Santa Claus

by Gerry Bowler

  (Courtesy, Rijksmuseum-Stichting, Amsterdam)

  Belsnickle, who began life as a dark and furry companion to gift-bringers such as the Christ child, accompanied German settlers to the United States, where he became a gift-bringer himself in Pennsylvania and Maryland.

  (Author’s collection) (photo credit col1.1)

  Hans Trapp makes a frightening entrance accompanied by the Christkindl, who was often portrayed by a young girl dressed in white.

  (Author’s collection)

  One of the most eccentric depictions of Santa Claus is this 1850 version from a booklet touting a tour of the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, promoted by P.T. Barnum.

  (Author’s collection)

  Santa’s sleigh has been pulled by reindeer, moose, horses, alligators, and kangaroos. In this 1858 magazine illustration, a turkey and some dolls are hitched up to pull Santa Claus along.

  (Author’s collection)

  Thomas Nast portrays Santa Claus reading the letters children send to him. Kids also alert Santa to their wishes by shouting them up the chimney, leaving him notes in the Nativity scene, or burning their letters and trusting the wind will waft them to the North Pole.

  (Courtesy, The Granger Collection)

  III

  Santa as Advocate

  Santa as Advocate: Demonstrators calling on the White House for political amnesty use Santa Claus to make their point about the need for generosity and forgiveness. (photo credit 3.1)

  By the late nineteenth century, Santa Claus was so popular that social and political movements began to recruit him as spokesman. Santa was drawn from the home and into the public arena, where he became less a creature of the imagination and fairyland and more of an authentic player in American life.

  Though in his youth Santa Claus was a roisterer and not averse to a tipple, the temperance movement employed him as the poster boy for its war against the alcohol trade. In a handout to children of the Loyal Temperance Legion* issued from his “Prohibition Palace” at the North Pole, Santa credited his good memory, survival in a cold climate, and far-beyond-mortal lifespan to his abstention from liquor. He swore off the wassail bowl of his youth and asserted to his young readers that “there is no other one thing in all the world that does so much to make Christmas wretched and to pinch and sadden the faces of children and to put lines in mothers’ and sisters’ brows, as the habit men have of making brutes of themselves by drinking whiskey.”

  “A Puzzled Santa Claus,” a poem by Alice F. Guernsey from an 1896 collection of temperance pieces, described a vexed gift-bringer, troubled by a telegraph informing him that many children would have no Christmas because

  Their papas have lost all their money –

  And the rumsellers stole it, we b’lieve –

  We big ones can stand it, but babies –

  Say, Santa, you know how they grieve.

  Now can’t you just help us a little?

  Just enough so the babies will think

  That Christmas meanings loving and kissing,

  And something to eat and drink?

  Santa’s solution was to use his magic telephone to contact the Temperance Legion and implore them to rally the world to the cause of children endangered by the purveyors of booze.

  White supremacists also took note of Santa Claus’s celebrity and wanted his endorsement. In December 1874, the “Santa Klaws Klan,” representing local business and civic leaders of Vicksburg, Mississippi, staged a Christmas parade designed to attract shoppers back to their town. Earlier that month, murderous racial violence had ripped through the county and discouraged people from visiting Vicksburg to do their Christmas shopping. “His Majesty, the Santa Klaws Chief,” rode in his four-horse chariot dispensing gifts to the crowds, a symbol of the goals of the area’s white residents: a return to the era of unthinking white supremacy and an end to the interference by carpetbaggers and Republicans. (The Klan would be up to its old Christmas tricks again in the twentieth century, as witnessed in a Time magazine photograph from the 1950s in which hooded Klansmen and their Grand Dragon dressed as Santa Claus present an elderly African-American couple with a radio as a holiday gesture of goodwill.)

  Left-wing groups attempted to appeal to younger minds through the image of Santa Claus. The Socialist Sunday School movement, which often used plays to get its message across, staged The Strike of Santa Claus in Milwaukee. It seems that Santa has downed tools and decided that there will be no Christmas presents this year. Big Business and The Trusts had so rigged the economy that only the rich were able to participate in Christmas: “The poor,” he says, “are so busy working long and hard to get enough to eat and wear that they have no time left to do a single thing about Christmas.” In protest, Santa Claus has gone on strike and urges all who wish to see a return to an equitable Christmas to vote for the Socialists in the next election.

  Santa Claus on strike would become a popular image in labour disputes throughout the twentieth century – few news cameras can resist the sight of a picketer in a red Santa cap or a long white beard, as was seen when government employees went on strike in Newfoundland, donning Santa suits in April 2004 to emphasize their resolve to stay out on the picket lines “until Christmas,” or when the Newspaper Guild workers at the New York Daily News in 1990 decided to dress as Santa and distribute candy canes to passersby to drum up support for their industrial action. (A 1904 cartoon had seen the issue in a different light. The drawing “On Santa Claus’s Picket Line” portrayed a lonely Salvation Army girl collecting money for the poor during a snowfall.)

  Left-wing appropriation of Santa Claus for purposes of furthering the revolution would also include the anti-poverty activists dressed as Santa and two of his elves who were arrested for trespassing in a Toronto grocery store to protest hunger or the Arizona Santa who carried a sack of old running shoes to protest the use of sweatshop labour in the Third World.

  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an advocacy group known for its attempts to outrage the sensibilities of the non-vegan majority. In 1996, it convinced the National Park Service to remove the reindeer from the annual Mall Christmas pageant, and in 2003 members dressed as Santa and an elf confronted fast-food company executives as they emerged from Christmas Eve services. Those tasteful folks who gave us “Beef: It’s What’s Rotting in Your Colon” and “Your Mommy Kills Animals!” also ran a campaign in 2003 entitled “Santa Isn’t Coming this Christmas,” in which they claimed that the glass of milk children leave out for the gift-bringer could give him more than he bargained for:

  Hey, kids! Is the milk that you’re leaving out for Santa sending his “North Pole” south? It could be that “Jolly Old Saint Nick” can’t get his jollies because milk is bringing him down. The fact is, milk can cause impotence by clogging the arteries and slowing down the blood flow to all organs, and hardening of the arteries can make it a blue, blue Christmas for the 30 million North American men who suffer from erectile dysfunction.

  A rather shrivelled Santa Claus was portrayed peering down the front of his trousers, and the kiddies were urged to turn to soy “milk” as a yummy alternative.

  During the runup to the 2004 American presidential election, the MoveOn.org advocacy group revived an editorial cartoon metaphor that is at least a century old and ran an anti-Bush television ad featuring the president as a Santa Claus to corporate friends and supporters: “Yes, big contributors, there is a Santa Claus. But he’s not at the North Pole. He’s in the White House!” In Britain, a fathers’ rights movement has adopted the tactic of disrupting public events or intruding into public spaces dressed as superheroes such as Spider-Man, Batman – and Santa Claus. They choose these characters to disarm opposition through humour and to portray to their children, from whom they are often separated, that fathers are heroes to their families.

  Though Americans seemed to prefer a gift-bringer that was more secular (or at least less overtly a Catholic bishop) than Saint Nicholas, this did not mean that Santa Claus was c
ompletely stripped of religious meaning. In fact, one of the chief tasks he undertook in the United States during the nineteenth century was the resacralization of Christmas, to help pour religion back into a holiday that, in many places, had lost that aspect.

  The war waged against Christmas by Puritans and other Calvinists had eliminated the end of the year as a holy season and, without a connection to the Nativity, popular celebrations in late December had developed an unchecked riotousness that worried authorities and social commentators. Christmas and New Year’s observances became dominated by drunken males and disorderly public conduct. For many American church leaders, this seemed only to confirm the wisdom of their repudiation of Christmas, and for the first half of the nineteenth century Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and other Protestant denominations continued to treat December 25 as a day without religious significance or, still worse, with significance only to those servants of the Antichrist in the Catholic and Episcopalian churches. In 1798, John M. Mason, a Presbyterian minister and controversialist, wrote in The Christians’ Magazine:

  We reject in a mass the corruptions of popery and of her ape, prelacy. We renounce the religious observance of Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, etc., and the festivals in honor of a troop of saints and saintesses as superstitious and inconsistent with gospel worship, how graceful soever to the anti-Christian Calendar.

  The normally mild-mannered Society of Friends, or Quakers, were no less vehemently opposed as this 1846 editorial demonstrates:

  That particular period of time, especially, called Christmas, viewed as a Religious festival, has, we fully believe, tended more to open licentiousness of manners, than to the increase of sound morality and religion. The mummery which takes place in some of the churches, so called, at this season, under the ministration of a class of hireling teachers, and the childish and superficial ideas which are propagated through this corrupt and interested medium, concerning the nature and mode of Christian redemption, are wonderfully calculated to enlarge the sphere of stupidity, and to increase the shades of moral darkness over the minds of mankind.

  This anti-Christmas stance coincided with a hard-line taken by proponents of modern industry who wished to impose a new, more disciplined view of time on their workers. No more Twelve Days of Christmas – leisure time had been greatly reduced and the number of holidays on the American calendar, though varying from region to region, was few. An editorial in the New York Times complained:

  There are several luxuries which the European misses in America, holidays being among the most considerable and serious. Our people are spendthrifts in everything but time. Our few seasons of festivity evoke ample liberality of outlay for presents and feasting, and merrymaking; but the feast days are few and far between, and each is hurried to ends as if the morrow were another day of carnival hilarity. We have only time for fugitive pleasure, none for happiness. The lust of money-making … is strong within us; and we travel fast from the bower to the bank; and sink our social being into interest-computing, profit-calculating machines.

  Changes in popular attitudes, however, would make this situation a hard one to maintain.

  After the 1820s, the urge to celebrate Christmas underwent a slow but steady revival in the English-speaking world, inspired in America by a flood of immigration from Christmas-loving countries such as Germany and by authors such as Clement Clarke Moore and Washington Irving and, in England, by Charles Dickens, ceremonialists in the Anglican Church, and carol-minded musicologists. With the holiday once more in the public eye, a number of churches in the United States were moved to make room for Christmas observances in their calendars and to enlist Santa Claus as a vital contributor.

  The Sunday School movement was a major evangelical force in nineteenth-century America, bringing the Christian message from frontier huts to inner-city tenements. In either denominational or non-denominational form, Sunday schools shaped the religious experience of hundreds of thousands of youngsters each year. And though many churches at first opposed Christmas observances in these schools, by the 1850s the festival was again a part of the curriculum. Organizers soon found that a surefire way to increase attendance at Sunday schools (especially those involved in missions to poor urban children) was to arrange for a Christmas tree, gifts, and Santa Claus to distribute them. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for example, churchgoers in 1886 could choose from the Congregationalists’ “Santa Clausville,” the Baptists’ literary musical entertainment and supper, the Presbyterians’ “Gathering of the Nations to Meet Santa Claus,” or the Methodist-Episcopal “Christmas House” with Santa. So regular a feature of church productions was Santa Claus that religious-supply companies sold Santa masks complete with white beards.

  These Christmas productions were so popular that churches began to complain about “Christmas Bummers” – children who only made an appearance at Christmas and who often went from one Sunday school to another to increase their haul of seasonal loot. Moreover, some of the plays and cantatas that were written for these occasions necessitated large casts and a considerable cash investment in sets and gifts. Few could have been more elaborate than the spectacle staged by the Pilgrim Unitarian Church in San Francisco, which took place in a hired public hall and featured songs, recitations, and tableaux, a giant Christmas tree hung with lights and presents, artificial snow falling from the ceiling, and a Santa in a sleigh drawn by two real deer. It is little wonder that some critics came to think that church money could have been better spent.

  When it came to American faith practices, however, Santa Claus was more than just a Sunday-school shill. Some scholars have seen the nineteenth-century linkage of Santa Claus and religion to be the perfect expression of Protestant theology. It is, they say (thinking, perhaps, of the narrator of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and his encounter with Saint Nick), the personal convergence with God that is valued; the gift (both the present in the stocking and eternal life) is free; and reality matters less than belief and emotion. Santa himself must have come close to blushing upon reading celebrated Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley’s “Santa Claus,” in which the gift-bringer is elevated to near-divine status, the object of prayers and a source of solace.

  Most tangible of all the gods that be,

  O Santa Claus – our own since Infancy! –

  As first we scampered to thee – now, as then,

  Take us as children to thy heart again.

  Be wholly good to us, just as of old:

  As a pleasant father, let thine arms enfold

  Us, housed within the haven of thy love,

  And all the cheer and wholesomeness thereof.

  Most like a winter pippin, sound and fine

  And tingly-red, that ripe old face of thine,

  Set in thy frosty beard of cheek and chin

  As midst the snow the thaws of spring set in.

  Ho! Santa Claus – our own since Infancy –

  Most tangible of all the gods that be! –

  As first we scampered to thee – now, as then,

  Take us as children to thy heart again.

  This sort of confusion between Santa Claus and God found expression in “Annie and Willie’s Prayer,” a poem by Sophia P. Snow printed on the back of an advertisement for a dry goods store in the 1870s. On Christmas Eve, two motherless children go to bed crying because their father has denied the existence of Santa Claus. But they persist in their belief: “Now we know there is, and it can’t be denied, / For he came every year before mamma died.” Perhaps, they reason, their mother’s prayers had caused God to send Santa, so the two of them pray to Jesus to send gifts and the magical gift-bringer. Father, who that very day had suffered a reverse on his stock portfolio that had made him grumpy, overhears the children’s prayers and repents, going out and buying a pile of presents. “I am happier tonight than I have been for a year. / I’ve enjoyed more pleasure than ever before. / What care I if bank stock falls ten per cent, more? / Hereafter I’ll make it a rule, I believe, /
To have Santa Claus visit us each Christmas eve.” The poetess concludes: “Blind father! who caused your stern heart to relent? / And the hasty word spoken so soon to repent? ’Twas the Being who bade you steal up-stairs, / And made you his agent to answer their prayers.”

  The identification of Santa Claus with holiness and the divine plan is explicit in this 1865 editorial:

  All love and honor to dear old Santa Claus! May his stay in our land be long and his pack grow every year more plethoric! And when, through the broad earth, he shall find on Christmas night, an entrance into every home, and every heart throbbing with joyful gratitude at the return of the blessed day that gave the Christ-child to a sinful world, the reign of the Prince of Peace will have begun below; everywhere there will be rendered, ‘Glory to God in the highest’ and ‘good will to men’ will be the universal law – we shall then have become as little children.

  The implied scriptural reference, which all nineteenth-century readers would have caught, is to Matthew 18:3, where Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Santa Claus is thus an agent of salvation.

  Though the Methodist Sunday School Advocate might inveigh against Santa Claus as a false tale, the Lutheran Observer might object to the “Santa Claus folly” on aesthetic grounds, and others might complain of the excesses of Christmas theatricals, most churchfolk felt that Santa Claus was a role model who could inspire generosity and compassion in children.

  The desire to make Christmas the great opportunity for exercising charity transpired partly from purely Christian impulses and partly from a sentimental view of the season, which emerged from the desk of Charles Dickens in the 1840s.