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Father Christmas
The guardian saint of Russia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, and Greece, patron saint of pirates, thieves, brewers, pilgrims, fishermen, barrel makers, dyers, butchers, meatpackers, and haberdashers, he who has more churches named after him than any other and has evolved into one of the best-known characters in the world, Nicholas of Myra in Turkey, was no doubt a very real and very generous man. In the 4th Century, Nicholas, walking past a house, overheard a man telling his three daughters that he was selling them because he didn't have enough money for their dowries. Nicholas put three small bags of gold on their window sill and became the patron saint of brides and spinsters. Pawnbrokers also adopted him as their patron, their symbol being three balls of gold, Nicholas's three bags of gold. For centuries artists painted Nicholas holding these three bags of gold but in time the bags became painted as three heads. To explain this, another legend evolved. St. Nicholas stopped at an inn during a famine and was surprised when the innkeeper served him meat. Suspecting foul play Nicholas went into the cellar and found the pickled bodies of three boys in a barrel. He restored the boys to life and this 'miracle' led to Nicholas becoming canonised in the Middle Ages.
Soon after the Middle Ages, on the 6th December, Europeans gave gifts to children on the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, the patron Saint of children. Popular in Holland, the Dutch Saint Nickholas was tall and gaunt, wore the traditional clothes of a bishop and carried a large shepherd's staff. He rode a donkey, not a sleigh, which later became a white horse. On St. Nicholas's Eve, children left shoes filled with straw for the donkey and by morning the straw was replaced by presents.
In 1664 the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was taken over by the British and renamed New York. For 200 years the Dutch citizens of the colony tried to preserve their traditions. One of the most active groups was an association of intellectuals called the "Knickerbockers." Washington Irving was a member and in 1809 published The Knickerbockers History of New York containing several dozen references to "Sinter Klaas" an adaptation of "Sint Nicholaas" including a tale of how he flew across the sky in a wagon dropping presents down chimneys for children. Irving saw Saint Nicholas not in clerical robes but as a Dutch burgher. The English adopted the Dutch celebrations of St. Nicholas' Day but merged them with their own traditions celebrating the birth of Christ and gradually Sinter Klass became Santa Claus.
In Celtic Europe, pagan ceremonies celebrating the re-birth of the sun were hi-jacked by Christians. We still honour ancestors by bringing their spirits, locked into trees, into our homes, even 'touching wood' for our ancestors' approval. Dickens referred to this Celtic image of the 'woody' spirit of mid winter as his 'Ghost of Christmas Past', a large green suited fellow, decked with holly and ivy, representing "the green fuse of nature" awakened by the sun, shortly after the longest, darkest winter night.
The most important contributor to the modem image of Santa was a professor of divinity in New York - Dr. Clement Clarke Moore. In 1822 when Moore, a friend of Washington Irving, sat down to write his children a Christmas poem, he was impressed with Irving's vision of Sinter Klass, his flying wagon and his gift giving. But Moore made a few alterations to make the story more believable. Teresa Chris writes, "The clogs that the Dutch children left in the chimney comer on December 6 became something all children could relate to in cold weather - stockings." And the wagon became a "miniature sleigh" pulled by "eight tiny reindeer." The sleigh and horse with its bells was a common means of transport in New England. Being pulled by reindeer the sleigh gave St. Nick an exotic link with the far North, a land of cold and snow where few, if any people travelled and hence was mysterious and remote, so remote that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein retired to the North Pole at about the same time. Moore described Santa as a dwarfish "Jolly Old Elf," dressed in furs, scampering down chimneys to give children their gifts. Moore even gave the reindeer names: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen. Other Christmas stories had portrayed Saint Nicholas on a white horse, or with one or two reindeer. One version even had him in a cart pulled by a goat. But Moore's account was so vivid and compelling that it became the standard.
Moore never intended for anyone other than his children to hear 'A Visit from Saint Nicholas'. For more than twenty years he refused to admit that he was the author (apparently because he was afraid it would damage his standing in the academic community of the 19th century) but his wife liked the story so much that she sent copies to her friends. Somehow the poem wound up printed anonymously in The Troy, New York, Sentinel on December 23, 1823. It eventually became known as "The Night Before Christmas". It was so popular that within a decade it had become a central part of the Santa legend, along with the best-known poem in American history. Now Santa had a personality and a mission, and was permanently linked to Christmas. But what did he look like?
In the mid 1800's it was popular to draw St. Nick either in his bishop's robes or as a man with a pointed hat, a long coat, and straight beard. Sometimes he even had black hair. This changed in 1863, when Harper's Weekly hired 21 year old Thomas Nast to draw a picture of Santa Claus bringing gifts to boost the morale of Union troops fighting the Civil War. The Santa that Nast drew combined Clement Moore's description of St. Nicholas in his poem, "Twas the Night before Christmas" with, believe it or not ... Uncle Sam. Nast's Santa was a jolly, roly-poly old man who wore a star-spangled jacket, striped pants, and a cap. "The drawing boosted the spirits of soldiers and civilians alike because it showed that the spirit of Christmas had come to the Civil War," says historian James I. Robertson. It was so popular that every year, for 40 years, when the magazine asked Nast to draw Santas, he stuck to the same concept - although he did drop the stars and stripes in favor of a plain wool suit. "Hence," Robinson says, "the American Santa Claus took shape by repetition. We just became accustomed to this same figure."
Nast added new little details every Christmas: one year he showed Santa pouring over a list of naughty and nice children; another year showed him in a toy workshop in the North Pole. Nast also went on to become the most famous political cartoonist of the 19th century, responsible for giving the Democratic Party its donkey and the Republican Party its elephant. However, his Santa drawings are his best remembered works. In fact, Nast almost single-handedly established the Santa image as it is today - except in one major area - the colour of his suit.
In 1931, the Coca-Cola company hired an artist named Haddon Sundblom to create the artwork for a massive Christmas advertising campaign they were preparing. Until then, the fizzy drink was a summer beverage, with sales dropping off sharply in the cooler winter months. Coke hoped to reverse this trend by linking the drink to the winter holy (oops!) holidays ... and they decided the most effective way to do that would be to make Santa a Coke drinker. Sundblom was told to create a painting of Mr. Claus that the company could use in magazine advertisements. Sundblom's first brainstorm was to dump Nast's black and white Santa suit and adopt the increasingly more popular image of the old gent in red and white, which just happened to 'suit' the Coca-Cola livery. Then he managed to find a real life retired Coca-Cola sales rep. named Lou Prentice who looked so much like the public's conception of Santa that he could be used as a model. "Prior to the Sundblom illustrations," Mark Pendergrast writes in 'For God, Country and Coca-Cola', "…the Christmas saint had been variously illustrated wearing blue, yellow, green, or red.... After the soft drink ads, Santa would forever more be a huge, fat, relentlessly happy man with broad belt and black hip boots - and he would wear Coca-Cola red." While Coca-Cola has had a pervasive influence on our culture, it has certainly shaped the way we think of Santa. At the very least, we can say that the entire world's present concept of Santa owes much to American popular culture, as does so much of our world's iconography. Globalisation I guess!
In 1939, Montgomery Ward hired ad man Robert May to write a Christmas poem that their department store Santas could give away during the holiday season. He came up with one he called "Rollo the Red Nosed Reindeer." Executives of the company accepted it, but didn't like the name Rollo. So May renamed the reindeer Reginald - the only name he could think of that preserved the poem's rhythm. Montgomery Ward also rejected that name. Try as he might, May couldn't come up with another name - until his four year-old daughter suggested Rudolph. The rest is history. When the poem was put to music and recorded by singing cowboy Gene Autry, it became the second best selling single in history ("White Christmas" being the first!). Moral of the story, if you want a song to remain in the memory forever (generating lots of royalties), make it something to do with Christmas!
Now if there is or ever was a Father Christmas, we can certainly thank a few story tellers, medieval artists, romantic writers, advertising men and song writers for the image we have of him today. Whether we call him 'Father Christmas' or not, there's no denying that there is a real 'Spirit of Christmas', that lives and grows or deforms and dies with and within us.