The Sunday Tribune - Spectrum

"You are not a Father Christmas just because you wear a big white beard and a red robe", says Ole Lundsgaard, head of the Santas Guild in Denmark. In the past Lundsgaard and his fellow Santas have argued passionately over the true home of Father Christmas. Indeed, on the borders between Finnish, Swedish and Norweigian Lapland, some men have come to blows over exactly where the origins of Father Christmas lie. Russia, Iceland, Germany and Greenland have also laid claim to him.

He was not always a fat man with a fluffy beard and a rubicund face. And until Coca Cola Company decided that Santa Claus was too good a marketing opportunity to miss, he didn’t wear red and white — the colours they earmarked as their own — either.

In 1931, the Coca Cola Company commissioned Chicago illustrator Haddon Sundblom (whose family, incidentally was Swedish) to develop the image of a more cheery Santa Claus. For inspiration, he turned to Clement Moore’s 1922 poem, A Visit From St Nicholas, which describes the toymaker as "chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf". Then, for his model, he turned to his neighbour, Lou Prentice, a plump, jovial, retired salesman.

Santa Claus was not known to fly, driving team of reindeer, through the bejewelled sky or indeed come down the chimney to deliver toys to children until Moore described this unconventional method of delivering gifts in his poem. But from where did he derived his inspiration? The presence of a reindeer gives the first clue.

The Koryak, Kamchadal and Chukchi people of north-eastern Siberia worship the Great Reindeer Spirit. As is the vogue among primitive tribesmen, they believed that the only person who can communicate with this spirit is the Shaman (the tribe’s witch doctor). This he does by eating the fly agaric mushroom which induces and ecstatic trance. He then ‘flies’ to the spirit world, to collect messages and ‘gifts’ in the shape of new songs, dances and stories for the tribe. The Shaman enters the realm of the spirits through the smoke hole in the roof of his hut.

The obvious parallels with the Santa Claus legend raise an important question. How did the obscure rituals of Siberian tribesmen find their way into Moore’s poem who was an American? Possibly the answer lies in the fact that Moore was a professor of oriental languages. The rituals of Siberian tribesmen had been known to the European scholars for at least a century before Moore wrote his poem.

The bearded old man in the fur costume that we are so familiar with today incorporates many traditions from different European countries, seasoned with a dash of American spice as European immigrants moved to the New World and adapted their beliefs and customs to the United States. These ancient traditions have their sources in religion, ancient pagan practices and in the modern world’s concern for a good story.

The e-mail address of Santa Claus stnick@computek.net, plucked off Internet from approximately 100 Santa sites, offers a clue to his origins, which are blurred in the mists of time. Though there is some confusions about its pagan and Christian aspects, tradition points to Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, Asia Minor, who lived in 4th century AD.

There isn’t much we know about the historical Santa because his existence is not attested to by any historical document. However, the Little Pictorial Lives Of The Saints (Benziger Brothers, Printers to the Holy Apostlic See) tells us that Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, was born in Patara, Lycia in Turkey around 1257 AD. He came from a wealthy family, whom he lost in a plague and then went to Palestine and Egypt when he was young. He became Bishop of Myra soon after returning to Lycia, was imprisoned by Diocletian and freed by Costantine. After his death in about 1350 AD, he was buried in his church at Myra but he was allowed no rest. His remains were disinterred by Italian sailors or merchants and distributed among various churches. His relics remain enshrined in the 11th century basilica of San Nicola, Bari.

His place in Christmas iconography developed from two legends: the first concerns a poor father and the second an unkind butcher. The poor father was unable to offer a dowry for his daughters and was about to deliver them to a brothel. When Nicholas heard of their plight, he gifted each daughter some gold, enabling them to improve their plight, the story is that he threw three packets of money through their window one night — a motif that has links with the image of Santa climbing down a chimney. In doing so, he also leant the symbol of three golden balls to the British pawnbrokers, who, no doubt, believe that they are in the same business. The nasty butcher had slaughtered three children and dumped them in a bucket of brine and Nicholas is said to have restored them to life.

The miracle gave him his symbol — the the side of the vessel from which he retrieved the children. The act of charity ensured his position in a cross-cultural pantheon. The tradition of giving gifts on Christmas morning undoubtedly stems from Nicholas’s act of charity, for on December 5 (the anniversary of his death), children were given presents.

In the Middle Ages, devotion to Nicholas extended to all parts of the Europe. He became patron saint of Russia and Greece, of cities like Fribourg in Switzerland and Moscow and Manhattan island. He also became the patron saint of sailors, businessmen, pawnbrokers, traders, charitable fraternities and guilds, unmarried women and even thieves. But he is best known as the patron saint of children.

After the Reformation, many of the practices associated with Nicholas died in almost all countries of Europe, except Holland. They did not give him the heave-ho. When the Dutch migrants struck roots in New Amsterdam (present day New York) in the 17th century, they carried with them the traditions associated with Sinter Klaas ( a Dutch variant of St Nicholas) which were assimilated into the English-speaking colonies there. Santa Claus was born there and the resulting image crystallised in the 19th century.

The Dutch legend says that Sinter Klaas arrived from Spain in a boat (as he does till today) in his red bishop’s robes and rode a white horse over rooftops. As the legend developed in the Netherlands, the three bags of gold of St Nicholas were transformed into a bulging sack of presents which Sinter Klaas distributed to good boys and girls on December 6 — the eve of St Nicholas’s feast.

The legend of St Nicholas, combined with old, Nordic folk tales of a magician who punished naughty children and rewarded the good, was gradually transformed with typical American panache into the present-day kindly, old gentleman. Even the day of the feast was changed to Christmas Day to appeal to secular sentiments.

Saint Nicholas came to be revered in Greece, where he is called as Haglos Nicholaos, Germany, where his name is Sankt Nikolaus and Austria, where he is known as Sankt Nicolo. He became Father Christmas in England, Bonhomme Noel in France and even Lang Khoong in Mainland China.

In Finland, the name of Father Christmas — Joulupukki — literally translates as Yule Buck. While the old pagan traditions were subsumed by Christianity elsewhere in Europe, they survived in a diluted form in remote Finnish Lapland, where the winter festival of the Yule Buck was marked by gifts to appease the spirits of darkness who wore goat skins and horns.

Like today’s incentive "be good or Santa won’t bring you any presents", the Yule Buck was used to frighten children into behaving. Today Joulupukki still asks whether children behaved during the year. Santa’s costume may also owe something to the traditional, colourful fur breeches, tunics and boots of the Finnish Laps. His cap, on the other hand, probably derives from the bishop’s mitre of Saint Nicholas. When Sinter Klaas crossed the Atlantic along with the Dutch immigrants to North America, he usually wore blue, green or yellow, and was tall and thin.

Santa Claus may be a man of tradition. But these days even the symbol of Christmas for millions of children around the world is taking some unusual steps to keep up the pace of modern life. To help him with what has become a year-round job, Santa has hooked up to cyberspace so fans who can’t travel to the Arctic Circle can see and talk to him live online an watch him receive guests in his office.

Around 5,000 people, mostly, but not all, children, will sit on his lap each day during the busy December weeks. For the rest of us, the Website www.santaclaus.com, launched in November 2000, may be just the ticket.

Santa says his focus is still to bring joy and hear the wishes of people who travel to see him in person from as far away as Australia, Japan and Tahiti. He is worried that the rapid growth of the personal computer and the internet — which each day reaches millions of more people may limit children’s creativity.

"I’m not saying the Internet and the PC are bad, but a computer is limiting and has boundaries, whereas a child with a pen, or a few pieces of wood, a hammer and some nails has no limits", he said recently.

Quintessentially, Santa Claus is a Christmas character. A character who, according to the stuff of myths and legends, goes around spreading good cheer and Yuletide spirit. The essence of the festive season, Santa is a celebration of faith. And one who has been picked off the shelf of legends and dolled up to serve the ends of marketing moguls.

Santa can be contacted at www.santaclaus.com