By
Madeleine Kando
Like most children, I grew up with Santa. Before he and I left Hungary, to move to Paris, his name was Mikulas. He wasn’t even Hungarian by birth, but Turkish and didn’t believe in flying over rooftops in a sled. His main mode of transportation was called ‘ambulatio’, also known as walking.
Mikulas’ original name was Saint Nicholas. He was from a town called Patara in modern Turkey. He became famous by saving a poor man’s three daughters from a life of prostitution. Since the father couldn’t afford a dowry, he secretly stuffed gold coins in the daughters’ socks. That was the choice daughters had in those days: either bribe a future husband or become a whore. Isn’t that amazing? What would be considered common decency these days, turned into a world-wide tradition of ‘doing good’. But just one day a year, mind you.
Mikulas was a clever fellow. He recruited a helper who went by the name of ‘Krampus’, an ugly goat like creature with huge horns, fangs and a very long tongue. This was the anti-Saint Nicholas, often seen stuffing unfortunate juveniles in a bag, hauling them to his lair and when he was really hungry, eating them alive. That way Saint Nicholas could remain saintly and untainted.
But the carrying capacity of a baby is very limited, especially with the increasing appetite for receiving gifts in the West. There were several contenders that applied for the job: the Three Kings, Baby Jesus himself and Père Noel. The latter won by a narrow margin, but not without some help, as you will find out later.
When we moved to Holland, I witnessed the fierce competition between Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas. Every 5th of December, Sinterklaas arrives from Spain on a steam boat, accompanied by Zwarte Piet. This Black Peter is saddled with the difficult choice of selecting which children have been good and which ones have been bad. If a child has been particularly bad, he gets stuffed in a canvas bag and shipped back to Spain. No wonder the Dutch are so stoic. Early on they are taught to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
The Dutch Santa Claus is pretty useless when it comes to presents and Christmas in general is a fairly boring church going affair. It's on Sinterklaas day that Dutch children put out their wooden shoes in front of the fireplace. But what could the bad children possibly have done to deserve being kidnapped? Needless to say I was especially good around December 5th.
Many questions remained unanswered in my 11 year old mind: how did a goat-like, horned Krampus morph into someone who was clearly of African descent and why did Saint Nicholas move from Turkey to Spain?
When I moved to the States, Saint Nicholas had completely disappeared from the scene, together with his helper, the scary Krampus. I was a mother by then, and heaved a sigh of relief. I wouldn’t have to explain to my own children what would happen if they failed to be good. The worst that can happen to American children is to find their stocking full of coal, but being beaten and stuffed in a canvas bag would not go down so smoothly over here.
In the beginning, celebrating Christmas was a rowdy, drunken affair in this country. It gave the much overworked immigrants a well-deserved chance to unwind and roll under the festive tables. But some famous ‘influencers’, such as Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore, wanted Christmas to become a more civilized family affair, so they came up with charming, soothing poems (the Night before Christmas) and stories of British upper class gentlemen magnanimously pretending to trade places with their poor servants.
The person who gave Santa Claus its present-day appearance of the jolly, round-bellied, rosy cheeked character, was Thomas Nast, a Civil War cartoonist. He was a fervent abolitionist and published his brilliant work in Harpers Magazine, to encourage union soldiers to fight the good cause. The American Santa Claus was born.
Having no Krampus or Zwarte Piet, the American Santa had to dole out presents all by himself. Without the help of his elves, he would have keeled over from exhaustion a long time ago.
But how did Santa manage to recruit all these elves? Since elves, gnomes and other vertically challenged individuals were already part of the Nordic mythology, it was only logical that the immigrants of these noble countries would bring over these traditions. That is how elves seeped into the American mix.
But isn’t there a limit to how many elves the North Pole can accommodate? Besides, Santa’s already oversized bag is bound to eventually get stuck in someone’s chimney, leaving Santa’s legs dangling there, for all eternity.
One solution would be to reinstate Baby Jesus as the gift giver. Even though he could easily fit through chimneys, his carrying capacity would drastically limit the gift giving.
Merry Christmas!
