Santa Claus

by Gerry Bowler

  The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.

  As I drew in my head, and was turning around,

  Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound;

  He was dress’d all in fur, from his head to his foot,

  And his clothes were all tarnish’d with ashes and soot;

  A bundle of toys was flung on his back,

  And he look’d 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 laugh’d, like a bowl full of jelly:

  He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,

  And I laugh’d when I saw him, in spite of myself;

  A wink of his eye and a twist of his head

  Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

  He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,

  And fill’d all the stockings; then turn’d with a jerk,

  And laying his finger aside of his nose

  And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.

  He sprung to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

  And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle:

  But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight –

  Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

  This poem, whose earliest title was “An Account of a Visit from Saint Nicholas,” is now most commonly known as “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Its impact on the development of Santa Claus and Christmas itself cannot be overstated: it achieved a seismic shift in the way its protagonist was portrayed and it aided greatly in the spread of a snug, family-centred holiday. A reindeer-propelled gift-bringer first launched himself on the public imagination in The Children’s Friend, but now, in Moore’s poem, it is not a single reindeer who obeys the touch of its master’s lash – eight tiny ruminants respond to an encouraging whistle and a call by name. And what names! Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder, and Blixem? That’s right: the original version listed “Dunder and Blixem,” from a Dutch oath meaning “Thunder and Lightning.” Subsequent editors, and Moore himself, would tinker with these names, so that “Donder” (or “Donner”) and “Blitzen” are more common today.* (Learned heads have suggested that the flying goats who pulled the wagon of the Teutonic god Thor, Gnasher and Cracker, may have provided the inspiration for the reindeer names.)

  Though the reindeer have multiplied, they and the saint they pull have shrunk. The illustrations in The Children’s Friend show the gift-bringer and his sleigh to be of normal size, but in “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” they have been miniaturized. He is now an “elf,” obese to be sure, but small enough to leap down a chimney and be pulled about by animals described as “tiny.” He has also undergone a complete change in personality. Saint Nicholas, the austere, godly, rod-wielding bishop, “cruel in correctyng,” must inspire at least a measure of respect and fear if he is to exact good behaviour from the young in return for his gifts, but this new character seems to expect no such bargain. He is jolly, lively, and quick to assure the narrator that, though he is a nocturnal house-breaker, he means no harm. His eyes twinkle, his mouth is droll, and his laugh inspires laughter in others. If, as Santeclaus of The Children’s Friend did, he has crept into children’s rooms to observe their hygiene and behaviour, he seems to have been easy to please. There is no mention of a rod or switches or horse manure in the stuffed stocking; in the morning, there will be no crying of disappointed children who have woken from dreams of sugar plums to learn that they have been judged and found wanting.

  His appearance is unusual: “dress’d all in fur, from his head to his foot” and covered in ashes and soot. In this regard he is clearly a relative of those rough Germanic gift-bringers who sprang up when the good Nicholas was banished from parts of Europe, particularly Pelznickel (a.k.a. Belsnickle, Pelz-nichol, or Belschniggle) and Aschen Klaus. German immigrants had brought Belsnickle with them to the middle American colonies and for some time he had been visiting families in Baltimore and the Pennsylvania Dutch country on Christmas Eve. He was meant to be a frightening character and many adults are haunted by uneasy memories of their childhood experiences with him. He might come alone or in gangs of his ilk, or he might be the bad cop accompanying the milder Christkindl or Saint Nicholas. Clothed darkly or wrapped in furs, this masked figure would crack a whip or shake chains at the trembling children; good boys and girls might then be thrown handfuls of nuts and candies while bad kids could expect to feel a smack across the backside. Moore appropriated the furry garb of the Belsnickle but declined to borrow the creature’s intimidating character.

  Though it might not be obvious to a casual observer of this new Saint Nicholas caught in the act of descending the chimney, wasn’t there really something, well, rather proletarian about him? Not only does he shed soot on the carpet, but look at what he is smoking – that “stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth.” To a social historian, this is clear evidence of Saint Nick’s origin among the lower orders. Members of the upper classes would not have been caught dead drawing on such a stubby little thing; they favoured instead a long, elegantly curved pipe.* Conversely, working-class folk would often snap off the long stems of their pipes, which they seemed to scorn as a mark of the hated aristos. For Moore to specifically describe the length of St. Nick’s pipe is to lower him in social status and to remove him from the ranks of the socially superior. (We shall see in a moment why he would want to do this.)

  Though our hero is referred to as Saint Nicholas, he has been stripped of his authority as a religious official. He wears no episcopal robes and is not adorned by a halo; unlike his European namesakes he neglects to quiz the little ones on their prayers or catechism. He is, in fact, entirely desacralized. Now his authority is derived from radiant goodwill and his generous bounty: he has been redefined as a petty capitalist – “a peddler just opening his pack” – but one who seeks nothing in return.

  This elfin Saint Nicholas, his open, undemanding character, and the poem’s lively anapestic rhythm proved enormously attractive to New York and Pennsylvania readers. “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” was reprinted frequently in almanacs, magazines, and newspapers over the next decade, but it was not until 1829 that anyone hinted at knowing who the author might be. In that year the editor of the Troy Sentinel let slip that the poet was a native New Yorker and a “gentleman of more merit as a scholar and writer than many of more noisy pretensions.” Nearly ten more years elapsed before Clement Clarke Moore’s name was openly attached to the poem when it was published in a collection entitled the New York Book of Poetry, and it was not until 1844 that Moore himself took credit for the work. This twenty-two-year stretch of anonymity has caused a number of critics to consider the claim of another to the authorship of America’s favourite set of verses. The rival claimant, whose cause has been defended for 150 years, is Major Henry Livingston, Jr. (1748–1828). According to partisans of his claim, Livingston wrote the work some time during the first decade of the nineteenth century and it made its way into the hands of Clement Clarke Moore when a young woman who had heard the poem in the Livingston household was employed as a governess by the Moore family. Though no hard evidence exists to support Livingston’s authorship, his supporters have pointed out that Moore never wrote anything resembling “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in his long career and was not the sort of genial personality that could have written such a poem. They point to another ditty about Santa Claus that Moore penned for his family in which the gift-bringer is much more judgmental:

  From Saint Nicholas

  What! My s
weet little Sis*, in bed all alone;

  No light in your room! And your nursy too gone!

  And you, like a good child are quietly lying,

  While some naughty ones would be fretting or crying?

  Well, for this you must have something pretty, my dear;

  And, I hope, will deserve a reward too next year.

  But speaking of crying, I’m sorry to say

  Your screeches and screams, so loud ev’ry day,

  Were near driving me and my goodies away.

  Good children I always give good things in plenty;

  How sad to have left your stocking quite empty:

  But you are beginning so nicely to spell,

  And, in going to bed, behave always so well,

  That, although I too oft see the tear in your eye,

  I cannot resolve to pass you quite by.

  I hope, when I come here again the next year,

  I shall not see even the sign of a tear.

  And then, if you get back your pleasant sweet looks,

  And do as you’re bid, I will leave you some books,

  Some toys, or perhaps what you still may like better,

  And then too may write you a prettier letter.

  At present, my dear, I must bid you good bye;

  Now do as you’re bid; and remember, don’t cry.

  Moore is not without his own scholarly defenders, however, and though the issue is by no means settled, he is still recognized as the author by most observers. Since 1915, Moore’s admirers have gathered every Christmas Eve at his graveside in Trinity Cemetery in New York City to read the poem attributed to him. No such honour is accorded Livingston.

  In “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” Americans had discovered an enchanting character who would play an increasingly large part in their celebration of the holidays, but his lineaments were still unclear and the full measure of his personality had yet to be explored. In the years before the American Civil War, a number of groups competed to define Santa Claus and, in so doing, how Christmas ought to be enjoyed.

  The earliest of these is the Knickerbocker school, among whom we can confidently number Washington Irving, John Pintard, and James K. Paulding. For this group of New York writers, who sought to create a distinctively American literature, the gift-bringer was named Nicholas; he was of Dutch blood, old-fashioned, sober, and a zealous Protestant. He appeared not on Christmas Eve but on the eve of St. Nicholas Day or New Year’s Day, and his gifts were largely the food items associated with the Christmas celebrations in Holland. The lengthiest description of this worthy can be found in the pages of Paulding’s 1836 story collection entitled The Book of Saint Nicholas, purported to be based on an autobiography delivered to the narrator by Nicholas himself – the only true account of his life, not to be confused with the earlier mishmash of legends “written under the express inspection of the old lady of Babylon” (a tart anti-Catholic characterization). Here, we are told that he was born not on December 6, but on January 1 (the favourite holiday of New Yorkers) and not in eastern climes but in Amsterdam, where he was apprenticed to a baker. As a young man, he wooed and won the fair Katrinchee, whom he married but by whom he was not blessed with offspring, “seeing that he was predestined to be the patron and benefactor of the children of others.” Sadly predeceased by his wife, Nicholas was held in high respect in his hometown, rising to the office of burgomaster. His popularity was scarcely enough to save him from the fury of a papist mob in the sixteenth century when he was found to be hiding a Protestant heretic, but when he died on his eightieth birthday he was widely mourned. At his funeral, “a remarkable and goodly-looking man of most reverent demeanour” spoke up: this was the great Reformer of Geneva, John Calvin, who asked that henceforth Nicholas be known as “the good Saint Nicholas.” Ever after the Dutch kept the saint’s birthday as a festival “for the exercise of hospitality to men and gifts to little children.”*

  In other stories we learn that Saint Nicholas despises innovation – his dress is centuries out of date and he scorns to ride on that “newfangled jarvie,” the Albany railroad; travel by canal is deemed more fitting, “the motion and speed of which aptly comport with the philosophic dignity of his character.” Nor has this saint forgotten the importance of good old-fashioned corporal punishment, racing around in his one-horse wagon, “distributing cakes to the good boys, and whips to the bad ones.”

  We can see a graphic example of this in the first oil painting of Santa Claus, an 1837 work entitled Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas by Robert Weir. Weir (1803–89) was a member of the Knickerbocker circle and taught art at West Point Military Academy, where one of his pupils was American painter James McNeil Whistler. His gift-bringer is caught in the act of ascending the chimney and (in homage to a gesture attributed to Saint Nicholas in both the Knickerbocker History and Moore’s poem) has turned to lay his finger aside of his nose. Over the next few years, Weir produced several versions of this painting, which were exhibited to favourable response. Only in the first one could Santa Claus be described as jolly; in later depictions the amiable face has become a manic leer. This is not a comforting midnight visitor. With wild eyebrows, jagged teeth, and an ample collection of switches, he might well be one of the sinister forest creatures of a Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, though there are still signs of his bishop’s rank and his Dutch origins. A rosary dangles from his waist while a processional cross* is stuck in his belt. His cloak is an ecclesiastical mozzetta, coloured the official episcopal red and trimmed with white fur. Dutch tiles, the image of a windmill above the mantel, a broken pipe on the floor, and a peeled orange (signifying the ruling Dutch dynasty) make clear Santa’s ethnic origins.

  Though the hero of “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” seems removed in many ways from this old Dutch gift-bringer touted by the Knickerbockers, one prominent historian has seen Moore and his poem as part of the Knickerbockers’’ far-reaching conspiracy to invent a new kind of holiday for Americans. According to Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas, these conservative New York writers were disturbed by the raucous, alcohol-fuelled mobs who took to the streets at Christmas and New Year’s, damaging property, disrupting worship, and frightening the gentry. Perhaps by evoking Saint Nicholas and a holiday that focused on class solidarity instead of class antagonism, and replacing the rowdy, outdoor, male celebrations with a cozy, indoor, family-centred time, the dangerous democratic tensions of the mob might be assuaged and their natural superiors allowed to sleep snug in their beds. Thus, to Nissenbaum, Moore’s lower-class gift-bringer with his stubby pipe could pose disarmingly as one of the labouring sort while still behaving as a generous patrician should.

  In the long run, this conspiracy (if it indeed was one) succeeded: Christmas in the United States of the nineteenth century gradually became domesticated. The drinking binges and loud callithumpian* music of the dreadful night crawlers were discouraged and replaced by more genteel pursuits, but not without a fight in which Santa Claus participated. For some, Christmas had always meant – should always mean – excess and not gentility, alcohol and crullers and not tea and stockings by the fireplace. For them Santa Claus was a figure of merriment and revelry, not to be suppressed by Puritans or conservative reformers. On January 23, 1821, in The Northern Whig, of Hudson, New York, a backwoods poet penned an ode to Santa Claus, in which he claimed that in Dutch areas of New York, Saint Nicholas was said to be well known and celebrated with gifts of “nuts and pies and crulls / and whiskey’s jovial flow,” whereas in Anglo New York the only saint was John Calvin, who “strips our virtues all away / And wraps us up in sin.”

  On December 27, 1823, The New-York Mirror and the Ladies’ Literary Gazette published an anonymous Christmas work entitled “Holiday Song.” It combines an awareness of the religious origins of the holiday – “Consecrated by Mercy’s nativity, / Bliss angelical granted to earth” – with the traditional festive emphasis on friends, gambols, and kisses. In its fourth verse, the poem draws atte
ntion to that part of Christmas for which children long:

  Now commence the infantile revelry

  Happy urchins the story believe,

  That Santaclaus, since ages of chivalry,

  Visits the nursery on holiday eve.

  Socks, intended for gifts, are suspended,

  And mystic rites blended, the fancy to cheer,

  While sweet snap-dragon* exhausts the full flagon,

  Each Merry Christmas and Happy New-Year.

  Five years later, in 1828, another anonymous writer took up the poetic cudgel in defence of a Christmas in which children might be rewarded by Santa Claus but one in which a thirsty man could still get a good stiff drink and carouse with his friends in the good old way. “Ode to Saint Claas, Written on New Year’s Eve” called on the gift-bringer to produce mulled cider, cherry bounce, and spiced rum and to join the poet in a drop of the pure:

  Come then with thy merry eye,

  And let us bouse [booze] it till we die!

  Come and o’er my thirsty soul

  Floods of smoking glasses roll!

  The Santa Claus who would answer this call to revelry was not a figure of Calvinist repression but rather the “king of good fellows,” a “little short, thick, lusty, ‘whoreson,’ rover, / Rolling about the room full half seas over.”

  But while this sort of behaviour could have been tolerated in a Christmas icon in Merry England of the Middle Ages, the times were changing in America in the decades preceding the Civil War. The new Christmas would not entail the revival of an imaginary, bucolic New Amsterdam, where the upper classes could mingle genially with the meaner sort during the holidays, nor was it going to surrender the streets to drunken louts.

  The elfin gift-bringer soon had more than one name, depending on his locale. In New York, he was Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas; in Philadelphia, he was Kriss Kringle or Belsnickle. At one time, as we have seen, these names referred to very different characters: Kriss Kringle was an American corruption of das Christkindl, the Christ child, portrayed either as an infant or as a white-clad adolescent; Belsnickle was a shaggy and fearsome creature, often accompanying Saint Nicholas or the Christ child. By the 1840s, however, the allure of Santa Claus was such that though Pennsylvanians clung to the familiar names, the gift-bringer they were attached to was clearly the newly minted Santa Claus described by Moore in “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” In an 1855 story in Putnam’s Monthly, the narrator, Mr. Sparrowgrass, implores his wife to mind her language: