Santa Claus

by Gerry Bowler

  Mrs. Santa Claus regarded him for the first time with silent sympathy.

  “Do I look like your mother?” she said at last.

  And Bobbie, shaking his head, replied: “I really couldn’t tell, because I haven’t seen her for a long time. She’s a suffragette like you. And, say! If you are not my mother, won’t you stay and be one?”

  Mrs. Santa Claus brushed a tear from her eye as she placed a generous bag of toys on the floor and prepared to depart.

  “I wish I might,” she said. “But I must obey the voice of Duty! Think of all the other little boys and girls I must visit to-day whose mothers are suffragettes!”

  A satirical magazine claimed to have interviewed Mrs. Claus and reported that she lived in a house with no doors but many chimneys and that her given names were Mary Louise. Mrs. Claus strongly affirmed her faith in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and went on to claim that she was the “real brains of the whole organization.… All that man does is rig himself in his best red suit and make one business trip a year. I’ve often wished that he’d take me on one of his trips.”

  There were reports that the newly liberated Mrs. Claus was less assured and competent than she made out. In an early-twentieth-century play, Mrs. Santa Claus, Militant, Santa’s wife complains that year after year of thanklessly making up candy bags and dressing dolls has left her unsatisfied with her Christmas role. So she has stolen the sleigh and bag of toys while Santa napped and “made off for a little fun for once.” Unfortunately, she has mixed up the gifts, giving skates to a crippled child, women’s clothing to men, and vice versa. Santa Claus, having borrowed Jack Frost’s airplane, makes his appearance to save the day but vows that his neglect of his wife will end, telling the audience: “Gentlemen, I haven’t been quite so quick as you have in asking my wife to take part in every move for good; but after this you can rest assured that wherever I go; in sleigh, aeroplane or on foot, there my helpmeet will be too, right by my side.”

  Santa was not quite true to his word. When he enlisted with the American forces in the First World War, he asked his wife to stay behind and make the Christmas Eve deliveries for him. She reacted cheerfully to the news that she was now in charge of the reindeer and sleigh:

  She was glad that this once she should drive them alone,

  Which she never could do when Santa was home,

  For Santa was old and had ways that were set,

  And he never believed in the Suffragette;

  But now Mrs. Santa would sure have her chance

  To make good with the Home Folks while he was in France.

  Assisted by a Brownie deputed to help her to get up and down the chimneys, she acquitted herself well until the war’s end and her husband’s return.

  Unlike so many other marriages in this divorce-ridden culture, the Claus union continues to be a success, despite occasional differences of opinion over gender roles at the North Pole (as we shall see when we consider how movies have dealt with Santa and his spouse).

  It was not a short nor easy journey to such domestic respectability but, in the first half-century of his existence, Santa Claus had come a long way. He had cast off his early Dutch-ness and become thoroughly Americanized. Despite the occasional use of the name “Saint Nicholas,” he had also abandoned his episcopal estate and become if not a secular figure at least a non-denominational one, at home coming down the chimneys of Protestant and Catholic alike. By the late nineteenth century, the Santa Claus legend had spread across the United States and become entrenched as part of the nation’s Christmas mythology.

  Santa Claus, who had existed only as a folk memory in parts of New York State, had become flesh and was vitally important to the way that parents decided to interact with their children. Despite the advice of well-meaning rationalists, educational reformists, and religious zealots, mothers and fathers chose to tell their sons and daughters that on Christmas Eve a supernatural figure entered their houses to bring them gifts. They encouraged their children to behave well as Christmas approached or this personage might leave behind, instead of a treat, something painful or humiliating. They were told that he would deposit these presents in their stockings, which must be hung by the fireplace, where he was said to make his entrance, or by their beds. Children were taught to believe that Santa Claus would not come to their house if they remained awake and that it was an act of politeness to leave out fodder for the animals that pulled the sleigh he rode in. (Any hay left uneaten by the gift-bringer’s livestock was considered by German immigrant farmers to bring good luck for their own animals.*) These stories would become more elaborate as the century wore on and were adapted to the heritage of particular ethnic groups or individual family traditions. (German and Scandinavian immigration, for example, would ensure that elves would become part of Santa’s entourage.) Parents would go to ever-greater lengths to convince children of their verisimilitude: the fire in the hearth would be damped down so as not to scorch the gift-bringer; tracks would be left in the fireside ashes, the jingle of reindeer harness sounded; a brave father might attempt an entry via the chimney (in 1893 a Pennsylvania man attempting such a feat became stuck. His cries of alarm frightened away his family and he had to be rescued by neighbours who were forced to tear the chimney down to extricate him). New details would be invented on the spot to answer the objections of the quicker-witted kids.

  How, for example, did Santa Claus know what to bring each child? The simple act of summoning Santa by putting out a stocking gave way to stories of how Christmas wishes were communicated to the gift-bringer. The minions of the U.S. Post Office who had vowed that “neither rain nor hail, nor sleet nor snow, nor heat of day nor dark of night would stay their couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” would surely not find the road to the polar regions impassable and so children were encouraged to write letters to Santa Claus, letters that Thomas Nast would show being earnestly posted by little hands and then read by Santa. This encouraged good penmanship, not to mention sober reflection on whether Santa would take their professions of good behaviour at face value. Some families adopted the old Scottish practice of “crying up the lum” – shouting wishes up the chimney:

  Plum cherished a firm belief that Santa Claus lived up the chimney; and as Christmas drew near, and visions of possible gifts filled her little heart, she would go slowly and timidly to the fire, hesitate a moment, and then deliver a loud ‘Tea-set!’ up the chimney, running away instantly as fast as she could, with a vague fear of pursuit of the unknown deity. We used to hear her calling out these abrupt messages at all hours of the day: ‘dolls,’ ‘No’s yark,’ ‘yittle tart wid horses’ were fired up the chimney like minute guns.

  Others resorted to writing notes and then burning them in the fireplace in the hope that the smoke would carry their wishes northward. European immigrant children might leave a letter by the window or in the home’s miniature Nativity scene. Some families, like those of Mark Twain, arranged for their children to speak directly to Santa Claus. In a letter from “Santa” to three-year-old Susie Clemens, Twain instructed his daughter how to conduct this conversation:

  I will call at your kitchen door about nine o’clock this morning to inquire. But I must not see anybody and I must not speak to anybody but you. When the kitchen doorbell rings, George must be blindfolded and sent to open the door. Then he must go back to the dining room or the china closet and take the cook with him. You must tell George he must walk on tiptoe and not speak – otherwise he will die someday. Then you must go up to the nursery and stand on a chair or the nurse’s bed and put your ear to the speaking tube that leads down to the kitchen and when I whistle through it you must speak in the tube and say, “Welcome, Santa Claus!” Then I will ask whether it was a trunk you ordered or not. If you say it was, I shall ask you what color you want the trunk to be. Your mama will help you to name a nice color and then you must tell me every single thing in detail which you want the trunk to contain. Then when I say “Good-by and a merry Chri
stmas to my little Susie Clemens,” you must say “Good-by, good old Santa Claus.”

  And how did Santa know whether one had been naughty or nice? Nast’s picture of a giant telescope might be convincing to some children; others were told that the family’s toys or pets were in league with the gift-bringer and would report on their behaviour. Clever children in snowless regions of America who objected that sleighs would be inoperable in their climate were satisfied to learn that Santa Claus often travelled by pack mule or canoe. What of houses or apartments with no chimneys? Well, Santa comes through the keyhole, my dear, or through chinks in the window, or slips under the door, etc.: thus parents and children engaged in a running dialectic that expanded the corpus of Santa Claus knowledge and perpetuated it for another generation.

  Why go to all this trouble? The answer is that parents saw Santa Claus as a means of both discipline and delight. Human offspring are not born polite or deferential; they are not easily persuaded to do chores, to refrain from violence against their siblings, or to attend to their studies. Through the ages, parents and other moralists have seized on supernatural forces to assist them in the job of taming the next wave of invading barbarians we call children; character is more easily built if the conscience feels that, even if Mother’s eyes are absent, someone equally powerful, albeit unseen, is watching.

  By invoking Santa Claus, American parents were only imitating their European ancestors, who had been frightening the little ones for centuries with Christmas bogeys. However, despite the threat of the rod, or a stocking full of bran (or lumps of coal in the late nineteenth century), the wrath of Santa Claus was, in fact, a much lighter cloud on the moral horizons of children than Frau Perchta the Disemboweller or the dark Knecht Ruprecht, who were still appearing in the holiday nightmares of German infants, or Belsnickle, who continued his whip-cracking excursions in rural Pennsylvania until late in the 1800s. An article in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier urged parents not to yield to the temptation of punishing their children via the Christmas stocking containing only “a whip or an old rusty jewsharp.”

  Whatever their experience of Christmas mornings past, most children still clung to some hopes on Christmas Eve, as did the fictional Wiggens children:

  However deficient in morality … the little Wiggenses were not to any perceptible degree wanting where their own interests were concerned. They did not expect Santa Claus, like the sun, to smile on the just and unjust alike; indeed, their own past Christmas-treeless experience gave the lie to such an expectation, but they did hope this year to manage or, as they put it, “to get ahead of him.” As he only came once a year and staid but a short while, they determined to test their strength and his perspicacity by a short, sharp trial of goodness. With handsome munificence, they cancelled from their minds all remembrance or even knowledge of past naughtinesses, calculating that by conduct superlatively exemplary for one night and day they would refute for once, if not for all, the calumny of the neighbors, who persisted that “Wiggenses didn’t know what good was” and render themselves worthy candidates for those largesses which they understood fell only to the obedient and pious. Their devices to this end were varied and endless.

  If Santa Claus were merely an invisible policeman invented by censorious elders, it is unlikely that he would have survived until today, the toast of chimneys around the world. Social historians are agreed that the Christmas gifts he brings are worth far more than their monetary value. Certainly true is the assertion of the Harper’s editorial of 1856: “Love is the moral of Christmas. What are the gifts but the proofs and signs of love?” They strengthen ties of affection, respect, and mutual reliance; they teach the value of generosity and altruism; they are signals that there are times when human goodness asserts itself and does not count the cost. Santa’s work makes manifest the value of home where the gifts are received and the stories about him are told. This was especially true at a time in American history when the rise of a consumer economy provided parents (whose own parents had been no less loving) with the opportunity and means to buy manufactured goods for their children. Moreover, by channelling those gifts through Santa Claus, a figure of seasonal generosity, parents could continue to maintain values of thrift and restraint throughout the rest of the year.

  The Santa Claus story was also promulgated in millions of homes because, through it, parents could give their children a sense of anticipation, wonder, and joy that served to magnify the good feelings that came merely from the Christmas gifts. (What child ever invests his or her birthday with such a burden of breathless expectation as they do Christmas, though the weight of presents received may be the same?) Santa Claus, therefore, was not just a gift-bringer; he was a gift himself. In acquiring him the child received weeks of a heightened consciousness of time; an acquaintance with the miraculous and magical; an awareness of the possibility of, and need for, grace and unmerited favour. In conveying knowledge of Santa to their children, parents shared in all this sentiment, crossing the generational divide and recapturing the feelings they had experienced themselves earlier in life. Said one fictional father to his wife, who had hitherto spurned such a ridiculous fable, but who had been converted by seeing the delight in his children’s eyes: “Christmas shall be an ‘institution’ in our family, hereafter! … I am a better man for last evening’s work and this day’s innocent frolic. I feel twenty years younger, and fifty degrees happier. It pays, my dear – it pays!”

  * Historians have suggested either writer James K. Paulding, professor Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” or Arthur J. Stansbury, an illustrator and Presbyterian minister. Paulding has also been credited with the anonymous verses in The Spectator. The figure portrayed in The Children’s Friend, however, bears no resemblance to Paulding’s written description of Santa Claus in later years: “a little rascal in a three-cornered cocked hat, decked with old gold lace, a blue Dutch sort of old pea jacket, red waistcoat, breeks of the same color, yellow stockings and honest thick-soled shoes.”

  * Many variants existed before editors took their cue from the Moore-approved edition of 1844, including the New-York Evening Post’s “Dender and Blixen.”

  * Members of New York’s Saint Nicholas Society would make it a part of their annual banquet to smoke from long-stemmed Dutch pipes. New York Times, December 7, 1870.

  * “Little Sis” was Moore’s daughter, Charity Elizabeth, born in 1816.

  * Any suggestion that Nicholas was not a practising Calvinist or that he might have had a long connection with the Catholic Church is indignantly rejected by Paulding: “Doth not everybody know that the blessed Saint Nicholas was of the Reformed Dutch Church and that the cunning Romanists did incontinently filch him from us to keep their own calendar in countenance? The splutterkins!”

  * Or a sword; art critics are uncertain.

  * Callithumpian music was the contemporary term for raucous noise-making, produced by banging pot lids, blowing horns, and shouting.

  * Snap-dragon was a popular parlour game at Christmas in which daring participants tried to snatch raisins out of a flaming bowl of brandy.

  * I except here his temporary seasonal companions such as Saint Catherine or Frau Holle.

  * The Pintard family encouraged this as part of the drive to re-enact the Dutch Saint Nicholas practices. Alexander J. Wall, “St. Nicholas at the Society,” New-York Historical Society Bulletin, 25:1, January 1941, p. 13. Philip Snyder, December 25th: The Joys of Christmas Past (New York: 1985), p. 215.

  St. Nicholas Resuscitates the Three Children Thrown into Brine Tubs, by Gentile da Fabriano. This fifteenth-century Italian altarpiece shows the wonder-working powers of Saint Nicholas in one of the episodes that made him the patron saint of children. Here he resurrects three students who had been slain by an evil innkeeper and pickled in tubs in his cellar.

  (Courtesy, Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City, Italy; Bridgeman Art Library)

  In 1810 John Pintard of the New-York Historical Society
commissioned this broadside of Saint Nicholas and two children (one naughty, one nice). The saint is depicted as a bishop and a stern judge, two traditional aspects that were soon to be challenged by newer ideas about Santa Claus.

  (Author’s collection)

  The anonymous 1821 poem “The Children’s Friend” introduced Santa’s reindeer sleigh to the world.

  (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  This 1837 picture by Robert Weir of Saint Nicholas about to ascend the chimney is the first oil painting of the Christmas Eve visit.

  (Courtesy, New-York Historical Society)

  Clement Clarke Moore, author of “ ’TWas the Night Before Christmas,” was a prosperous New York scholar who, legend says, wrote the poem for his children in 1822. Moore, with Washington Irving, John Pintard, and Robert Weir, was part of an influential group of writers and historians known as the Knickerbockers, whose ideas shaped the modern American view of Christmas.

  (Courtesy, The Granger Collection)

  Washington Irving’s satirical Knickerbocker History of New York introduced Saint Nicholas as an American gift-bringer of Dutch heritage. Irving is best known for his stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”

  (Courtesy, The New York Public Library)

  The Feast of St. Nicholas, by Jan Steen, 1666. On the morning of December 6, St. Nicholas’s Day, a Dutch family wakes to find the gifts the saint has left. While the little girl has been rewarded for her good behaviour, the boy has found only switches in his shoe. All around are signs of seasonal treats: nuts, waffles, and special loaves.