I have gone through a lot of incarnations over the centuries, from a real life saint to a figure that travels with an accomplice who beats naughty children with stick, but today, I encapsulate the potential for real magic in the world, magic that the lucky among you carry a little of forever.
I am Santa Claus and millions of children around the world eagerly await my arrival every year. While my modern incarnation dates back to an 1823 poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” author unknown, my history goes back much further, all the way to a fourth century bishop, also named St. Nicholas. Back then, I was the patron saint of children as well as sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, brewers, pawnbrokers, toymakers, unmarried people, and students, quite a collection if I don’t say so myself. The real-life St. Nick, also known as Nicholas of Bari or Nicholas the Miracle worker, lived in Myra, now Demre, the Lycian region of the Roman Empire in what is now Turkey between 270 and 343. I was known even then for my generous gifts to the poor, and my fame began to spread when I rescued three orphan girls from prostitution by secretly gifting them dowries. I did not use chimneys at that point. Instead, I tossed a bag of gold coins through their window in the middle of the night substantial enough to get married. I also saved three innocent men from execution, literally holding back the sword before it fell, and accusing the judge of accepting a bribe, though in another version of that story I merely tortured the judge in his dreams to force him to confess. Among my other miracles, I was said to have calmed a storm at sea when I made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and chopped down a tree possessed by a demon, but to be honest, most of what the world knows about me today was written hundreds of years after my death and no one really knows what is fact versus fiction. This does not mean that I am an entirely fictional figure, however, or that you know nothing about me for real. Instead, I live on through my remains which made their way to Italy hundreds of years after my death. Though my bones were originally interred at the St. Nicholas Church, where I served as bishop, Greek Christians in the region, subjugated by the Muslim Seljuck Turks, moved most of them to the Basilica San Nicola in southern Italy in 1087. After, the remaining fragments and the sarcophagus itself were taken to Venice during the First Crusade. Because I am one of the few ancient saints to have most of my bones preserved, you know more about me than many and they have been subject to rigorous scientific analysis, shown as recently as 2017 to not be forgeries. The professor who conducted the study, Tom Higham claimed, “we could possibly be looking at remains from St Nicholas himself.” In 2004, Caroline Wilkinson and Fraco Introna at the University of Manchester attempted to reconstruct my face based on a detailed examination of my skull for the BBC2 television program The Real Face of Santa. The reconstruction revealed that I had a broken nose, which had partially healed and seemed to confirm claims that I had been beaten and tortured during the Diocletianic Persecution before being released.
By a few hundred years after my death, I was already known as the giver of gifts to children, though I still looked nothing like my modern self. Throughout the Middle Ages, on the eve of my name day, December 6, a tradition arose of exchanging gifts in my honor, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that I took on the name Father Christmas and began to be more closely associated with the birth of Christ. Under the reign of Henry VIII in England, he who had an unfortunate habit of executing wives and who I probably would have had some choice words for when I was a saint, I was frequently depicted as a large man in green and scarlet fur-lined robes, who brought the peace, joy, food, wine, and all around revelry of the season, but more than two centuries later, as late as the 1800s, neither the English nor anyone else could agree what I looked like and my appearance varied from region to region, depiction to depiction. Charles Dickens, for example, used me as the Ghost of Christmas Present, and kept me in the green coat in the classic A Christmas Carol, when I led Ebenezer Scrooge through the London streets on the morning of the 25th itself, spreading good cheer to everyone I encountered. The Dutch, Belgian, and Swiss, however, embraced a different version of the legacy of St. Nicholas and the Christmas tradition with a different depiction entirely. In the Netherlands and Belgium, I am Sinterklass and I am still celebrated on December 5th and 6th, when most presents are exchanged instead of Christmas day. While they had me wearing the traditional red clothing with a long, full beard, I am generally stately and serious rather than jolly, and I carry a gold ceremonial shepherd’s staff, known as a crosier. I also travel by steamboat from Spain rather than driving a sleigh through the sky and on land, I ride a white horse. The French Swiss refer to me as Pere Noel, Father Christmas, and I am accompanied by Pere Fouettard in my travels. While I give out gifts to children who have behaved, my counterpart gives the misbehaved lumps of coal. The story of Pere Fouettard dates back to 1252; he was an innkeeper that captured three children and murdered them for their money along with their wife, essentially the opposite of my real life persona. In some versions, the children are drugged, then cut into pieces and stewed, until the real St. Nicholas discovered the crime and brought them back to life, enslaving Pere as a punishment. The German Swiss also believe Father Christmas has an accomplice. There, I am known as Samicchlaus and accompanied by Shmutzli, who spanks naughty children with a wooden broom rather than merely giving them coal.
Like so many things in the United States, the current version of the tradition fuses all of these different elements and adds some of their own unique twists. “A Visit from St. Nicholas” set the stage in that regard, essentially creating the modern legend in close to its entirety, from the famous opening lines:
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds;
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads
In it, I finally have my legendary sleigh and reindeer (technically this dates back to 1821 in a poem called “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight”), each with their own name except for Rudolph, who would come later:
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
In addition, I landed on the rooftops of the homes I visited, and descended into the house through the chimney. While the poem doesn’t say what color my clothes are, noting that they were too tarnished with ashes and soot, I am dressed entirely in fur and carry a large sack of presents, familiar to anyone these days. I am also undeniably jolly rather than stern or stately, so jolly in fact, that the author devotes several memorable lines to describing my demeanor:
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 on 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 laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf
After dispensing the presents, I put my finger to my nose and fly back up the chimney on the way to another house, the same as I do to this day even though most houses do not have chimneys anymore and I am more often than not sneaking in a window like a common burglar. At the same time, astute readers will note that I am still known as St. Nicholas instead of Santa Claus despite all the other modern trappings. Alas, this was a transition that would take a few more decades during which I could also be known as Kris Kringle depending on the ethnicity of the community, which probably would have led to a lot of confusion under ordinary circumstances, but since I am magical and brought everyone presents, no one really seemed to mind. By 1863, my common conception began to be further established when Thomas Nast, a famous German born American cartoonist drew me for Harper’s Weekly. In the illustration, I am large and bearded like I am today, but my fur coat has stars on it like an American flag and there are stripes on the pants because it was in the middle of the Civil War and I was recruited to help the Union cause. I guess they believed all of the little children of the Confederates were naughty those years, nor is that the only difference. I also have a puppet named Jeff with me for some reason that never caught on with the general public, though I liked the little guy well enough and perhaps it helped set the stage for the elves. Interestingly, Nast is also credited with moving my home to the North Pole, a location he used for an engraving in 1866, but something I cannot really thank him for because it is freaking cold. Could he not have chosen Hawaii or somewhere nice? A cute little volcano or something? Fortunately for my sanity, Mrs. Claus began to appear around this time as well, putting all of the key pieces in place, though it wasn’t until the 1930s that my red attire became fixed and that was at least partially a result of a Coca Cola ad campaign, leading to the false accusation that I only wear red because of their logo. Indeed, I was wearing red in a “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” but if you have never come down a chimney, you have no idea how damaging it is to your clothes. By the end of my adventures, I look like I have been properly barbequed.
Sadly, humans have always been doubters and have a deep skeptical streak, unable to accept that there is magic in the world or perhaps, even someone that would devote their lives to giving gifts and expecting nothing in return. Questions about whether I am real or should be considered real for even children began dogging me as early as 1897, a the height of the early Industrial Age when machines, those lifeless beasts, began to take over the world. At the time, an eight-year old girl, Virginia O’Hanlon, wrote the editor of the The New York Sun and asked, “Dear Editor, I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say that there is no Santa Claus. Papa says ‘If you see it in the Sun, it is so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?” Francis Pharcellus Church responded with a column well worth remembering, “Is There a Santa Claus?” He wrote, “Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds…Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. Not believe in Santa Claus? You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your Papa to hire men to watch all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? …Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see…No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, maybe 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the hearts of children.”
Not surprisingly, the debate continues to this day in what might be an even more skeptical time with even more powerful machines controlling your lives. The modern version of the question is, if anything, even more reductive, should we teach children to believe in things that aren’t real or tell them the cold hard facts practically from birth? For example, Happy Family provided seven reasons to tell your kids the truth about Santa Claus from an early age. In the view of Cecilia Hilkey, at least, the idea that only good kids receive gifts is “problematic” because it doesn’t support the notion of unconditional love, which she believes is inherent in the real tradition of St. Nicholas. In contrast, “the modern story of Santa sounds like surveillance, stuffing your feelings down, and not expressing your emotions” when we want our children to know that we love them unconditionally. In addition, Santa runs afoul of “behavioral science” because we get more enjoyment out of being kind to others when there is no expectation of return, lying about Santa doesn’t build trust, and not believing in Santa doesn’t take away the magic of Christmas. As she put it, “The fun of Santa is playing the ‘Santa game’: writing a letter to Santa, leaving out cookies and milk, having the gifts appear magically overnight! You can still play the ‘Santa game’ (I did and I still do!) and have all the magic of Christmas while still telling your kids the truth. Kids can handle the duality of knowing that Santa is real and isn’t real all at the same time. They can still believe in magic! You may not be taking anything away from them.” Psychology Today, in contrast, took a somewhat more scientific approach to the issue and found a different result, citing a study by Drew Curtis. He “asked a bunch of college students how often their parents had promoted the myth of Santa Claus. He also asked them how they felt about it and how their relationship with their parents is currently. Curtis found that most reported that their parents had lied about Santa a lot. They also said that they viewed their parents’ Santa lies as being somewhat dishonest. Fortunately for parents, he found that there was no link between how many Santa lies had been told and how good of a relationship people have with their parents currently. Taken together, it looks like lying to your kids is generally a bad idea. However, if you want to tell a little fib to your kid about the old man from the North Pole, you probably aren’t going to ruin their life or send your relationship with them into a tailspin. When I think back to that time before James and I found the toys and exposed the truth about Santa, it was a lot of fun. Believing in Santa and awaiting his visits was thrilling and enchanting.”
Me? What does the real Santa Claus think as an authority on the subject? I think you’re looking at this the wrong way in the modern world by focusing almost exclusively on whether parents should lie to their children when they necessarily do so all the time and you are misinterpreting the nature of unconditional love. In real life and in my mythic version, I am the unconditional lover and the unconditional giver. I make the idea that someone can love you that does not know you real; I know God is said to do that as well, but he or she is beyond the ability of children to comprehend, or anyone to comprehend for that matter, whereas I am easy to understand and adore because I have one purpose. The love of a parent and gifts from parents are an important part of growing up, but in a happy household they are to be expected. The love of a stranger, however, especially a magical one is something special, something beyond the expected, and something that provides an example to everyone. It seems to me that Church got closer to the truth in 1897. Santa Claus, as in yours truly, encapsulates the potential for real magic in the world, magic you believe in as children, but fades away as you enter adulthood when you realize real life isn’t a fantasy. Regardless, the lucky among you carry a little of that magic with you forever. Even if you are consciously aware I’m not real and couldn’t be real, the fact that you did so at a young age creates possibilities, opening you up to a reality greater than your own, which should never be closed.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 