I’ve never ridden in a sleigh. I’m not sure my grandparents ever rode in a sleigh. But every year, my kids consume tons of media about reindeer-drawn sleighs, because that’s a holiday tradition. Santa has ridden in a sleigh for a century and a half now, and that’s just the way he’s pictured. At this point, you can’t update it; no one would take it seriously. Likewise with all those handmade toys, and let’s not talk about the fact that the toy my kids, at least, are most likely to get for presents is LEGO.

Santa’s the most extreme example of this, to be sure, but there are things that are the way they are not because it’s the best way for them to be but because they’ve been that way as long as anyone can remember. A lot of pop culture gets around this by doing things as period pieces, but that isn’t always the choice. Sure, you can’t do that with Santa, because so many children believe in Santa, and the parents insist on keeping a lot of the traditions. But he’s not the only one.

Famously, one of the issues in the ’80s was how to fit James Bond’s notorious womanizing into the era of AIDS. But a lot of characters that are continued into the modern era also smoke, of course, and while admittedly so do a lot of humans, I’m not sure I’ve hung out in person with a smoker since college. It’s a lot less common in this era, but characters who linger from an earlier day are a lot more likely to smoke.

It’s strange that we can’t just update them. The one attempt I know of, as I said, is the James Bond thing in the ’80s where he only slept with one woman in a movie. There are versions where we just change half the stuff about the character, like the various modern Sherlock Holmes tellings. I suppose the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes is something along the lines of it, but I haven’t seen many of those. However, they are from what I know just assuming that everything about Sherlock Holmes is the same except now he’s in taxis instead of hansom cabs and so forth. And fighting Nazis, I believe?

Certain things become iconic. It just feels wrong to some people to have Santa flying a cargo jet instead of a sleigh pulled by reindeer. Even though it makes more sense. We have a cultural identity to all these figures, and it means that elves hand-make wooden soldiers which are then delivered in a sleigh. What do you do?

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