History
Of Santa Claus
To understand how the
modern-day Santa came about, we have to go way back to the fourth
century when a man named Nicholas became the bishop of a small
village in a place called Myra which is now in Turkey.
And that is all we know
for sure about this man. Everything else is based on supposition
and rumour. Yet he was later canonised and became the most famous
saint in all of Christianity.
He is the guardian saint
of Russia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Norway and Greece.
He is the patron saint
of children, virgins, pawnbrokers, pirates, thieves, brewers,
pilgrims, fishermen, barrelmakers, dyers, butchers, meatpackers
and haberdashers.
No saint has more churches
named after him – even the 12 Apostles – and he has
become the best-known Christian icon in the world.
A recent survey showed
that more people recognise St Nicholas as Santa Claus than they
do Jesus Christ, in non-Christian countries.
The cult of St Nicholas
is now so prevalent, that more money is made out of Santa Claus,
than out of any other Christian icon.
The legends
Apart from being the Bishop of Myra the only thing we have are
legends.
There are several stories
associated with him, and they quite naturally nearly all concern
children.
One says that a father
had three young daughters but was so poor that he had no money
for dowries, which meant that they could not marry.
The Father decided that
his daughters would have to become 'ladies of the night' and earn
some money through the world's oldest profession.
Fortunately for them,
St Nicholas heard of their plight and threw three bags of gold
through their bedroom window one night and so saved them from
a fate worse than death.
The girls were able to
marry, and for his trouble St Nick became the patron saint of
prostitutes!
Another story says that
a rich nobleman decided to send his three sons to Athens to be
educated. They reached Myra, where St Nicholas was bishop, and
had to stay the night at an inn.
The innkeeper, seeing
that the boys were rich, murdered them in the night for their
money and chopped up their bodies, which he placed in a large
pot with some pork that was being pickled.
St Nicholas had a vision
of what had happened, rushed to the inn and accused the innkeeper
of the crime.
Immediately the innkeeper
confessed and showed where the bodies were.
St Nicholas prayed for
help and brought the children back to life.
There used to be a custom
of electing a boy bishop to take the services in cathedrals from
St Nicholas' Day until Holy Innocents Day (28 December).
If the boy died during
this time he was buried with the full honours of a bishop, and
in Salisbury Cathedral there is a monument to a boy bishop who
died 'in office".
The custom was a direct
result of the innkeeper story.
"The Childrens' Saint"
The tales surrounding St Nicholas were part of the reason he became
the patron saint of children. And to honour him, people in Southern
and Eastern Europe began giving gifts to their children on the
eve of his feast day, December 6.
As Christianity spread,
the tales grew and the celebration became especially popular in
the Low Countries, Holland in particular.
The Dutch St Nicholas
(Sinter Klaas) was tall and gaunt, wore the traditional dress
of a bishop, including the mitre and carried a long Shepherd's
staff.
Instead of reindeer,
he rode on a donkey, which later became a magnificent white horse.
On St Nicholas eve (December
5), children left out not stockings, but shoes filled with straw
for his donkey and by the morning, the straw was gone and the
shoes were filled with presents.
The Dutch in America
In 1664, the Dutch community in New Amsterdam was taken over by
the English, who renamed it New York in honour of the Duke of
York.
For 200 years, the Dutch
fought hard to maintain their culture and traditions which were
most strongly held by a group of Dutch intellectuals called "The
Knickerbockers".
Washington Irving was
a member of this group and in 1809 he published a satirical book
called The Knickerbocker's History of New York in which he made
several mentions of Sinter Klaas.
Part of his history of
Sinter Klaas included a description of how he flew across the
sky in a wagon and dropped presents down chimneys for good little
girls and boys – not just on St Nicholas eve, but any night
he felt like it.
For some reason, Irving
touched a part of the American public's heart.
His description was not
of the stern, gaunt bishop, but of a jolly fellow of good cheer
– just like the Dutch burghers who inhabited New York –
and New Yorkers loved it.
Within a year of his
book being published the rest of New York adopted the joyful Dutch
celebration of St Nicholas' Day, but in doing so, they merged
their own traditional Christmas celebrations with the Dutch ones
and Sinter Klaas became Santa Claus.
Clement Clarke Moore
In 1822, and just 13 years after Irving's book was published,
a professor of divinity in New York – Dr Clement Clarke
Moore – sat down to write a poem for his children.
In his bookcase he had
a signed copy of Irving's book (they were great friends) and,
drawing on the ideas within, he took Sinter Klaas and his flying
wagon and turned him into Santa Claus with a sleigh pulled by
eight tiny reindeer.
The sleigh, pulled by
a horse with bells on, was a traditional Scandinavian means of
transportation,but to have it pulled by reindeer instead made
it a little more exotic and took him completely away from the
heat of Turkey to the arctic wastes of the far North – a
land of cold and snow and thus more remote and mysterious.
His description of Santa
as a dwarfish, jolly old elf dressed in robes of fur, was completed
with the naming of the reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen.
Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen.
By the time he had finished
A Visit From St Nicholas, it was December 1822 and Christmas was
about to change, forever.
The anonymous poem
Moore never intended for the poem to escape into the wider world
at all. It was a personal one, for his children.
However, unknown to him,
his wife liked the poem so much, she sent copies to all her friends,
including a writer for the New York Sentinel.
He saw the poem and one
year later, on December 23 1823, it was published – anonymously
– to public acclaim.
Almost immediately, Moore's
description was absorbed into everyday culture.
Out went the donkey,
the white horse, the wagon and the bishop's robe.
St Nicholas went from
being a religious icon to a secular one in the space of 20 years.
It eventually became
known as The Night Before Christmas, but for Clement Clarke Moore,
it was a disaster and for 20 years he disowned it, afraid it would
damage his reputation within the academic community he was in.
But for the rest of the
world, Sinter Klass was dead and Santa Claus was born, complete
with a personality and a mission ... and an irrevocable link to
Christmas.
The break with the St
Nicholas that the Dutch celebrated on December 6 was almost complete.
Uncle Sam – ta?
By 1863, the world was divided into those who celebrated Santa
Claus (on December 24) or Sinter Klaas (December 5) and for extra
confusion, it was traditional to draw either in furs or bishops
robes.
Sometimes he was a jolly
man with a pointed cap which then developed a little bell or ball
on the end, sometimes he had black hair, Santa was confusing for
children, that's for sure.
Step forward 21-year-old
Thomas Nast – the man who eventually became one of America's
most influential cartoonists and gave the US Republican Party
their elephant and the Democrats their donkey.
He was hired by Harper's
Weekly to draw a picture of Santa bringing gifts to the Union
troops fighting the South in the war between the states.
Borrowing heavily from
Moore's poem he began drawing a figure. But it wasn't quite right.
Then while he was out
walking one day, he saw a recruitment poster and hit on a brainwave.
The poster featured "Uncle
Sam" with white hair and a beard and Nast, turning him into
a fatter shape, drew "Uncle Sam's" beard a little longer,
and his hair a little more silver.
By the time he had finished,
"Uncle Sam-ta" was a jolly roly-poly old man wearing
a star-spangled jacket, trousers with red stripes and a striped
cap.
That drawing of "Sam-ta"
was a massive boost to the flagging morale of the Union soldiers.
It was so popular that
for 40 years, whenever the magazine asked him to draw Santa, he
stuck to the same basic idea of the "Sam-ta", but merged
the traditional stripes together and turned the jacket and trousers
into a woolen suit – but the suit was not red. It was it
was black and white..
Other cartoonists followed
Nast's basic drawing, each one changing the colour of his suit
to whatever they liked. We had green Santas, black, white, red,
yellow and even blue (left)...
But such was the confirmation
that Santa had entered the culture that when in 1897 a young girl
named Virginia O'Hanlon wrote to the Sun in New York to ask if
he was real, the editor had no hesitation in answering.
Then along came Coca-Cola.
Santa Soda ?
The story goes that in 1931, Coca-Cola was in trouble. Seen primarily
as a summer drink, sales always slumped when the weather cooled
and Coke needed a sales boost because profits were down due to
the depression.
They hired an artist
named Hadden Sundblom to create the designs for a huge advertising
campaign they were planning to run over the Christmas period.
Sundblom decided to make
Santa a coke drinker and set about painting Santa drinking a coke.
Out went Nast's black-and-white
Santa suit in favour of Coke's red-and-white colours. But Sundblom
needed more inspiration and he found it in a Coke sales rep called
Lou Prentice who looked so much like Nast's Santa that he could
have passed for him in the street.
The claim is that after
1931 Sundblom's Santa became the standard for the rest of the
world: Fat, jolly, white-beared with a red and white suit and
black hip boots, Santa, as we know him today was born.
But this is only party
true.
As The New York Times
reported on 27 November 1927:
"A standardized
Santa Claus appears to New York children. Height, weight, stature
are almost exactly standardized, as are the red garments, the
hood and the white whiskers. The pack full of toys, ruddy cheeks
and nose, bushy eyebrows and a jolly, paunchy effect are also
inevitable parts of the requisite make-up."
What Coca-Cola did was
to establish Santa Claus as the Christmas figure across all of
America, as opposed to just New York.
In an era before colour
television, colour films, and the widespread use of colour in
newspapers, it was Coca-Cola's magazine advertisements, billboards,
and point-of-sale store displays that exposed nearly everyone
in America to the modern Santa Claus image.
Rollo rolls in
Eight years after Coke's Santa made his first appearance, came
the last piece of the jigsaw.
In 1939, the Montgomery
Ward Department Store chain hired Robert May to write a new poem
for Christmas that their in-store santas could give away during
the holiday season.
His first effort was
perfect – almost. They hated the name but loved the song
and for eight weeks May tried to think of an alternative to Rollo
The Red-nosed Reindeer – but he could only think of Reginald,
or Reggie The Red-nosed Reindeer.
Surprisingly, they hated
that too.
Try as he might, May
could not come up with an alternative that fit the rhythm of the
song until his four-year-old daughter suggested the name of her
best friend: Rudolph.
The name fit –
and the rest is history.
Recorded in 1939 by the
singing cowboy Gene Autry, Rudolph The Red-nosed Reindeer became
the second best-selling song in history and Santa, as we know
him today, was complete.
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