The Christmas arrived with the sound of a thousand malls quietly switching over to holiday music. As displays go up in windows and on porches, you might see the Christmas spirit filtered through various interpretations and incarnations, but Santa Claus remains ubiquitous. His red and white robes, his long white beard, and his jolly demeanor are inextricably part of him, linked to the spirit of giving and togetherness.
Or are they? Well, not exactly. Santa Claus, as he currently exists, is an amalgam of myths, reality, fantasy, and a heaping soupcon of advertising, synthesized into the modern-day red-robed figure that adorns storefronts and creeps into your consciousness earlier every year.
Santa Claus wasn’t always jolly. He seems to have been a rather grim and humorless man, obsessed with justice and righteousness. The man who became Santa was once Nicholas of Patara, a child orphaned by disease, who was apparently born between 260 and 280 A.D., in what was then Greece, and is now the southern coast of Turkey.
Nicholas gave away the wealth his parents left him, helped the poor and the unfortunate where he could, and according to legend, was elected Bishop of Myra even though he was not previously a priest.
The newly-ordained Bishop Nicholas became a highly political man: even his name means “victory of the people.” He traveled to Constantinople to petition for lower taxes – successfully. Bishop Nicholas was also responsible for the utter destruction of the famed Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, on the grounds that its presence tempted new Christians back to paganism.
But he was most notorious for secretly saving three women from prostitution by giving them each golden balls to pay their own way without having to sell themselves, slipping the money into their stockings. Over time, the legends about him grew, until he had a reputation for giving gifts at random and in secret ways, like putting gold coins in shoes that people left outside. After he died and was beatified, Dec. 6 was dedicated to his legacy of giftgiving.
Saint Nicholas is also the patron saint of harbor cities and all of Greece, and in some regions is still revered as a Christianized version of Poseidon – thereby, in a way, coming to symbolize what he sought to destroy. There is also a school of thought that the stories of Nicholas’s wisdom, love for children, and ability to work miracles comes directly from Norse myths of Odin, not such a far reach when you consider what Santa traditionally uses to pull his sleigh.
Because of his association with the sea and harbors, Saint Nicholas traveled with sailors, and so was one of the first saints to arrive on new shores, first with the Vikings and then with the rest of Europe.
He began his evolution into Santa Claus because of an affectionate shortening of his name in Dutch: Sint Nikolaas became Sinter Klaas, which finally, in the 1800s, was Americanized into the far jollier Santa Claus, just in time for Christmas to regain the popularity it had lost in the United States after the American Revolution. His feast day became a day to give and mete out justice, joining with other Yule traditions to eventually make him an elflike, sprightly old man who decided who was naughty or nice, and who got gifts or handed out coal.
The poems “The Night Before Christmas” and “A Visit From St. Nicholas” cemented his place in American culture. But even then, Santa Claus was not yet recognizable. For one thing, sometimes he wore a blue tricorn hat and yellow stockings, sometimes a red and white cloak and waistcoat and Flemish stockings, and he was still somewhat more saintly than mythical. Santa became standardized as a pink-cheeked, jolly, red and white clad gentleman not because of any ancient history or myth, but because Coca-Cola cannily used illustrations of him to promote their products.
But that’s no reason to be cynical about Santa Claus. He is simply the latest iteration of a long line of stories of sprites, saints, or gods arriving at homes to dole out gifts to children and represent the end of a year and the beginning of a new one. These traditions have persisted from the Roman celebration of Saturnalia (during which people would cry to one another, “Io, Saturnalia!” from which “Ho, ho, ho” is thought to have been derived) to the Father Christmas stories that pilgrims brought to the Americas. The most miraculous thing about Santa Claus is that his stories have persisted for as long as they have, drawn from more than two thousand years of history.
