The Everything Family Christmas Book (8 page)

The day of St. Nicholas’s death (December 6) is still observed in many parts of Europe as St. Nicholas’s Day—it marks the beginning of the Christmas season in many countries, where children receive gifts said to be from the kindly saint.

To the English, Nicholas became Father Christmas; to the French, Père Noël; to the Italians, Babbo Natale. Though many people incorrectly assign the German name for the Christ Child—Christkind or Kris Kringle—to St. Nicholas, the true German equivalent is
Weihnachtsmann,
meaning “Christmas man.”

Though popular throughout Europe, nowhere is the saint more celebrated than in Holland, where his name was transformed to Sinter Klaas. The bearded saint in this version wears breeches and a broad-brimmed hat; he carries a long Dutch pipe; and he rides a white horse with a basket of treats for good children and birch rods for naughty ones.

According to the Dutch, Sinter Klaas spends the majority of the year in Spain with his servant Black Peter (a Moor), who keeps scrupulous records of the behavior of girls and boys. A few weeks before St. Nicholas’s Eve, Sinter Klaas packs up for the Netherlands. Dressed in full bishop regalia, he arrives by steamer on the last Saturday in November; the whole city turns out to greet him and there is a ceremony featuring all the area officials.

St. Nicholas spends the time before St. Nicholas’s Eve visiting hospitals, schools, and markets, giving little gifts to good children, while Black Peter gives switches to the bad ones. The biggest presents are left for St. Nicholas’s Eve; children leave their shoes out at night filled with hay for Sinter Klaas’s horse and are given gifts in return—not wrapped, but disguised or cleverly hidden. Each present comes with a note that must be read aloud and often contains a line or two that will embarrass the recipient.

Many of the Dutch customs that surround St. Nicholas are carryovers from old Norse mythology and ritual. The god Wodin (whom the American St. Nicholas often resembled in the late eighteenth century) was said to ride around on his horse checking up on little children.

In Germany, children were warned to behave by the prospect of an encounter with a dirty, rather sinister figure known as Pelznicken (“furred Nicholas”), who carried not only gifts for good boys and girls but also long switches for naughty children. Eventually, an ogre-like companion joined the saint, to mete out justice to errant little ones.

Interpreting St. Nicholas

Gift givers inspired by St. Nicholas—who differ from the saint only in name and in a few particulars—can be found elsewhere in Europe. Russia’s Nikolai Chudovorits, for example, evolved into Father Frost, who lives beyond the Arctic Circle and comes to Russia on New Year’s Day on a reindeer-pulled sleigh with his daughter, the Snow Maiden, to place presents under trees.

The Scandinavian gift givers are much more impish and mischievous. The Norwegian Julesvenn, the Danish Julenisse, and the Swedish Jultomten are left treats on St. Nicholas’s Eve in an effort to get them to return the favor, to dissuade them from trickery, and, in the case of farmers, to ensure they’ll protect the livestock.

In some places, St. Nicholas is also celebrated as the youthful Boy Bishop who took over the church in Myra. In England, for instance, a Boy Bishop was chosen to preside over the solstice festival, along with St. Nick’s older incarnation, Father Christmas.

In some parts of Europe, the legend of St. Nicholas was incorporated into the winter solstice festivals. St. Nicholas’s Day had long opened the Christmas season, and as we have seen, the saint’s selfless gift giving and love of children was in keeping with the themes of the Nativity. Because of the closeness in time, some places eventually merged the two days.

Germany and France, for example, transferred most of the activities surrounding St. Nicholas’s Eve to Christmas Eve. The majority of European countries still keep the two separate, however; St. Nicholas brings goodies on his day, and the Christ Child or the Three Wise Men deliver on Christmas or Epiphany Eve.

Santa in the New World

St. Nicholas came to America by way of the Dutch in the 1600s. Sinter Klaas, as the name was rendered, was obviously an important figure to the Dutch settlers: They named their first church in the New World the St. Nicholas Collegiate Church. In the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam—later New York City—St. Nicholas Day and Christmas were celebrated in a merry fashion unknown to the rest of the colonies, where the strictly Puritan background of most of the settlers precluded any celebration of saints or Christmas.

It was only in the years after the American Revolution that Christmas began to win slow acceptance in various regions of the United States, however, and only at the dawn of the nineteenth century that any meaningful references to Santa Claus began to appear. The change in the national attitude can be traced at least in part to the influx of German immigrants to the new country: German immigrants were perhaps the most enthusiastic celebrants of Christmas in northern cities during this period.

A Visit from St. Nicholas

Although Washington Irving’s nostalgic turn-of-the century satires of New Amsterdam society feature some of the earliest American literary treatments of the St. Nicholas legend, the evolution from St. Nicholas to the American Santa recognized today appears to have begun in earnest at least two or three decades later.

Clement C. Moore’s enormously influential poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was written in 1822, but it did not become widely popular until several years after that. Moore wrote the verses for his own children, reciting it before his family for the first time on Christmas Eve. The poem was published anonymously, and to increasingly enthusiastic public response, until 1837, when Moore finally acknowledged authorship.

Much of what we now consider as essential to Santa—such as his plumpness—first appeared in Clement C. Moore’s poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” Moore apparently based his St. Nick on a rotund gardener who worked for him, but preferred to call the character St. Nicholas rather than Santa Claus.

Although Santa has grown over the years from the elflike stature Moore assigned to him, it is from Moore’s lines that the first (and by far the most influential) concrete physical description of Santa comes:

He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

His eyes, how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face and a little round belly
That shook, when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.

Moore’s portrayal of St. Nicholas as a generous gift giver and friend to children was, of course, an outgrowth of the legends surrounding St. Nicholas. The influence of Irving’s (often imaginative) accounts of the Dutch legend is also apparent throughout Moore’s poem.

Thomas Nast’s 1863 illustrations for the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—which itself went a long way toward standardizing the jolly one’s physical appearance—were the turning point in Nast’s career. Although his later political cartoons also won him national acclaim, he made a tradition of supplying fresh drawings of Santa for the Christmas issue of
Harper’s Weekly
each year.