My Dad was a cherubic guy who possessed a winning smile, a great sense of humor, twinkling eyes and who was good with people. He was a generally fit guy, but like most older men, he got a bit paunchy in his old age. He also could grow a beard that would make a lumberjack jealous.
Later in life, Dad and Mom lived in Austin, Minnesota. They were downtown Austin in the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas supporting local merchants with a little hometown Christmas shopping. Dad was wearing a red plaid jacket and a nearly matching red hat, sporting his bushy white beard when he felt a little hand in his. Dad looked down and a girl about four years old was beaming up at him, her eyes wide with wonder, holding onto his hand for dear life. Dad looked around and there was the girl’s mother a little way off, smiling and shrugging. The little girl gushed, “I know who you are!” My Dad was confused. He had never seen this little girl nor her mother ever before. “Who do you think I am?” Dad responded. The little girl blushed a bit, got shy and whispered, “You’re Santa.”
Dad exchanged some appropriate words and greetings with the little girl. When he returned home that day he shaved off his beard. He didn’t want to cause undo excitement and angst in other Austin children. He never grew a beard again.
It took centuries before we came around to our present conception of the appearance and practices of Santa Claus. Here is his story…
First, there was nothing. Christmas was not a holiday that was celebrated. The early Church was focused on Christ’s resurrection and the promise of Eternal Life. When Christ was born was irrelevant. It was his ministry, death and resurrection that were important. It was only when the Church was having a hard time weaning pagans from their beliefs that the Church began to coopt some of the pagan practices and a good place to start was with the December pagan festivals that went by a myriad of names (but not Christmas and definitely had nothing to do with the celebration of Christ’s birth). That story is the subject of next week’s column.
The idea of a giving, benevolent figure around Christmas began with St. Nicholas. These days we tend to conflate Santa and St. Nick (St. Nicholas) as one and the same. It’s not so. Saint Nicholas was a real person, a Catholic Bishop of the fourth century. We know of his existence from records of the Council of Nicaea held in the year 325.
All the historical accounts agree that St. Nicholas was pious and tried to live a Christ like life. To that end he provided for the poor, was forgiving and tried to help the lower classes into a better life on Earth before ushering them into salvation and eternity.
Like most legends, there is a kernel of truth in this next story. It’s absolutely true girls at that time had to have a dowry to get married. It wasn’t enough that the young man was getting her hand in marriage, the prospective groom needed some additional incentive to take her off of her father’s hands. That usually meant money, but could mean a title, land or perhaps a place in his bride’s father’s business. The modern tradition of the bride’s parents paying for the wedding is the last vestige of this dowry system. In St. Nicholas’ time, women without doweries ended up as drudges – servants in someone else’s house or as spinsters living at home, or worse – as prostitutes.
According to lore, three girls in the same family faced prostitution because they lacked dowries, so St. Nicholas took some of his own gold and threw it through an open window of their home for the girls to use as dowries. Legend has it that his bags of gold landed in their stockings, which were hung by the fire to dry. That is the origin of the tradition of gifts in Christmas stockings. Many cultures celebrated, and some still do, “St. Nicholas’ Day” on December 6th instead of (or in addition to) Christmas on December 25th.
The idea that bad children get punished, or at least receive no presents, has a long history. In Austria, “Krampus”, a half goat/half demon creature, ate bad children. This legend arose, in part, to explain all of the children who died from childhood diseases and other causes, while serving as an object lesson to the remaining kinder to straighten up and fly right. In Switzerland, there was a similar creature. Schumtzli was a winter demon who beat naughty children and carried a sack to spirit bad babies away. When Santa was “born”, these two ideas – the generosity of St. Nicholas and the demons who punish bad children got melded together into one being who took notice of both naughty and nice children.
Dutch settlers to New York brought a character known as “Sinter Klaus” with them to America. The name eventually was Americanized into “Santa Claus”. The early Santa Claus depictions show a rather skinny fellow, bedecked in white looking more like a Pope than Jolly Old St. Nick. It was Clement Clark Moore who began to shape our present view of Santa. Moore wrote “A Visit From St. Nicholas”. We know it today as “The Night Before Christmas”.
In that poem, Moore made up out of whole cloth Santa’s sleigh, the reindeer and their names, the idea Santa gains access to our homes through the chimney and then gets up and out again by “laying a finger aside of his nose”. In the poem, Santa is an elfin type of figure. I suppose he would have to be, in order to get down and back up the chimney. Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist who gained fame for drawing Uncle Sam and associating the elephant with the Republicans and the donkey with the Democrats, fleshed out Santa’s look. It was Nast who added details like Santa lives at the North Pole and has a book of children – divided into the naughty and nice.
In 1890, to promote sales at his store, James Edgar became the first department store Santa. Edgar did that in Brockton, Massachusetts, and merchants knew a good idea when they saw one. Soon the practice spread to business establishments across the United States.
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was born in 1939. Montgomery Ward was attempting to compete with their major rival, Sears. At that time, those two stores were virtually the only ones in the United States that let consumers buy via catalogue in the days before the shopping mall and the modern Internet. To get people into their brick and mortar stores and to encourage them to pick up a catalogue to do additional shopping, a copywriter for Montgomery Ward (named Robert May) came up with a giveaway children’s book about a reindeer with a birth defect, which at first is a disadvantage and then an asset. The book was a runaway success and early disability advocates were happy with it for reasons that had nothing to do with saving Christmas.
Montgomery Ward, in a display of corporate largess that has rarely been repeated, granted May full individual property rights to Rudolph, the story, publication, merchandising etc. Later, May’s brother-in-law Johnny Marks wrote the story into song and tried to sell it to artists like Bing Crosby and Dinah Shore but initially with no takers. Marks eventually approached Gene Autry, who didn’t like the song either. However, Autry’s wife loved the song, and you know the old saying, “Happy wife, happy life” so Autry recorded the song and released it in 1949. It was a number one hit and Autry’s most popular tune. Later, in 1964, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer became a beloved stop-motion children’s classic produced by Bass/Rankin. It still airs somewhere on television every year.
Haddon Sundblom drew a series of print ads for the Coca Cola company depicting Santa. Prior to Sundblom’s illustrations, advertisements featuring Santa tended to be either cartoon depictions or men clearly impersonating Santa but just as obviously not Santa himself. These earlier merchandising depictions of the Jolly Old Elf were variations on the theme that is described in the Christmas song, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”. On the other hand, Sundlom’s Santa was big, jolly, robust, shaped and dressed how we view the character of Santa in modern times and in these commercial illustrations, the figure depicted was clearly the man himself, not some mere mortal posing as Santa Claus.
It took about 1800 years but Santa, as we know him today, was born. He’s been a star almost since the beginning of mass media. One of his most famous appearances is in 1947’s “A Miracle on 34th Street” with Edmund Gwenn in the role of Santa. Some fancy legal work, on the part of the character played by John Payne, has the courts of New York State declaring there really is a Santa Claus and Gwenn’s character is the man himself. Gwenn won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his performance as Kris Kringle (Santa) in the film.
The spirit of giving, of charity, of benevolence and love is alive in the lore of Santa. I hope it is in you too. Merry Christmas!