by Gerry Bowler
The curse of God and the New Year be on you
And the scath [harm] of the plaintive buzzard,
Of the hen-harrier, of the raven, of the eagle,
And the scath of the sneaking fox.
The scath of the dog and cat be on you,
Of the boar, of the badger and of the ghoul,
Of the hipped bear and of the wild wolf,
And the scath of the foul polecat.
It should not be surprising that most houses gave what they could, providing the treat lest the trick fall on them.
Though we can see the long association between Christmas and gift-giving, what the world lacked for more than a thousand years was the annual appearance of a magical gift-bringer, one who cared particularly about children. Such a figure would appear in the twelfth century in the form of Saint Nicholas.
By the year 1100, Saint Nicholas was the most powerful saint on the church’s calendar, rivalled only in earthly and heavenly influence by the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Nicholas legend (and we must call it that because its historical foundations are shaky) asserts that he was a bishop of Myra, on the coast of what is now Turkey, early in the fourth century. Though his real activities (if any) are principally the subject of speculation, we know that within a few centuries of his alleged death on December 6, 343, a widely disseminated body of stories had grown up around him and that he was the object of considerable veneration around the Mediterranean rim. In these stories, Nicholas (whose name means “people’s victory”) takes on the role of wonder worker, renowned for miracles that saved a host of sailors, soldiers, officials, children, and starving townspeople.* In his lifetime, and even after his death, Nicholas could be counted on to come to the aid of those who called on his name, be they Christians, Jews, or Muslims and other “unbelievers.” At times tender and nurturing, at other times wielding a vengeful whip or rod, Nicholas had the powers of flight and miraculous transport, wafting innocent captives back home from slavery, hovering over stormy seas to calm the waves, or appearing suddenly in front of the guilty to confront them with their misdeeds.*
Two of these stories have special significance for the origins of Santa Claus. In one of the earliest of his legends, the young Nicholas learns of a father who, finding himself unable to provide dowries for his three daughters, reluctantly decides to sell his children into slavery and prostitution. With supreme tact Nicholas manages on three nights to throw bags of gold through the father’s window, saving the girls from lives of shame. His secret nocturnal do-gooding is detected by the recipient of his charity, but Nicholas begs him to tell no one of his acts of kindness. The grateful father must have spread the tale, however, because Nicholas became, in time, the patron of both maidens and fruitful marriages.
In the second story, Nicholas, now an elderly bishop, stops one night at an inn, in which the evil innkeeper had earlier murdered three young men, students whose dismembered remains were pickled in a barrel in his cellar. Miraculously, Nicholas detected this atrocious deed and restored the students to wholeness and life – an inspiration for countless artists over the centuries who have since depicted the saint standing over three naked figures emerging from a vat. The murderer confesses and repents; Nicholas is merciful and goes so far as to promise the innkeeper’s barren wife that she will give birth to a son; and hence the saint’s patronage of students and children.
The fame enjoyed by Nicholas accelerated rapidly after his violent kidnapping in 1087. Relics, the physical remains of saints, were highly prized in the Middle Ages for their wonder-working powers. Pilgrims might journey thousands of miles to visit a church that housed the thigh bone of Saint Swithin, the cloak of Saint Martin, or a drop of the breast milk of the Virgin Mary, hoping that contact with, or even a glimpse of, these holy relics would effect a miraculous cure. Devotional travel brought prestige to a city and enriched its churches with the grateful offerings of the faithful. The relics of some saints were thought especially potent, and they became the objects of an international trade that borrowed, bought, sold, or stole. The relics of Nicholas were held to exude an aromatic liquid or “myrrh” that flowed from the tomb of the saint and drew visitors to his burial site even after the town of Myra had been overrun by the Turks. Some in the Christian West began to think that it was a shame and a reproach that the bones of a revered bishop should remain in lands ruled by infidels and made plans to remove him to the safety of a Catholic territory.
Such a “translation” of relics was not uncommon. The practice had been made famous by Venetian sailors who in the ninth century had stolen the bones of St. Mark from under the noses of the Muslims of Alexandria, hiding the blessed apostle under a cargo of pork. Under the patronage of San Marco, Venice had prospered and in the year 1087 Venetians cast longing eyes at Myra and Saint Nicholas. Other seafaring interests, however, became aware of the designs of Venice and acted swiftly to forestall them. Merchants from the southern Italian port of Bari, ruled by Normans who had long been enamoured of the Nicholas cult, swept down upon Myra and made their way to the church that housed the tomb. Finding it guarded not by an army of fierce Saracens but a mere handful of Orthodox monks, they tried reason, bribery, and finally threats to make the unarmed custodians reveal where the bones lay. The monks yielded this information only after a divine communication from the saint himself made it clear that he wished to leave his abode of some seven centuries and make a new home elsewhere. Joyfully, the Barians made their way back to Italy, where Saint Nicholas was reinterred and his remains began once more to ooze forth their miraculous manna di san Nicola. (The Venetians also claimed to have made off with relics of the holy man, and Nicholas’s erstwhile keepers at Myra also swore that they had never given over the true set of bones, so three cities could lay claim to be graced by his presence. Saints, it would seem, multiply by division.*) In 2004, these relics were subjected to a forensic technology that is said to be able to reconstruct an original facial image from skeletal remains. Saint Nicholas, it now appears, was about five-foot-six (1.68 metres tall) with a wide chin and brow and, perhaps unsurprisingly in a saint known for his forthright interventions, a broken nose.
The cult of Nicholas, wherein he was seen to be the heavenly protector of those aforementioned categories but also a host of others – Aberdonians, apothecaries, Austrians, bakers, barrel-makers, Belgians, boatmen, bootblacks, brewers, brides, butchers, button-makers, captives, chandlers, coopers, dock workers, druggists, Dutchmen, firemen, fishermen, florists, folk falsely accused, Greeks, grooms, haberdashers, judges, Liverpudlians, longshoremen, merchants, murderers, newlyweds, notaries, old maids, orphans, parish clerks, paupers, pawnbrokers, perfumers, pharmacists, pilgrims, pirates, poets, rag-pickers, Russians, sailors, sealers, shipwrights, Sicilians, spice dealers, thieves, travellers, and weavers – had all begun on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, but now that he was securely ensconced in the West it spread all throughout Europe, and even as far as Greenland, where the first cathedral erected by the Viking settlers was named after him. Hymns were sung in his honour, liturgies were written to praise him, stained-glass windows and statues portrayed his deeds, plays were performed based on his miracles, and in twelfth-century France some generous souls sought to imitate him in a way that was to change the world.
In the Middle Ages, gifts and the Christmas season had become inseparable. But children who wanted these gifts were expected to demand them, going door to door in groups and accompanying their requests with threats. A revolution in gift-giving was achieved when French nuns in the 1100s honoured the patron saint of the young by secretly leaving presents at the houses of poor children on the eve of Saint Nicholas, giving the holy man himself the credit for this deed. This practice spread throughout western and central Europe, though, curiously, it never permeated the southern Catholic lands that would develop stories of supernatural Christmas gift-bringers of their own. A sixteenth-century English rendition of a German look at the custom linked the legend of the three purses of gold to the my
sterious arrival of presents:
Saint Nicholas money used to give to Maydens secretlie,
Who, that he still may use his wonted liberality
Their mothers all their children on the eeve do cause to fast, And when they every one at night in senselesse sleepe are cast:
Both Apples, Nuttes, and peares they bring, and other things beside,
As caps, and shooes, and petticotes, which secretly they hide,
And in the morning found, they say, that this saint Nicholas brought …
The saint came through the window (even when it was barred shut) or down the chimney; sometimes he came alone and sometimes with companions; he left gifts in stockings and gifts in shoes, by the fire, by the window, by the bed; he walked or flew or rode a donkey. However he accomplished his deeds of miraculous generosity, he was petitioned in song and prayer by children for centuries. In Artois, in northern France, they sang:
Saint Nicholas, patron of good children
I kneel for you to intercede.
Hear my voice through the clouds
And this night give me some toys [joujoux].
I want most of all a playhouse
With some flowers and little birds,
A mountain, a green meadow,
And some sheep drinking in the brooks.
In the Netherlands, they begged:
Sinterklaes, good noble man,
Put something in my shoe,
An apple or a lemon,
A nut to crack.
So avidly adopted was the custom of giving gifts on the saint’s eve that Saint Nicholas markets sprang up, providing the playthings and edible treats that the occasion demanded. In towns across Germany, France, and the Netherlands, these markets were outlets for the professional toy and doll makers that were now appearing and for the bakers and confectioners who turned out seasonal treats such as marzipan, gingerbread, and cookies in the shape of the beloved bishop. Those historians who have questioned the nature of medieval parents’ love for their children must account for the ways that mothers and fathers threw themselves into finding such methods to delight their little ones during Christmas. It may be that the late-medieval view of Jesus as the brother of humanity prompted parents to mark the season of his Nativity by giving the same sorts of gifts as were given to children at the birth of a baby brother or sister. However, lest the saint appear too benevolent, it must be remembered that he had his stern side as well: this was the same Nicholas of legend who smote unbelievers and evildoers with rods and whips. Children who misbehaved knew that an empty shoe or a switch in the stocking might await them. German families kept a Klasholz – a Nicholas stick – on which to keep track of the number of Our Fathers said by the child, both to impress the saint when he arrived and to remind the child of the conditional nature of the anticipated gifts. In England, a book of saints legends printed by William Caxton in 1483 noted that while Nicholas was humble and joyous, he was also “cruel in correctyng.”
The religious revolutions that swept Western civilization in the sixteenth century did not leave Christmas or holiday gift-giving untouched. Protestant reformers universally despised the medieval cult of saints, which had claimed that some Christian souls had more influence in heaven than others and were therefore worthy of devotion and prayers. Across northern and western Europe, saints days were abolished, their statues were pulled down, and a host of social customs underwent change. Could Saint Nicholas and his role as the Christmas gift-bringer survive?
In most Protestant countries, the answer was no. Our sour poet Barnabe Googe linked the December 5 gift-giving custom to the excessive veneration of saints and other unspecified, but no doubt dire, popish practices, saying, “Thus tender mindes to worship Saints and wicked things are taught.” We hear no more of Saint Nicholas’s nocturnal visits in England after the accession of Elizabeth 1 in 1558. In that country and in Scotland, gifts were henceforth reserved for New Year’s Day, and we hear little of gifts for children for a long time.
In many areas of Germany, both Protestant and Catholic, poor Nicholas was elbowed aside for a new gift-bringer, the Christ child. Martin Luther himself spoke of a peaceful coexistence of the two figures, each giving presents on their respective night. In 1532, he wrote: “This is what we do when we teach our children to fast and pray and hang up their stockings that the Christ Child or Saint Nicholas may bring them presents. But if they do not pray they will get nothing or only a switch and horse apples.* ” Later in the century, however, his disciples would call for a more thoroughgoing purge of the saint. In 1570 in Strasbourg, a reformed preacher called for the renaming of the famed Christmas market, demanding that the Saint Nicholas fair become the Christkindelmarkt in honour of the infant Jesus. The Calvinist theologian Walich Sieuwerts cried: “It is a foolish and pointless custom to fill children’s shoes with all sorts of sweets and nonsense. What else is this but sacrifice to an idol? Those who do it do not seem to understand what true religion is.” In the Dutch town of Grave, the authorities deplored the fact that the practice of Saint Nicholas’s gift-giving put “many decent people to great expense and stimulates the youth in superstition.” They forbade all citizens from observing the celebration or allowing their children to put out shoes for the saint to fill. In Amsterdam, they melted down the silver statue of Nicholas to pay for the war against their Spanish overlords and proscribed the Saint Nicholas market. Frisian towns banned questing on St. Nicholas Eve, and the city of Arnhem banned cookies baked in the shape of the saint, even in the home. Across Europe, church and secular authorities repressed the old custom of choosing choirboys as “Nicholas Bishops,” who traditionally had presided over services, parades, and parties from December 6 to 28.
Theologians and magistrates may curse or issue edicts, but the outlawing of magic was bound to invite resistance. Though one supernatural gift-bringer had been denied them, the families of Europe soon found that there was a host of mysterious figures able to take his place, some dark and threatening, some creatures of light and grace, all of them willing and able to bear presents to the homes of good children. The centuries between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution saw the Christmas appearance of shaggy bogeymen, witches with iron teeth, ghostly figures in white, devils with chains, men clad in fur, straw, and goatskin, fairies, kings, angels, saints, and an amazing peeing-and-pooping log.
In the early seventeenth century, a Protestant pastor warned that parents ought not to leave gifts in their children’s beds and give Saint Nicholas the credit. “This is a bad custom,” he said, “because it points children to the saint, while yet we know that not Saint Nicholas but the holy Christ child gives us all good things for body and soul, and He alone it is whom we ought to call upon.” For Protestants, the Christ child, or das Christkindl as he was known in German-speaking lands, was an obvious choice as the new gift-bringer: since God was the ultimate source of all good things, what better substitute for a discredited bishop could there be than the sacred infant himself whose birthday was being celebrated? The celebrations moved accordingly, away from the saint’s day in early December to Christmas Eve, thus focusing more clearly on (as later centuries would say) the reason for the season. So sensible a custom was this that le petit Jésus began to appear on December 24 in many Catholic areas as well. The shift to the newborn Jesus was, however, not without obstacles. For one thing, any adult could dress up as Saint Nicholas and stage an appearance at home or school to awe the children and quiz them on their behaviour, but genuine human babies were unreliable impersonators of the new divine gift-bringer. Consequently, the Christ child was portrayed by a young adolescent female dressed in white. It was also difficult to imagine an infant carrying the heavy bag of treats and toys that the occasion required, and so assistants were needed to lug the goodies.
This assistant could also serve as a useful intimidator – while few would be frightened into good behaviour by a baby, a devil or other ogre wielding chains, rods, or a whip could concentrate the minds of errant
children wonderfully. So welcome then Krampus and Cert, demonic figures from central Europe; Père Fouettard (Father Switch) from France; Hans Trapp in Alsace; or Knecht Ruprecht in Germany. A whole menagerie of shaggy sidekicks emerged from a strange metamorphosis suffered by Saint Nicholas. Though his saintly, episcopal form might be forbidden from appearing, he re-emerged in a host of threatening and semi-bestial guises. As Ru-klaus (Rough Nicholas), Aschenklas (Nicholas in Ashes), or Pelznickel (Furry Nicholas), he served to remind bad children that their sins merited a good thrashing or even being spirited away in a basket to a grisly fate.
Many of the new generation of gift-bringers were female. In Italy, the Befana came down chimneys on the eve of Epiphany bearing presents to atone for her having missed an opportunity to accompany the wise men on their journey to worship the baby Jesus. In the Franche-Comté, Tante Arie came down from her cave in the form of a goose-footed witch with iron teeth. Slipping through keyholes or windows, she rewarded good girls and boys, but left the wicked with a set of donkey ears or birch rods soaked in vinegar. In more fanciful accounts, she would lead the bad kids into a river and suckle the good with her giant breasts. In Germany, there was Frau Holle, an elderly woman with white hair and prominent teeth; in Haute-Sâone, the Trotte-vieilles were kindly female fairies; and in Alsace, La Dame de Noël appeared wearing a crown and carrying a basket of treats.
The yule log was one of the most widespread Christmas traditions of early modern Europe. From its first recorded appearance in 1184, some historians have treated the log as an enfeebled version of the ancient Celtic human sacrifices, while others relate it to feudal obligations around the provision of firewood. Whatever the roots of the practice, it became customary from Scandinavia to Serbia, from Scotland to Italy, across southern France into Spain, to drag a huge block of wood into the house during the holiday season and attend to it with ceremony and superstition. It could be decorated with leaves, ribbons, and flowers or anointed with wine, grain, or salt. The wood was lit with a remnant of the previous year’s log, which was kept about the house to ward off lightning, mildew, toothaches, hail, housefires, and chilblains. When the log was kept burning through the Twelve Days of Christmas, the Virgin Mary would come in the night and sit in front of it to change the diapers of the baby Jesus; angels, the three wise men, and the spirits of the family dead have also been known to seek the log’s warmth during the long winter nights. In parts of northern Spain and southern France, a remarkable feature of the log’s powers is its ability to defecate gifts. There are variations on this theme. In Catalonia, children beat on the wood, singing traditional songs to the caga tio and chanting a spell that produces a flow of candies, nuts, figs, and, finally – as a signal that the log is depleted – a salted herring or an onion. In Burgundy and the Franche-Comté, the log is deemed to “piss” gifts; the children are sent into the corners of the room to pray while the parents hide sweets under the wood. In le Doubs, the log was covered with a sheepskin and children produced the goodies by beating on it with sticks.