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Kurt Cobain/Nirvana
“Santa’s Super Sleigh,” the famous Christmas song written by Will’s dad in 1948, represents Will’s privileged and superficial lifestyle. It also points to his arrested development; at 36, Will still earns his living off the royalties he receives from the song and, as a result, he doesn’t have to work. Though Will aggressively maintains that he’s content with such an easy, responsibility-free life, his overwhelmingly negative feelings toward the song itself betray his unconscious desire for a life with more substance. In many ways, the song reminds Will of his misanthropic father, who succumbed to alcoholism (and, it’s implied, neglected Will) as a result of its commercial success. Despite what “Santa’s Super Sleigh” has given him, the song’s continued presence in his life in the form of consistent royalties prevents him from finding a purpose, evolving, and healing from the trauma the song and his dad inflicted on him.
“Santa’s Super Sleigh” Quotes in About a Boy
The About a Boy quotes below all refer to the symbol of “Santa’s Super Sleigh”. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 12
Quotes
The truth was that he didn’t mind. He applied for these jobs in the same spirit that he had volunteered to work in the soup kitchen, and in the same way that he had become the father of Ned: it was all a dreamy alternative reality that didn’t touch his real life, whatever that was, at all. He didn’t need a job. He was OK as he was.
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Chapter 14
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Fiona meant it. She meant ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, and then she meant ‘Fire and Rain’, and then she meant ‘Both Sides Now’. There was nothing between her and the songs; she was inside them. She even closed her eyes when she was singing.
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Chapter 16
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[...] it could reasonably be argued that reality was not in his genes. He liked watching real stuff on EastEnders and The Bill, and he liked listening to Joe Strummer and Kurt Cobain singing about real stuff, but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it.
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Chapter 18
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So Christmas was the season of anger and bitterness and regret and recrimination, of drinking binges, of a frantic and laughably inadequate industry (one Christmas day his father wrote an entire, and entirely useless, musical, in a doomed attempt to prove that his talent was durable). It was a season of presents by the chimney too, but even when he was nine Will would gladly have swapped his Spirographs and his Batmobiles for a little peace and goodwill.
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“Santa’s Super Sleigh” Symbol Timeline in About a Boy
The timeline below shows where the symbol “Santa’s Super Sleigh” appears in About a Boy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 8
...above all the rest: he lives off the royalties of a famous Christmas song called “Santa’s Super Sleigh” that his father wrote in 1938. Both Suzie and Marcus respond by singing the song...
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Chapter 18
...season seems to begin earlier and earlier each year. This means he is subjected to “Santa’s Super Sleigh” more regularly than he would be if people stuck to the traditional holiday schedule, which...
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