Let us remember this day in Advent as a reminder of the true spirit of Saint Nicholas—a valiant defender of the faith, a tender-hearted lover of the poor and a kindly, generous soul, who saw that the true message of Christ’s nativity was that unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom.
How did a fourth-century, heretic-slapping bishop from Southern Turkey wind up being a fat, Coca-Cola-swigging American elf?
Saint Nicholas was born into a wealthy Christian family in the third century. His parents died in a plague, and having inherited the family fortune, he decided to obey the radical call of Christ and give it to the poor. So he became famous for his generosity to those in need, his love for children, and his concern for sailors and ships.
Bishop Nicholas was exiled and imprisoned during the persecutions under the Emperor Diocletian, and after his release, attended the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 where he famously lost his temper and slapped the heretic Arius in the face. He died December 6, AD 343 in Myra and was buried in his cathedral church. Legends grew up about his generosity, and throughout the Middle Ages he became one of the most popular and wonder-working saints across Europe.
Now “jolly old Saint Nick,” aka Santa Claus, is a secular figure used to promote godless good cheer and commercial consumerism. What happened?
St. Nicholas travelled well because, among other things, he was the patron saint of seafarers. Therefore, the first Europeans to arrive in the New World travelled with St. Nicholas as their patron. On his first voyage, Columbus named a Haitian port for St. Nicholas on the saint’s feast day December 6, 1492 and in Florida, the town now named Jacksonville was first called St. Nicholas Ferry by the Spanish explorers.
The Protestant revolutionaries were not enthusiastic about saints, but the celebrations around St. Nicholas’ Day were so popular that they had trouble stamping them out completely. Northern Europeans—especially the Dutch— continued to celebrate with a man on horseback dressed as an Eastern bishop in red vestments and flowing white beard processing through the streets. Remembering Nicholas’ gifts of gold to redeem children about to be sold into slavery, the celebrations included parties with childish hijinks, and gifts of nuts, apples, and sweets placed in shoes and stockings left beside beds before the hearth.
The popular version of the narrative is that the Dutch brought St. Nicholas Day customs to the new world. However historians disagree and suggest that it was German immigrants in Pennsylvania who kept the feast of St. Nicholas. They were the “Pennsylvania Dutch”—the “Dutch” meaning “Deutsch” or “German” rather than the Dutch from the Netherlands. It was from Pennsylvania that the St. Nicholas celebrations made their way to New York and only after American Independence did the Netherlander Dutch in New York begin to remember and celebrate their heritage.
The St. Nicholas Center website reveals that “John Pintard, the influential patriot and antiquarian who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both society and city. In January 1809, Washington Irving joined the society and on St. Nicholas Day that same year, he published Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with humorous references to a jovial St. Nicholas.”
Irving’s St. Nicholas was not an Eastern Orthodox bishop, but a mischievous Dutchman with a clay pipe. The author’s imagination places St. Nick in Dutch New Amsterdam, and for the first time he is seen dropping down chimneys to give gifts to kids. When the New York Historical Society held its first St. Nicholas celebration on Dec 6, 1810, Pintard got artist Alexander Anderson to create an image of the saint filling stockings by the fireplace.
The idea caught on. Eleven years later publisher William B. Gilley brought out Sante Claus, The Children’s Friend. Now the gift-giving saint arrived from the North in a sleigh with flying reindeer. This image along with a cute, didactic poem sealed Bishop Nicholas’ fate. Not only was Sante Claus in a sleigh with reindeer, but he arrived on Christmas Eve—not December sixth, and he arrived with a ghastly new idea: He now “had a list and was checking it twice.” He was “gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.” Put in the language of the 1821 poem, he had a ”long, black birchen rod… directs a Parent’s hand to use when virtue’s path his sons refuse.” His gifts were respectable and safe: “pretty doll… peg-top, or a ball; no crackers, cannons, squibs, or rockets to blow their eyes up, or their pockets. No drums to stun their Mother’s ear, nor swords to make their sisters fear; but pretty books to store their mind with knowledge of each various kind.”
Two years later the new St. Nicholas mythology was consolidated with the hugely popular poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, now known as The Night Before Christmas. The image was complete, for Santa was now…”
…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 of 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 bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf. . . .
Then in 1863 cartoonist Thomas Nast began a series of annual black-and-white drawings inspired by the poem. These drawings established a rotund Santa with flowing beard, fur garments, and an omnipresent clay pipe. Along with the image shift came a linguistic shift. The German “Sankt Niklaus” and the Dutch “Sinterklaas” became “Sancte Claus,” then “Santa Claus”.
By the 1920s well-known illustrators N.C. Wyeth and J.C. Leyendecker had jumped on the sleigh, producing lush, realistic portrayals of the red-suited, white-bearded, rotund elf, and by the 1930s Norman Rockwell picked up the tradition in his covers for The Saturday Evening Post. In 1931 artist Haddon Sundblom linked Santa with Coca-Cola Santa and for thirty-five years Santa was famous for refreshing his thirst with Coke before visiting another home in his endless Christmas Eve adventure. He thus became universal, appearing in advertisements everywhere. As a result the image of St. Nicholas became like the soda he was drinking: sweetly sentimental but with little nutritional value. The advertisers took it to the next level and soon Santa was the universal salesman—used to sell most anything at the end of the year.
Now that the link between Santa Claus and St. Nicholas is completely broken, it is a good time to rejuvenate the true celebration of St. Nicholas Day. No sense being a Scrooge about Santa. Let him be a jolly part of Christmas, but let us bring back St. Nicholas and remember this day in Advent as a reminder of the true spirit of St. Nicholas—a valiant defender of the faith, a tender-hearted lover of the poor and a kindly, generous soul who, in his kindness to children, saw that the true message of Christ’s nativity was that unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom.
This essay first appeared here in December 2014.
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The featured image is “Der Heilige Nikolaus von Myra” (1736) by Mathieu Elias, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I fear the Dutch have had a hand in destroying ‘Santa Claus’. http://io9.com/5714824/rare-exports-is-the-most-disturbingly-awesome-christmas-movie-ever
We the spaniards fought against the dutches
A fascinating post. Three cheers for bringing back St. Nicholas Day.
YES!!!…Each year when I hear the announcements (and this week’s cover of the weekly BULLETIN, rather than the 2nd Week of Advent!) of “Breakfast with Santa” at my parish, I want to scream out….”NO! It’s the PERFECT time to have a “Breakfast with St. Nicholas!!!”
This could be a true TEACHING MOMENT….and there are good Bishop’s/St. Nicholas costumes available!!!
It is SO sad!!
Google “picture of karl marx gravestone” to find out in whose image the current Santa is molded…this was a ploy by the Marxists and their funders to make the Welfare State supplant the Church as the official dispenser of goodies.
There is evidence that the Dutch (read ‘Flemish’) had Sinterklaas already in the 1600’s. Was the author aware of this? http://flemishamerican.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-flemish-influence-on-sinterklaas-in.html
It was not possible to cover all the detailed history of St Nicholas across Europe. My awareness of his popularity–including the medieval Flemish traditions–is there at the end of the third paragraph when I mention his popularity across Europe.
I never considered that Santa Claus was himself an Elf; it makes sense, though, given his (apparent) “immortality.” I agree that Santa Claus can be a fine mythic (in the good sense of that term) image or symbol for Christmas, SO LONG AS St. Nicholas’ original character and the conditions of his historical evolution in the popular imagination are kept in mind. The fact is that the real St. Nicholas was [is] a noteworthy defender of the Incarnation, and the Incarnate God is the Christmas Gift par excellence. The very fact of a Christmas gift is a reflection of the Incarnation: Jesus — the Logos and “image of the invisible God” — is the Father’s “idea” of what Man is meant to be, and the same is His Gift to us. When we give a gift, something of our “idea” of the recipient is “incarnate” in the very gift itself. Who better to represent our annual participation in this divine act-of-giving of the Holy Gift than that saint who so heroically struck the Heretic? — which is, let us admit, the only really worthwhile response to heresy.
The fact of the “red vestments” is a fascinating precursor to the popular Santa suit.
The link between St. Nick and Santa Claus is most certainly NOT broken everywhere. But, posts such as this only further destroy a good myth.
Winsor McKay, the talented comic strip artist and creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland drew several Santas in his splendid strip around Christmas time in the early 1900’s. I mention this because, though I am not entirely sure, one of his Santas was not dressed in red. I wonder if anyone has done research in depth on his costumes in the color sections of newspapers and magazines in the early part of the 20th century. Perhaps there would be quite a bit of diversity.
Fred McCormick: I have turn-of-the-century Christmas postcards in which Santa is dressed in blue or green.
I am in Slovenia. On St. Nicholas day children wake up to little presents, and those who are naughty are supposed to get the “hoof”, a baked piece of tasty bread in the shape of a devil’s cloven hoof with his face on top of the hoof. Actually, they’re a treat, everyone eats them (and they look quite cheerful, not mean at all). So the past is not entirely forgotten even though some people here can’t tell you where the tradition comes from. Still, it’s a lot of fun. And has been going on for generations. So all is not lost. Traditions hide a real truth-
To tell the truth, I am so glad that I came across your article and become enlightened about such a significant component of the historia of our world. I think that it is really important to be aware of such things as the identity and role of Saint Nicholas in our world. Without any doubts, most of the mentioned facts regarding Saint Nicholas blew my mind because of their singularity and non-obviousness. Of course, this connection of Saint Nicholas with Santa Claus has always been truly great and close because it was St. Nicholas who served as the prototype of the modern Santa Claus, but I don’t really like all these mentioned myths. I think that it is really important to differentiate these two significant personalities and to pay due attention to the celebration of St. Nicholas Day because, from my point of view, this day has a huge value in our life and Saint Nicholas is a really essential figure in our historia.
Today I am visiting my Dutch neighbor lady in her retirement community with a large wooden shoe filled with St. Nicholas Day goodies. She is full of stories of the visits St. Nick made to her village in Holland when she was growing up, accompanied by his sidekick Swarte Piet (Black Pete) as they disembarked from a boat on the river and gave presents to the kids. St. Nicholas is definitely a big tradition in the Dutch-speaking areas of Europe.
When my kids were young, one of the other kids asked our pastor about Santa Claus and St. Nicholas. The pastor had a good answer: “Santa Claus is good friends with Saint Nicholas.” This way, he upheld the dignity of St. Nicholas without being a scrooge regarding Santa Claus. As for us, we left the kids presents under the Christmas tree, but didn’t really talk much about Santa one way or the other (at least not the way my parents played him up!)
I think it’s good, maybe ultimately necessary, to know the “real” St Nicholas but I don’t think there’s any harm or shallowness or disgrace in all the images of a jolly man sailing through the skies on Christmas Eve with a sleigh—-and Rudolph too!
The message is clear and before I was ever a Catholic or even much of a Protestant, the specialness of Christmas was obvious! In fact, the “magic” of it all is what can lead to looking deeper.