It is said that, when you were a theology student in Paris, you partly earned your bread and butter by dressing up as Father Christmas to be photographed with children at the door of the Bon Marché supermarket. However, some time before, dummy figures of Father Christmas had been burnt at Church doors in Paris. They were associated with Christmas Trees and other cultural imports from the Anglo-American world and were regarded by the French bishops as pagan substitutes for the traditional cribs and Baby Jesus. Why do you think we still try so hard to persuade children to believe in Father Christmas?

Claude Levi-Strauss, in addition to the anthropological works I spoke about on the occasion of his death when past his 100th birthday, had also sought to answer your question in Sartre's monthly magazine in the early 1950s.

Basically, he points out that Father Christmas has a double origin. In the first place, he is Santa Claus, or St Nicholas (AD 343). The fur-lined red garb in which he appears is a bishop's robe simplified. His feast falls on December 6.

The story is told of three small children, wandering about in their play, until they got lost, captured and killed by an evil butcher. St Nicholas appeared and appealed to God to return them to life and to their families. And so he became the patron and protector of children.

Levi-Strauss takes Father Christmas to embody the agent of an inter-generational transaction between adults and children. The instinctive rebellion of the young against the authority of their parents is bought off by the parents giving gifts to their children mediated through the figure of an old man in beneficent guise. He is the 'father' par excellence, who sometimes retains the name of Nicholas (Claus) but who sometimes gets it changed into Christmas, because of the proximity between the feast of the saint and Christmas.

What is the other source of Father Christmas?

It is the god Saturn, pictured by the Romans as an old man who devoured children. His feast was celebrated by the Romans for seven days between December 17 and 24. Christians decided on the date of Christmas as a way of giving a new meaning to the Saturnalia.

Levi-Strauss notes that in practically all societies there are so-called rites of initiation to celebrate the transition from youth to adulthood. The separation between the two age-groups is in our society signalled by belief or otherwise in Father Christmas. The gift-giving by adults to children through Father Christmas (whose descent through chimneys and placing of gifts in footwear allude to other episodes from the legend of St Nicholas most popular in northern Europe) symbolises the way in which the powerful control the weak, in all social structures. Gifts reconcile.

In many rituals, moreover, the relationship between childhood and adulthood is taken to symbolise the relationship between the dead and the living. The paradox that the children represent the dead in the rituals associated with Father Christmas is easily resolved with a little reflection upon both the Christian legend of St Nicholas and the pagan myth of Saturn.

Levi-Strauss was concerned in his article to show that there was no real historical continuity between the origins of those elements of present-day celebration of Christmas which are attributed to the Druids or the ancient Celtic pagan religions, such as the Christmas Tree and ivy decorations, and present-day practices.

In fact, the earliest texts that speak of the Christmas Tree are found in Germany only in the 17th century, in England in the 18th and in France in the 19th. Levi-Strauss holds that the structural likeness between all these rituals is due to their expressing such basic human concerns as the hostile/friendly relations between different generations analogous to those between the spirits of the dead and the living.

Do you intend to dress up as Father Christmas this year?

At the Dar tal-Kleru the tradition is for one of the most recently professed sisters to dress up (I am not sure whether one should call the result Mother Christmas) and distribute goodies to us, the old folk. This kind of reversal of both gender and age roles would have delighted Levi-Strauss since it is a frequently occurring characteristic of mythic-ritual language.

Had I been distributing gifts preferably to follow Maltese tradition on the night between the end of the year and the beginning of the next I would have included in my sack at least three books.

The first is a collection of short stories by Nora Macelli called Ir-Regettier u l-Muzew tal-Klassi (The Second-hand Shopkeeper and the Classroom Museum). They have a deep kinship with the mythic-ritual language of Christmastide, particularly those involving rather Lacanian dream interpretation.

The second is a poetry collection entitled Bliet (Cities) by Norbert Bugeja. It also gives expression filtered through a highly sophisticated mind to primary patterns of human experience, including two poems that expressly refer to the Christmas season, Pasturi and Purċissjoni tal-Milied.

The third one is another of Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci's monographs on 20th century Maltese sacred art, called Apap, Cremona and St Paul. His interpretation of Fr Paul (for the Maltese) in the work of these artists makes him appear much more religiously ambiguous than Father Christmas in the hands of Levi-Strauss.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.