Every Child Has a Santa Claus

In their early childhood their family held the tradition of spending Christmas with their mother’s family.  There was always Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

One early Christmas morning the eldest of those first four grandchildren talked breathlessly about how Santa Claus came the night before.  She saw a great light through the window and heard the sleigh bells, she recounted.  You should have stood up and looked out the window to say hello, I said.  She said she was scared, so she covered her face with the blanket instead.  Then she heard the door open, heard Santa Claus come in, and stop near her feet where her socks were hung.  And he placed all these gifts, she continued wide-eyed.

Well, Santa Claus came to us through the USA.  He is a 19th century creation who has evolved physically in the works of cartoonist Thomas Nast’s series of Christmas drawings in a magazine, based on the poem “The Night Before Christmas” (1822) written by Dr. Clement Clarke Moore.

Nast’s drawings of 20 years, begun in the 1860s, had integrated stories of how Santa spent the whole year making toys, reading and noting children’s wishes for special gifts, and checking their behavior.  Nast’s images are responsible for the Santa that we know today.

But it was the Dutch who brought the concept of Santa Claus to the US.  Earlier, before the Protestant Reformation, Europe had a considerable following of St. Nicholas, a 4th century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor (now said to be near Finike in Turkey) who was imprisoned during the Roman persecution of Christians and was released when Constantine became emperor.  Miracles were attributed to the bishop whose benevolence was known and he and his works became the favorite theme of medieval artists and religious plays.

St. Nicholas’s feast day is December 6, and while no historical document is said to exist to bear out his life, he is traditionally commemorated in both Western (Roman Catholic) and Eastern (Greek Orthodox) churches.  He is the patron saint of Russia and Greece and the cities of Moscow and Fribourg in Switzerland.  He also watches over a wide spectrum of age and calling, from children, sailors and unmarried girls, to merchants, pawnbrokers, and charitable organizations.  A 6th century church at Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) was built in his honor by the Roman emperor Justinian I.

St. Nicholas was buried in Myra, a shrine that became well-known after two centuries.  By the Middle Ages, Italian sailors removed his remains and took them to Bari in Italy.  This added to the saint’s popularity in Europe as Bari became a known shrine.  The saint’s relics are now at the Basilica of San Nicola, an 11th century church in Bari.  Thus is St. Nicholas known as both St. Nicholas of Myra and St. Nicholas of Bari.

Only the Dutch kept the tradition of honoring St. Nicholas after the Protestant Reformation.  Part of that tradition was for children to place wooden shoes filled with straw by the hearth on the night of the saint’s supposed arrival.  The straw was food for his donkey, his means of transportation.  St. Nicholas in turn would place small treats in the wooden shoes.

When Dutch colonists sailed for America, the image of St. Nicholas, the protector of sailors, was on the prow of their ship.  They landed in New Amsterdam, the present-day New York, and built their first church named after the saint.  The Dutch Sint Nikolaas, with the variant Sinterklaas, then evolved into Santa Claus when the English-speaking population of 17th century America adopted the saint’s legend.

The legend was further combined with Nordic tales of a magician who either punished or rewarded children according to their behavior.  Even the dwelling place assigned to him is Nordic, said to be Korvatunturi in Finland.  The Dutch children’s wooden shoes by the hearth had evolved into stockings by the chimney.

The saint’s transformation throughout the centuries has retained one thing about him— that of a compassionate gift-giver, identifying him further with the Christmas season, it being a time for gift-giving.  Thus is Santa Claus the same as Sint Nikolaas or Sinterklaas of the Dutch, Father Christmas of the English, and Kris Kringle of the Germans. The Italians and Russians have their respective female counterparts, Belfana and Babushka.

And we too have our Santa Claus, the very same one whose sleigh bells and footfalls a nine-year-old girl had heard many Christmases ago, when my kid sister and I helped her and her siblings prepare for Santa’s coming.  Because their socks were so small, we sometimes used those big Christmas decorations designed as socks or had their shoes lined up as well.  At one time, we had them use pillowcases with their socks pinned on them for form’s sake.

That little girl is now a doctor married to Tibbs Bullecer of Loay.  It won’t be long when their Paola Benmarie would hang her socks and see Santa as her mother had, as my own Angel had hung hers more than 12 days before Christmas to coax Santa to come earlier.   And we made sure that he came, with token gifts in the early days and the real surprise gift on Christmas Eve, the Santa Claus who comes on the wings of every child’s faith and dreams.

(2005)