A Mile of Make-Believe: A History of the Eaton's Santa Claus Parade by Steve Penfold (review)

Steve Penfold analyses the history of the Santa Claus parade in Canada, from Eaton's first such parade on the streets of Toronto in 1905 to its cancellation of that annual parade in 1982. To study this corporate spectacle and its variants "that played out on multiple scales, from sidewalk and city to nation and continent," he situates the parade within North American parade culture and its use of public space, a growing twentieth-century consumer culture and the increasing centrality of Santa Claus in its Christmas narrative as well as the rise of the department store that dominated the retail landscape. Penfold seeks to highlight how these Santa Claus parades "represented a significant moment in the cultural history of capitalism." To do so, he traces the manner by which Eaton's successfully expanded and extended the skilful commercial spectacle of its department store window displays into its Eaton's Santa Claus Parade that coursed through Toronto's public space. It was a model that the retailer later launched in several other Canadian cities.

Penfold argues that the Eaton's Santa Claus Parade ushered in a new form of spectacle. He terms this the "corporate fantastic" in order to capture the nature of the narrative and the aesthetic aspects of the parade as well as the substantial organizational practices employed by Eaton's employees in planning and producing each year's parade. This form and the organizational strategy behind it was so powerful, Penfold asserts, that not only did the Eaton's Santa Claus Parade become "a continentwide form of commercial expression," but Canadians also began to view the Santa Claus Parade as the beginning of the Christmas season.

To emphasize how the Eaton's Santa Claus Parade was a holiday spectacle that operated at multiple scales, Penfold skilfully layers in an analysis of the "mediated Santa." Initially, Eaton's promoted its spectacle to those beyond the sidewalk crowds through film and then radio. In the early 1950s, Eaton's began to televise its local parades, eventually replacing this coverage with a national broadcast of its Toronto parade. Penfold suggests that such promotion of "the metropolitan nature of the mediated Santa" extended Eaton's power across English Canada. While this mass media promotion failed to shape a unified Canadian audience, it did succeed in promoting the powerful cultural form of its parades beyond the metropolitan centre in other significant ways. Penfold employs the term "civic fantastic" to analyse the widespread appearance of Santa Claus parades in smaller centres across North America during the middle decades of the twentieth century. While this form imitated the Eaton's Santa Claus Parade, it reflected local civic identity and organizational forms, community spirit, and volunteerism.

Although Eaton's hegemony over the Christmas season had reached powerful and unmatched levels across multiple generations of Canadians, the corporate fantastic model collapsed in 1982, when Eaton's announced that it would no longer organize its Toronto Santa Claus Parade. Yet, in that disappointing decision rests evidence of the powerful success of Eaton's cultural invention. New community groups stepped forward to revive and continue the tradition of the Toronto parade. Penfold concludes that the corporate fantastic proved to be "a brittle form of hegemony," undermined by its dependence on a single retailer at a time when Eaton's was in decline and the entire retail industry faced a structural crisis. In a twist of irony, he notes, it was the non-professional, volunteer-led civic fantastic model that proved resilient and continues to mount Santa Claus parades that remain popular with children and their parents, who continue to find joy in seeing a child's wonder at the makebelieve on parade.