satan makes material gifts to people instead of a "spiritual gift" like absolution. People try to be good people in order to get a material present on Christmas and not the absolution of their soul. He makes people more materialistic.
Downsizing!
Satan wasn't always Santa, but due to celestial budget constraints, quite a few of the classic job titles have been combined. "Satan" and "The Boogey Man", who scare children into behaving, has been combined with "Santa" and "The Easter Bunny", who bribe children to the same effect. This new "Department of Child Control" which also covers the responsibilities of "Tooth Fairy" and "The Closet Monster", is now handled by a single part time celestial employee with no health-care, paid-vacations or retirement benefits.
Satan is the good guy
If you read the Bible, God does a lot of killing, raping and slavery not to mention the war and incest, he just happens to have a good PR team that plays dirty and blames everything on Satan despite being innocent and the only proof of the few things Satan is accused of is in God's own book.
Satan is just trying to show his love by gifting everyone, one day a year and he changed his name because of the lies God has told to blacken his reputation.
From looking at the bible and its passages, it was Satan (the angel Lucifer) who was first to sin, not Eve or Adam. And while people say that Satan causes all sin, by posessing those and causing them to commit sin, this is not all true. There have been cases where Jesus has met and cleansed those posessed by demons, but most of all human sins come from within.
Looking at the case of Adam and Eve.
Eve commited the sin all by herself, she was not possesed at any time, Adam did not even meet the snake and was therefore also not posessed. But Satan did speak through the snake to bring out those hidden desires from within Eve which then lead to her commiting sin. They both sinned by there own will and actions.
So how does this relate to the topic of the Satan and Santa, well...
Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death (James 1:13–15).
Drawn away by his own desires and enticed. One of the origin stories of Satan was that, as an angel of God, was enticed by his own desire to become higher than God due to his already almost perfect state, this created his sin from pride which was the cause of him being cast from heaven. Another origin possibility was that the angel Lucifer grew jealous of God's attention to humans and went to prove that God's creations could be corrupted by corrupting himself.
Both of these bring towards a certain trait of Satan: its not that he directly wants to create sin, its rather he would provide opportunities for others to become corrupted and commit sin. And what better time than christmas.
The original idea of christmas is good, give to those who have been good, warn those who have been bad. But we are human: we have envy, pride, greed, gluttony, sloth, lust, and wrath. We wish for those things we can't have, we get jealous if someone gets something that we want, we get hateful when someone gives us a bad present, we want to have presents that we can show off to our friends. These are all our emotions which lead us to sin and therefore corrupt ourselves, either removing us from God's influence or proving Lucifer's point that we are corruptable.
But this is all just the beginning, while Christmas is just a single day, the time and effort expendature can be considered a labour of months. And while it affects those at all levels of society due to our own desires and expectations. In lower income suburbs, a toy car may be the greatest gift ever to a child. In middle income, that car becomes remote controlled. High income, it is a real car.
But here is a fun kicker, what does an over commercialised christmas lead to? Of all things, Greed. The innocent ideals of what Christmas is to promote; love, community, spirit, and all that, gets expolited in other innocent days as well: Valentines day, Easter, love day, birthdays, other holidays which anyone can celebrate. Have all become overcommercialised and strewn away from ideals, all because of the hidden desires of men and women. While the three wise men seem like the good guys in the story, did they predict what their innocent gifts would become? ([{or were there actions their own?? or a far reaching plan of Satan/Santa himself?????} sorry, my own conspiracy theory here. Coundn't resist])
The starter for this all, a jolly man in a red suit. The picture of kindness and innocence, hiding a face of hidden desire. The greatest good can hide the greatest evil, and christmas and Santa are perfect cover for Satan and his influences. And even if the original Santa was pure, his legacy has been influenced to a darker path.
The opposite side of good is bad, so the bad is the opposite of good. If Satan existed, so Santa must exist to justify each other, else Satan can't exist. If God exists, then Lucifer must exist to justify that God is omnipresence and the creator, of the men and angels; and the most powerful of His creation, Archangel Lucifer the Morning Star must fall to justify God is everlasting and the ruler.
If one owns 100 billions, he is on the shore; yet if for the same figure - 100 billions - he owes, he is in the deep sea. Thus a play of words A-A-N-S-T is playing on this little string. Of note is, the n does look like a holder while the e looked like flinging [away the money] :). Maybe this is the genius of the word formulation using also the graphical imagination to construct the word own and owe in the subconsciousness of the human group psyche, similarly the word Santa/ Satan constructed with the same letters.
To emphasize, Santa and Satan must exist so that the opposite of each other can exist, nothing can exist on its own. If we talk about long, that's it compared to short it's called long, so is hot/cold, far/near, love/hate/, evil/good... etc., John is John because there are Tom, Mary, Ann...; Earth because there are Mars, Jupiter...; anything existed because it's different from other "things that's not this thing" that this anything got the unique name.
To play the letters: A-A-N-S-T
SA + TA + (NA) > the 1st two combinations of consonant and vowel is chosen for Satan. Thus the only left arrangement of letters following the constrain of SA_TA_N is, SA_N_TA we have Santa!
MAGIC.
Satan needs power to do his evil deeds, but after being cast away from heaven he lost his angelic powers. Doing a great good deed once a year allows him to collect enough childish hope and belief to power his dark sciences.
To power up!! Collecting hopes and childish joys once a year allows him to become more powerful to fuel his dark sciences. However, he also does this to make people to look down on Jesus so he can rule!!! He also fuel sins like sloth, envy, greed, pride, lust, gluttony, and others.
Almost everyone answering here is a Sith for dealing in absolutes.
Notice the small dots in the Yin-Yang symbol? There is a little evil in all that is good, and there is a little good in all that is evil.
Lucifer once had a disagreement with his father, which led him to being cast out of heaven and becoming Satan. That does not mean that Lucy is a complete *******, he's more like a "mostly" ******* guy.
There is good in him, and sometimes he does selfless deeds. The reason he does not get credit properly is twofold:
The Mission Of The Satanic Temple Is To Encourage Benevolence And Empathy, Reject Tyrannical Authority, Advocate Practical Common Sense, Oppose Injustice, And Undertake Noble Pursuits.
We have publicly confronted hate groups, fought for the abolition of corporal punishment in public schools, applied for equal representation when religious installations are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women's reproductive autonomy, exposed harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners in mental health care, organized clubs alongside other religious after-school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations, and engaged in other advocacy in accordance with our tenets.
