12/12/2023
I wrote this article about Santa Claus 30 years ago and it was published Dec. 18, 1992 in a New York newspaper.
SANTA CLAUS IS A DYED-IN-THE-WOOL NEW YORKER
Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without the jolly man in the red suit but where exactly does this fat fellow come from?
Like most Americans, his roots are elsewhere, but the Santa Claus we all know and love is truly a son of NEW YORK—Manhattan, to be precise. Let’s go back a bit and see how his ancestors evolved.
The idea of magical gift bringers predates the Christian era, but the one with whom we are most familiar today is Saint Nicholas. He seems to have inherited many of the attributes of the older pagan figures who rewarded the good and punished the bad.
Saint Nicholas was the kindly Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor of the 4th century, who was noted for his kindness and generosity. Folks thought him quite peculiar for giving gifts to people he’d never met. He’s usually depicted holding three gold balls or bags which represent the dowries he gave to the daughters of an impoverished, though faithful, merchant.
The story goes that he secretly tossed the bags of gold through the windows of the three sisters, thus giving them dowries and allowing them to be wed. According to legend, one of the furtively tossed bags fell into a stocking that was hanging near the chimney to dry, giving rise to the custom of hanging Christmas stockings on the mantelpiece.
The true veneration of St. Nicholas began in 430 AD when the Emperor Justinian built the first church in his honor in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). The St. Nicholas cult spread throughout the Eastern church and he eventually became the patron saint of Russia.
The bankers of Lombardy, Italy adopted him as their patron saint and placed his highly recognizable emblem of the three gold balls overtop their doors. These three balls might have meant “bank” in northern Italy, but later they became a symbol everywhere for “money lenders” or pawnshops.
The Protestant Reformation brought about many changes in Europe, not the least of which were the new forms that this annual gift giver took in different countries.
French children called him Pere Noel (Father Christmas) while in Germany, a visit was paid by Christkindl (Christ child), which was later Amercanized to Kris Kringle. These gentlemen as well as the other incarnations of St. Nicholas eventually made their way to New York along with the other immigrants, but it was the Dutch settlers of early Manhattan island who really brought the joyful spirit of Christmas to America in the early 1600’s.
In Nieuw (New) Amsterdam, the children waited all year for December 5th, the feast of Sinter Niclaes. The Dutch kids filled their wooden shoes with straw for his horse to eat and left them outside their windows hoping that the good Bishop, known affectionately by then as Sinter Klaas, would in turn, fill them with goodies.
After the English conquered New Amsterdam in 1664 and took charge of the newly renamed New York, the city was flooded with English citizens moving to the New World. The English continued the local customs surrounding the kindly St. Nicholas, picturing him as a tall and stately person. The English children, struggling to blend in with the Dutch children, haphazardly mis-pronounced the Sinter Klaas as Santa Claus.
Few Americans outside of New York City ever heard of Santa Claus until 1809 when New York writer Washington Irving wrote his popular book A Knickerbocker’s History of New York. The book was about life in old Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam and mentions the white-bearded fellow over two dozen times as the guardian or patron saint of New York. Irving created a picture of St. Nicholas as a small, jolly old Dutchman with a broad-rimmed hat and smoking a pipe who rode through the air in a horse-drawn wagon and dropped presents down chimneys. Irving’s book was a best-seller and introduced Santa Claus to the rest of the American public.
Another New Yorker who added to the legend and who took Washington Irving’s work to heart was the young Episcopal seminarian Clement Clarke Moore, who lived on his Chelsea farm in Manhattan (now the Chelsea neighborhood). An architect and lay professor of Hebrew and Greek at New York’s General Theological Seminary, Moore wrote a poem for his three small children Clement Jr., Charity and Emily for Christmas 1822. The beginning of the poem is now legendary: ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. This poem was the beginning of our modern visualization of Santa, replete with red suit and reindeer. (Note: modern historical revisionists have said that perhaps Moore didn’t write the poem and that it was written anonymously by a family friend but this hasn’t been proven).
New York illustrator and political cartoonist Thomas Nast did a drawing of Santa Claus (based on the description in Moore’s poem) for a children’s book published in 1863. Nast was yet another New Yorker who added to the legend. Nast drew not only the evils of Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed and the 19th century politicians, but also created a picture world in which Santa Claus had a North Pole workshop where toys were built and had a large book where all the children’s names and behavior were recorded. New Yorker Thomas Nast put the finishing touches on the elfin picture of Santa Claus that we now cherish. His pictures were reprinted in newspapers around the country, spreading the legend of Santa Claus.
Later on, other authors and artists added elves to assist in the workshop and Mrs. Claus was born in a New York World newspaper cartoon in1889.
In 1897, yet another New York newspaper, the New York Sun, made history when its editor Francis Church, announced to a little girl from 115 West 95th Street and indeed the world at large that “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!”
It wasn’t until 1931 that Coca-Cola’s Madison Avenue Ad Agency in New York commissioned the now-famous series of promotional paintings that resulted in the adult sized more robust figure that we know today as Santa Claus.
New York added to its Christmas image with the annual Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, which started performances in 1933 and still features a Nativity pageant with live camels and sheep as well as huge Broadway style musical production numbers. New York’s famed 1858 MACY’S Department store was the first store to have annual “Christmas windows” and a Santa to greet the children. By 1946, New York was permanently emblazoned in Americans’ Christmas memories with the movie The Miracle on 34th Street filmed in New York City at Macy’s.
In summary, we have today’s SANTA CLAUS, created in a wonderful melding of many cultures and ideas that could only happen in New York!
Merry Christmas!
