If you’re holding onto any amount of Christmas magic in your heart, avert your eyes, because I’m about to reveal the biggest lie ever told about Christmas.
Santa isn’t real.
Haha, kidding, that’s not the big reveal. Obviously, Santa Claus isn’t real. Santa is, however, a big deal, especially to children. Even if you never believed in Santa, if you grew up in the US, then you were constantly exposed to Santa and all the lore surrounding him. You know how he looks. You know what he wears. You know he’s married. You know who works in his factory. You know he owns a particular species of hoofed mammal. You know what he drives. You know what he delivers. You know when he delivers it. You know how he gets inside homes to deliver it. You know his favorite food and drink. You know he makes moral judgements about children and keeps them in a centralized database. You know a lot about Santa.
You also know where he lives—the North Pole. Obviously, the North Pole doesn’t exist the way movies and Christmas specials told us. There is no giant candy-cane-esque pole sticking out of the ground at 90°N. There is also no giant workshop filled with elves making toys. But what if I told you there was no land at the North Pole at all?
That’s right, there is no land at the North Pole.
“Surely you must be joking,” you would retort, but I’m not. Think of the last time you looked at a map. What was at the North Pole? “Ice, like Antarctica,” you say? But how could you know? At the top of the map, where the North Pole is, it’s all stretched out and deformed. Maps weren’t meant to tell you what goes on up there, because you never needed to know. Maps never taught you about the North Pole. Instead, you relied on mass media meant for marketing Christmas as your source of North Pole knowledge.
Let’s start beneath the surface. You might have seen a Christmas movie where Santa’s workshop was hidden underground. Obviously, no such workshop exists—you’re too clever for that—but that movie subtly convinced you that there was space underground at the North Pole. How much space, unclear, but certainly enough for an underground bunker. This is not true. At the North Pole, you’d be lucky if there was more than 10ft (3m) of ice beneath you.
“But what about the earth beneath the ice?” you might ask.
“There is no earth,” I would respond.
There is no actual land mass upon which the Arctic sits. Instead, it’s just ice, floating in the ocean. You can check this for yourself on Google Earth. The interactive map doesn’t distinguish between ice and water, so the entire Arctic looks empty. If you went to the North Pole, you would be doing little more than standing on an oversized ice cube.
“Ha!” you might exclaim, “there is still ice, and ice is something! It may not be earth, but it is there.”
“Well…” I would hesitate to mention, “not for long.”
The Arctic ice has been decaying rapidly due to climate change. It’s going so fast that by the year 2040, the North Pole ice is predicted to melt entirely in the summer. Mind you, the summer average temperature at the North Pole is 32°F (0°C), the freezing point of water. That’s how little ice there is at the North Pole—just a few degrees warmer, and it all melts away.
There is nothing at the North Pole. There are no plants or interesting topography. There are no rocks or dirt underground. The North Pole is nothing more than water—some frozen, but not for long. The North Pole is about as real as Santa’s reindeer—it references a real thing, but just barely.
So the next time you see an AI-generated Coca-Cola ad or watch a classic Christmas movie, remember that Santa Claus isn’t the only made-up thing in the story. The real lie—the one you never expected—is the North Pole.