When I was a kid, I never sat on the Big Guy’s lap. I never told Santa in person my Christmas wishes. I never wrote him a letter and laid out what I wanted for Christmas gifts. I saw him from afar in department stores of course but had no close encounters of the Santa kind. I never left carrots for his reindeer or cookies for Santa himself. I was brought up in a Christian home. Christmas was about Christ; the gifts were from the Magi not Santa. Christmas was still exciting but some of the magic of childhood was sucked out of the experience along the way due to my parents’ militant attitude about that denizen of the North Pole.
Perhaps it is because of that experience that I want to punch people who talk about global warming in relation to Santa living at the North Pole. I want to beat, with a giant candy cane, those people who do math calculations on how fast Santa has to travel to get to every child’s house in the world on a single night. I want to drown in hot chocolate, people who postulate the impossibility of Santa physically getting down a chimney or worry children who have no fireplace in their home that Santa will be arrested for breaking and entering should he choose another means of ingress. These naysaying Scrooges should have a sprig of holly driven through their Grinch hearts.
Santa Claus is based on the real life person of St. Nicolas, a 4th century Christian Bishop. St. Nicolas defended the divinity of Christ at the Council of Nicaea and fought off the cultists and others who would clutter up the Scriptures with Gnostic or other gospels. According to lore, St. Nicolas performed miracles like bringing dismembered boys back to life and their dismemberer to justice. It is a fact that he often provided dowries to poor young women. There was a time when parents had to pay a groom to take the woman he chose to marry off of their hands. Love and desire just weren’t enough; money, land or bestowing an esteemed title on the prospective son-in-law also had to part of the marriage deal. The modern concept that the bride’s parents pay for the wedding is a vestige of this ancient tradition. Women who didn’t have a dowry didn’t marry. They entered domestic service or worse, became prostitutes.
According to legend, St. Nicolas heard of a young woman who didn’t have money for a dowry and so he tied up some gold in a little bag and tossed it through the girl’s window. The bag landed in her stocking, which was pinned to the mantel of the fireplace to dry. He did the same thing for her two sisters when they became eligible for marriage. This is the origin of the practice of hanging up our stockings and receiving presents in them.
The real St. Nicolas was the father figure of Christmas, which is why early artistic depictions showed St. Nick dressed more like the Pope than Santa. Originally December 6th (St. Nicolas’ Day) was celebrated with presents and feasts rather than December 25th. Initially it was Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection that was celebrated throughout Christendom. His birth didn’t matter to the early Church. Christmas was arbitrarily placed on the calendar on December 25th to coopt pagan celebrations that occurred on that day but that is a subject for next week’s column. The actual good works of St. Nicolas were soon conflated with other myths and legends like that of Odin. Odin is a Norse god, supposedly capable of flight and who knows if you’ve behaved (who’s been naughty or nice, in other words). That got added to the myth of St. Nicolas who soon morphed into St. Nick before eventually becoming Santa Claus.
The Dutch had a yuletide figure called Sinter Klaus that they brought with them to the New World when they settled New Amsterdam (today’s New York City). Sinter Klaus got Americanized into Santa Claus. A minister, Clement Clark Moore, was out shopping for a turkey and was taken with the sights and sounds of the season. He gathered his thoughts and impressions penning a whimsical poem that he had published anonymously. Reverend Moore thought such frivolity was beneath a man of the cloth and was embarrassed to reveal he was the author. Eventually the popularity of “A Visit From St. Nicolas” convinced him to fess up to being its creator. We know the poem today as “The Night Before Christmas”.
That poem told us some things about Santa. It gave us the names of Santa’s reindeer and his means of transportation by sleigh. It explained how Santa got into the house and how he rose up the chimney (it has something to do with laying his finger aside of his nose). The poem also told us how Santa dressed, which was a departure from the Papal look of St. Nicolas. Thomas Nast, a muckraking political cartoonist of the time, drew popular depictions of Santa and added some details in his illustrations; for instance, Santa lived at the North Pole, had a list of good and bad children and kept an eye on kids through a massive telescope.
In 1890, retailer James Edgar became the first department store Santa. He had dressed before as other historical figures in order to draw customers to his store in Brockton, Massachusetts so why not impersonate Santa too? It was a gimmick that was massively popular with the public and soon department store Santas were popping up all over the country. Today there is a bit of a rivalry within the United States between the Fraternal Real Bearded Santas and those who don fake whiskers. There are even Santa Schools one can attend in order to become a better stand in for the bearded gentleman.
In 1939 Robert May, a copywriter for Montgomery Ward, came up with a children’s book giveaway promotion idea to get shoppers in the store for Christmas. The story of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was an immediate hit. Montgomery Ward, in an act of supreme generosity or stupidity depending on your point of view, ceded their rights to Rudolph to Mr. May. The book was conceived and written on company time by a company employee and produced with company funds so it technically belonged to Montgomery Ward but they signed all the rights over to Robert May without question or reservation. May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, a successful songwriter, put the story to music, which Gene Autry then recorded, and the rest is history.
Childhood ends too quickly as it is. Christmas is a wondrous time of year made all the more delightful by the joy and awe of children, so allow them their fantasies and dreams. Of course Santa is real.