We should probably talk about “Santa Baby.”
Like Brenda Lee’s 65-year-old “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Eartha Kitt’s 1953 standard is celebrating a milestone anniversary. Unlike “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which just enjoyed a two-week run at the top of the Billboard pop singles chart, the 70-year-old “Santa Baby” has become one of the most polarizing songs in the holiday canon.
“Santa Baby” appears anytime somebody runs a list of the worst Christmas songs ever, yet it returns to the charts every December and has been covered by more major female pop stars than we have room to list: Madonna, Taylor Swift, Kylie Minogue, Ariana Grande, Gwen Stefani, etc. Even people who don’t like it would probably not dispute its significance.
It is, depending on the source, a materialist reinforcement of sexist cliches or a feminist expression of autonomy and sex positivity — which of course means it is a bit of both.
“Santa Baby” is a playful tune performed in the smoky-nightclub style that would become Kitt’s trademark, delivering a list of Christmas wishes that becomes increasingly elaborate: a fur, a new convertible, the deed to a duplex, a yacht and an honest-to-god platinum mine.
That part isn’t unusual. Written by Brill Building mainstays Phil Springer and Joan Javits, “Santa Baby” partly is a riff on Christmas songs that were structured as kids’ letters to Santa — although, as the Los Angeles Times pointed out in a 2017 story about the song’s endurance, “adjusted for inflation, she’s asking for billions.”
Before long, it takes a turn. The end of each stanza includes the refrain of “Hurry down the chimney tonight,” which, delivered in Kitt’s sultry coo, is so unambiguously horny that it barely qualifies as a double entendre.
It seems amazing that a Christmas song full of suggestive overtures could even have been released in 1953. Its sexual frankness was basically unheard-of in mass-marketed culture at the time, particularly if expressed by women of color. (Kitt was biracial.)
“Santa Baby” is an extreme example of a trend in mid-century holiday recordings to at least acknowledge adult desires, as with the previous year’s big hit, the more PG-rated “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Online there is a running joke about millennials realizing the song is referring to Dad, rather than implying Mom was actually having an affair with Santa.
Similarly, there is some disagreement about precisely whom Kitt is targeting with her requests. Assuming she’s not literally propositioning Santa Claus, initially it seems she’s addressing either her spouse or a sugar daddy.
After the second verse, Kitt coos: “Think of all the fun I’ve missed, think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed.” This could just be the song’s protagonist playfully petitioning her partner for a big seasonal purchase, or it could imply something a bit sadder: that she’s deprived herself of opportunities while waiting for another person who might never return that love.
The final lines land like a climactic plot twist: “Santa baby, forgot to mention one little thing / A ring, I don’t mean on the phone.” Again, that could be an earnest suggestion to a steady boyfriend, but more so she’s giving “other woman” who has caught feelings during an affair, creating the kind of imbalance of power that, in pop culture, only seems to end tragically.
And now, she’s playing all of her cards to turn it into something else. We’ll never know whether she succeeds, but later in life, Kitt realized her character would have been better off without all the gifts she wanted that year anyhow.
In 2007, a year before her death, Kitt told NPR: “Every time I sing ‘Santa Baby,’ I laugh more at myself. The song says, ‘Santa Baby, slip a sable (fur) under the tree.’ Well, all the men who have done that with me never stayed with me. So I realize everything that I want in life I have to pay for myself, and I really love that because then nobody owns me but me.”
That’s a great lesson, even if it means never getting that platinum mine.