HERE COMES SANTA CLAUSE How To Make A Myth

 

I call it a recipe for magic. You begin with one pious Greek aesthetic. Let him rise at room temperature for a millennium or two before blending a little religious fear mongering and a revolution or two, add a smart-ass frat boy, an academic in ancient languages and just a pinch of the Bowery boys. Pour this mixture into the crust of an illiterate German-American and then bake at 350 degrees for a century. Season to taste with relentless capitalism.

A scant 200 years after Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, the faithful in Alexandria, Egypt got curious about when exactly Jesus had been born. There were no records, of course. And in loo of any, the magi came up with a magical answer.  Now, Matthew, Mark and Luke all said Jesus had been crucified on the morning after the Jewish “Passover” meal – putting his death squarely in the spring. But the Alexandrian magi decided it would be magical, meaning religious, if Jesus had been conceived on the same date on which he would die 33 years later. Nine months after the Jewish spring festival of Passover, comes the Jewish mid-winter festival of Hanukkah. And that, as near as I can tell, is the first compromise explaining how Jesus came be born on 25 December.

It didn't hurt that the popular god Mithra (above) and the even more popular the Unconquered Sun god,  Sol Invictis (below), were already sharing that birthday. As Christian mouthpiece Cyprian of Carthage pointed out not long before losing his head in 258 of the Common Era, “Oh, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born . . . Christ should be born." 

So now Christians could join the pagans in celebrating the birth of their gods – small “g” - alongside the birth of The God – large “G” - despite all the un-Christian behavior associated with the celebrations - over eating and boozing and dancing and sexually suggestive behavior like singing naked in the streets. And not long after this popular idea reached Constantinople, so did Saint Nicholas.

Now, for most of the last 1,300 years the Catholic Church has celebrated Nicholas as Bishop of the rich port of Myrna, on the southern coast of what is today Turkey. But while most early saints achieved sainthood by either being eaten by lions, stoned to death, lost their heads like Cyprian, or – a lucky few – were crucified Christ-like for refusing to renounce their faith. 

However, Nicholas (above) died of old age and in his own bed. All he did to achieve sainthood was give his entire inheritance to poor children. Well, to the church, of course, to feed and clothe poor children. To the average Christian that made Nicholas, who died on 6 December, 343 C.E., a saint. It also helped that “manna” periodically dripped from his tomb, and was sold as a miracle cure-all. Still the church officials, who mostly depended on rich people for their operating funds, have never been entirely convinced about this poverty being good for the soul, thing.  So it was not with their help, but the rise of Islam a couple of hundred years later that, started Saint Nicholas on the road to his north pole workshop.

Because it was Islamaphobia which financed the 3 Italian ships that arrived in Myrna in 1087. Claiming the Muslims were about to ransack his tomb - which they weren't -  the sailors bribed and bullied their way into Nicholas' church...

...smashed his shrine, stole, er, rescued, his bones – henceforth referred to as “relics” (above) - and spirited them home to the port of Bari, at the top of the heal of the Italian boot. 

It seemed a perfect fit, because Bari had been the home of a pagan goddess named Pasqua Epiphania – the Grandmother – who once a year filled children's stockings with gifts. Now Nicholas would do the same, every 6 of December.

With the publicity machine in Bari now squeezing money out of Pilgrims, Nicholas also became useful when Christianity was marketed to the pagan Anglo-Saxons of Germany and the Norse of Scandinavia, who had worshiped the blood thirsty Woden and the violent Thor. Every fall the white bearded Woden (above) would mount his flying horse and with his red cloak sailing behind, ride across the heavens, burning and destroying anything and anybody who got in his way. 

Also sailing across the heavens with Wooden was the Norse god of thunder, Thor (above). He drove a chariot pulled by a pair of flying goats, improbably named Gnasher and Cracker. But Christianity found a way to tame these 2 angry and violent deities by making them children.

Every 6 December, the youngest boy in northern churches would don a false beard, Bishop's robes, and chose the foods and music for the St. Nicholas feast, afterward leading the other boys into the streets to collect alms for the poor. And if some of the lads should occasionally form gangs of snowball-throwing muggers, stealing from the rich and poor alike, well it was all in the domesticated spirit of Woden and Thor.  But St. Nicholas would not become Santa Claus until the Americans had driven out the British.

The American Revolution didn't really change that much. The Church of England became the Episcopalians, and the 13 colonies became 14 states, but mostly the people running things in 1775, locally anyway, were the same people running things in 1783 – English religion, English language and English class structure. 

As to be expected, the post war generation rejected their parent's social conventions, and about 1804 -  when John Pintard founded the New York Saint Nicholas Society - younger Gothamites decided to retroactively convert their grandparents' provincial illiterate English backwater into a provincial illiterate Dutch backwater. 

And the cox man directing this voyage back to the future was a 26 year old Manhattan rich-kid smartaleck named Washington Irving (above).

When he joined the St. Nicholas Society in 1809, Irving's contribution was writing the cities' new foundation myth, the verbose and pretentious mockumentary, “History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker” (above).  The author's name, like everything else in the book, was an overwritten joke. A worker who baked children's clay marbles was called, in Dutch, a Knickerbocker, and during the Federalist Period it was the equivalent of calling the author “Joe the Plumber” or “John Q. Public”.

Irving did not invent “Sinter Klass” - the Dutch translation of St. Nicholas. That figure was already filling children's stockings in Holland every 6 December. But the European Sinter Klass (above) was a pretend bishop who supposedly arrived by boat from Spain – the Netherlands used to be owned by Spain – and was accompanied by his Moorish assistant Zwarte Piet - Black Pete.  St. Nicholas delivered presents to good children and Black Pete left coal and twigs in the stockings of bad children.  But uncomfortably in America most black skinned people were slaves, so Irving avoided that moral complication by dropping the assistant, and re-imagined Nicholas as...

...a jolly, little plump Dutch elf wearing a tri-cornered hat, a red waistcoat above a “huge pair of (yellow) Flemish trunk hose,” and smoking a clay pipe. Irving's history claimed everybody in New York believed in this Sinter Klass.  In truth, few in New York had ever heard of him. The entire thing was a gag, a joke, a jape. Irving's “History...” wasn't the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” - another adapted Dutch story -  but as any writer will tell you, Irving could never have written the latter without having already written the former.  Still it was, “The first notable work of imagination in the New World" in somebody's opinion.

Enter printer William Gilley, yet another member of the St. Nicholas Society and a book publisher.   One of his most successful money makers was his annual illustrated series, “The Children's Friend”. In Volume 3, which came out in 1821, appeared an anonymous poem which began with good intentions - “Old Sante Claus with much delight,  His reindeer drives the frosty night , O'er chimney tops and tracks of snow...”  But the author wanted a politically correct Christmas, so Sante promised, “...No drums to stun their Mother's ear, nor swords to make their sisters fear; but pretty books...”  Beyond the fun police, the poem also introduced Santa driving a sleigh pulled by a  flying reindeer.  Gilley later insisted the unnamed author's mother had been “an indian” who lived in the north where reindeer were common and could fly.

That same year one of Gilley's neighbors also put pen to paper.  He was an academic who had already composed the well-named 2 volume “Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language” (1809), and similar ponderous intellectual non-fiction.  But Clemet Clarke Moore (above) was also a part time poet and the father of six children (he would eventually sire nine), and he wanted to make their Christmas as joyful as possible for children.

So as Christmas 1822 approached, Moore decided to compose his own version of the myth, but with no lectures.  It began, “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...”

Under Moore's professional and well educated hand everything came together – St. Nicholas, Christmas eve, snow, and flying reindeer. But it was Moore the poet who rhythmical multiplied the beasts, with just a faint hint of those flying goats.  “Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Dunder and Blixem”. The last two names were Dutch for thunder and lightening, but within three editions of the poem their names had morphed into “Donner and Blitzen”, which still scanned but avoided sounding like popular jokes about visiting the outhouse.

But in Moore's poem Santa remained Irvings' original creation, a “jolly old ELF”- a dwarf, a munchkin, a little person, with a “round LITTLE belly”. That was how he fit down the chimney. And he was driving “...a MINIATURE sleigh and eight TINY reindeer”.  Saint Nicholas not only delivered toys, he was a toy. How magical is that? All that was missing was for somebody to bring all these new pieces together.

I suspect that Thomas Nast  (above) was dyslexic. Although his family had arrived from Germany when he was only 6 years old, “Tommy” was never comfortable reading or writing in English or German. But after finances forced him to drop out of the National Academy of Art, on Broadway and Leonard Street in lower Manhattan, the 15 year old became a staff artist for Frank Leslie's Weekly Illustrated Newspaper. Four years later he was offered more money by the New York Illustrated News as an artist-reporter. And the next year – 1860 – the now 20 year old was sent to England to cover a prize fight, and then on to Sicily to cover the war to unite Italy.   On his return Nast – with just 50 cents in his pocket – was hired at a generous salary by Fletcher Harper, to draw for his “Harper's Weekly Illustrated News”.

Over his quarter of a century at Harper's, Nast invented the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party - inspired by a mass escape from the Central Park Zoo - and popularized the donkey for the Democrats. Nast would scratch his drawings directly onto wood, before they were copied into metal plates for printing

Still his accurate caricatures so enraged Tammany Hall boss, William Tweed (above and below), the crooked politician ordered his supporters to “Stop them damn pictures... My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures." 

But Nast turned down a $500,000 bribe to quit, and hounded Tweed until he was arrested. After Tweed jumped bail and escaped to Spain, it was Nast's famous drawings which ensured Tweed was recognized and extradited.  But it was Nast's yearly Christmas drawings that changed Santa Clause from a diminutives regional figure, into first a national and then an international symbol.

In 1861 Tommy Nast had married Sarah “Sallie” Edwards, “with brown hair, a graceful form and delicate damask cheeks”. In his drawings she became his idolized image of “Columbia” (above), symbol of the United States. The couple remained deeply devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, and raised 5 children together – 3 girls and 2 boys. Sallie was his business manager, and it was she who read Clement Moore's poem to Tommy, and he enshrined it's images for all time. 

 And as his children grew, so did his Santa Claus, 24 Christmas in a row, 76 etchings in all - becoming a full-sized St. Nicholas, a bearded and smiling hedonist, a real person, unrecognizable anymore as the aesthetic Bishop of Myrna.  And he had a new address. Instead of coming from “the north”, Santa's workshop was at the North Pole.

And there were the Christmas Cards, an invention inspired in large part to market Nast's beloved images. And he presented the first image of a child mailing a letter to Santa Claus. 

Santa's  pipe, which had started out as a Dutch practical clay, Nast replaced with meerschaum. And from Nast's own Bavarian childhood, he included a Christmas Tree in the party. Thomas Nast's etchings transcended linguistics. In Europe, where St. Nicholas' Feast was still being celebrated on 6 December, Nast's Santa Claus began shifting the holiday emphases to 25 December.

After Thomas Nast, little changed about Santa Claus until Joe Mizen, who painted billboards for the Coke-a-Cola Company, and came up with a tie-in for the Famous Barr Company Department store in St. Louis, Missouri, which boasted they had the world's largest soda fountain. He called his 1930 creation “The Busiest Man in the World”.(above)  Once again it treated the latest incarnation of St. Nicholas as a real man, and Coke decided to use the ad in magazines all that year. 

But the image worried Archie Lee, the executive for the Coke account at the D'Arcy Advertising Agency, who imagined beer companies hijacking the image, once prohibition came to an end.  Lee felt Coke needed a more wholesome and realistic Santa. And one of the artists he hired to develop this mythical real man was Haddon Sundblom.

Sundblom modeled his Santa after his friend, salesman Lou Prentess.  And from 1931 to 1964, Haddon was the man who defined what Santa Clause looked like, for all of us - “...plump belly, sympathetic face, jovial air, and debonair bearing.”  And white, of course. In this modern version, the traditional Santa was full sized, but his workers were still elves. 

And that was the new mythology of Santa Claus. Like the mold (above) created to support a myth. And now there is a ninth "red nosed" reindeer.  I smell evolution on the winter breeze.

It is hard to imagine how Santa will change in the future.  My guess is we will have to go backward, again, and reinvent the past.  Or perhaps envision Santa Claus as a computer server delivering presents via reindeer drones.  However the future comes, I am certain Santa will never die. Mythical characters never do. Not really. Just ask Mythra, Pasqua Epiphania or Sol Invicits.

- 30 -

YES, VIRGINIA

I know of only two moments that justifies the sin of pride. Both are a "Horace Mann moment". The first, of course, when you have “won some victory for humanity”, and the second is when a child raised by you does the same. Consider the example of Philip F. O'Hanlon, who in his own life achieved wealth and professional and public recognition. In 1886, right out of N.Y. University Medical School, this sixth generation physician became the head of surgery at the new Gouverneur Community Hospital, on the lower east side of Manhattan.

He was appointed the State Medical Examiner in 1891, and in 1895 became New York City Coroner and Police Surgeon. The later two posts made him famous, and his testimony front page news in several big murder trials. But it was as a father that Philip O'Hanlon won his greatest victory for humanity, because his daughter was Laura Virginia O”Hanlon.

Laura Virginia O'Hanlon (above, she was named after her mother), was born 20 July, 1889, the same year the family leased a larger home, at 115 West 95th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, just a block west of Manhattan's Central Park. It was a relatively new brownstone, with a red brick front and peaked roof, having just one previous owner. As she reached the age of reason, Laura decided she preferred the name Virginia. And in the late summer of 1897, Virginia approached her father with a simple but profound question, belying her innocence and tender age. 

Fifty years later Virginia remembered the event this way: “Quite naturally I believed in Santa Claus, for he had never disappointed me.  But when less fortunate little boys and girls said there wasn't any Santa Claus, I was filled with doubts.  I asked my father, and he was a little evasive on the subject....It was a habit in our family that whenever any doubts came up as to how to pronounce a word or some question of historical fact was in doubt, we wrote to the Question and Answer column in “The Sun”. Father would always say, “If you see it in the The Sun, it's so,” and that settled the matter. “Well, I'm just going to write The Sun and find out the real truth,” I said to father. “He said, “Go ahead, Virginia. I'm sure The Sun will give you the right answer, as it always does.”

Consider for a moment this privileged Victorian child, Virginia O'Hanlon  (above) -  the daughter of a well known community leader in New York City. At eight years of age she knew children who were less fortunate than herself,  knew them well enough to talk with them, to share the theology of childhood. She was raised in a home in which the family shared knowledge, and the joy of discovery. Parents and their only child learned together. And she was encouraged to seek truth on her own.

So early in September of 1897, Virginia wrote the following letter. “Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?” She mailed it to The Sun newspaper offices, at 280 Broadway, New York City.

The Sun (“It Shines for All”) had been published in New York since 1833, but in 1868 it acquired its most famous editor, Charles Anderson Dana (above). Under Dana “The Sun” was a strongly Democratic newspaper, and “a newspaper man's newspaper”, and first of the modern newspapers, introducing editorials, society news, and human-interest stories, along side the “hard news”,  all squeezed into eight pages or less, two editions every weekday, and recently even a Sunday edition, with a circulation at its peak of 130,000.  Dana collected about him young, talented writers, and who followed his concisely stated revolutionary approach to news: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

But as Dana aged, “The Sun” became “notoriously inconsistent”. Others improved upon his method, like Joseph Pulitzer at the “New York World”, and built larger circulations, like William Randolph Hearst via his “Yellow Journalism”. By Charles Dana's death in 1897, and his replacement by his son Paul, “The Sun” had slipped to fourth along Newspaper Row (aka Park Row, above ) in lower Manhattan - “The World”, “The Tribune”, “The Times” and now lastly “The Sun”.

It was one of Dana's talented young writers, now an editor, named Edward Mitchell, who was the father of modern Science Fiction. And in early September Mitchell handed Virginia O”Hanlon's letter to a 58 year old editorial writer, Francis Pharcellus Church (above). He was a Columbia graduate, who had reported on the horrors of the Civil War. With his brother, Church co-founded two successful magazines. According to Mitchell, after reading Virginia's letter  “...he pooh-poohed the subject a little. Then he took it, and in a short time handed me (the) article” And on 21 September, 1897,  in a standard 500 word unsigned editorial, printed in the middle of page seven, the journeyman writer responded to the little girl's letter.

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age...Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. 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....Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you 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...Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

The letter and its column were  not an instant phenomenon.  It was not until the 1920's that the newspaper began to reprint it annually. But by 1930, “The Sun” was receiving over 163,000 requests for reprints every year. Since then it has appeared in thousands of newspapers and books, decade after decade , and remains the most reprinted editorial in the English language. But it was not until after his death on 11 April, 1906, that The Sun broke their own rules and named Francis Church as the author.  Church never married and had no children. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

In 1898, young William Randolph Hearst, in building his own newspaper empire, drove America into war with Spain. Virginia's father, Dr. Philip O'Hanlon, volunteered as lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corps. He survived that service, and was listed as still alive in 1920, and still living on 95th street, although now on the south side of the street.

Virginia O'Hanlon  (above) received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College in 1910,  a Master's in Education from Columbia University in 1912, and the same year she began teaching underprivileged grade school children in New York City schools. 

In 1913 she married Edward Douglas, but he abandoned her just before she gave birth to her daughter, Laura Temple Douglas (above) in March of 1914.  Virginia was eventually promoted to principal, and in 1930 was even awarded her doctorate from Fordham University. Her dissertation was titled “The Importance of Play.” Her daughter woould grow up, marry and have seven children of her own.

One of those grandchildren, Virginia Rogers (above, with Virginia), remembered as a child visiting her grandmother in New York City. “Gram was a lady," she said, "Very elegant. She would dress up to go across the street (to the)...post office. At Christmastime, there would be literally box-loads of mail addressed to my grandmother.”  Another granddaughter said, “She was a woman ahead of her time.”

Virginia never took credit for the column her letter inspired. She told her nephew, James Temple, “All I did was ask the question. It was Mr. Church who did something wonderful.” Virginia told an interviewer, Church's column “gave me a special place in life I didn’t deserve. It also made me try to live up to the philosophy of the editorial and to try to make glad the heart of childhood.”

What Virginia did was to teach at Brooklyn’s P.S.401, which held classes for chronically ill children confined at home or in hospitals. Eventually she became a principle at the school. Shortly before she retired she wrote another letter, this one addressed to the “Children of Yesterday.” She pleaded, “Some little children doubt that Santa still lives because often their letters ...never seem to reach him. Nurses in hospitals know who some of these children are. Teachers in great city schools will know others....Won’t you try to seek out these trusting children of today and make sure that their letters in some way reach Santa Claus so that “he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.” Laura Virginia O'Hanlon Douglas had made that her life's work, after retiring from teaching in 1950.

Nine years later she moved to North Chatham, 15 miles south of Albany, New York, to live with her daughter.  During the Christmas holidays in 1969, heart problems forced Virginia to be admitted to the Columbia Memorial Hospital, in Hudson, New York.  There she was visited by Santa Clause (above), disguised as John Harms, a hospital maintenance man, who often visited patients.  He kissed Virginia on the cheek, and she whispered in his ear that she still believed.  Virginia died, in the Barnwell Nursing Home, in Valatie, N.Y., on 13 May, 1974.  She was 81 years old.

Her original letter, which the newspaper had returned, was saved in a scrapbook by a granddaughter and somehow survived a house fire. Today, the brownstone at 115 West 95th street (above), is occupied by The Studio School, where children from “an economically diverse student body” (20% receive financial aid), “ learn to value intellectual and creative ideas, and to take pleasure in the process of discovery.” The school maintains a Virginia O’Hanlon Scholarship Fund to help students with financial needs.

Late in her life, Virginia wrote the following. “Those whom Santa visits think of Christmas as a beautiful, sacred occasion which it should be — but today seldom is. But for every child tucked into bed Christmas night with his new toy, there are hundreds, no thousands, who huddle in ragged bed clothing sobbing in the night at a fate at best cruel.” And Virginia asked us all to “Remember the children at Christmas.”  

Will you try and do that ?  Please.

- 30 -