Santa who?Santa who?By JAMIE SHANKS of the Weyburn Review
"Here comes Joulupukki, here comes Joulupukki, right down Joulupukki lane"
Yikes.
Mark Hill hasn't heard anything quite like that in the two years he's been putting on his red and white suit and slinging the jingle bells at the Weyburn Square Mall during the holiday season. He does hear a lot of requests from the kids, though.
"Everything. Every kind of toy imaginable," he laughs. "One even asked for two front teeth."
That's because, to the local children who climb aboard his knee to make their Christmas wish, he is the one and only Santa Claus, the famous bearded elf who lives at the North Pole, travels via flying reindeer and slides down chimneys (in spite of a belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly) to deliver gifts to everyone on Christmas Eve.
Except that there doesn't seem to be a 'one and only' Santa Claus. On the contrary, the famous character we associate with the spirit of holiday cheer answers to a bewildering number of names and appears in a wide variety of forms throughout the world. His mission of charity, however, has remained virtually unchanged from the very beginning.
But just where is the beginning?
To learn who Santa really is - or was - one must turn back the pages of time and plunge into the murky depths of ancient history. Although details are conflicting, it is fairly certain that the man who would become Santa Claus was born in Asia Minor in the fourth century AD. Medieval standards of record-keeping being somewhat lacking, however, things get a bit foggy from that point on. According to one source, he was born in Lycia in southeastern Turkey. Another names the city of Patara as his birthplace, after which he supposedly travelled through Palestine and Egypt during his youth and was later imprisoned by the Roman emperor Diocletian (who now has the unenviable historical distinction of being the person who locked up Santa Claus). He was subsequently released by the more agreeable emperor Constantine and eventually became the Bishop of Myra, a man whose generosity was renowned far and wide even then. There are Roman tales of his kindness to children in particular, a trait which ultimately led to his entitlement as their patron saint.
Many illustrations of the time depict St. Nicholas, as he was then known, as a tall, imposing figure garbed in the official vestment of a bishop (complete with crosier and a split-peaked cap) and, yes, a flowing white beard. Others portray him as a stern, dignified man in black astride a white horse.
Whatever he looked like, St. Nicholas was a rather busy man. There is no shortage of legends and stories which chronicle events in his life, his kindness to others and his amazing miracles; one notable tale of his exploits involved a father who was too poor to afford a dowry for his three daughters. St. Nick rode to the rescue, dropping a bag of gold down the chimney into each of their stockings which were hanging to dry, unwittingly beginning an association with chimneys and stockings that has endured for much of his career.
His Christian feast day was on Dec. 6, still used for gift-giving in some countries, and was the date when he made his annual rounds accompanied by a humble donkey - some sources say a flying horse - and left presents such as fruit, nuts and figures of wood and clay by the hearth.
Although St. Nicholas apparently died around 350 A.D., he is obviously alive and well today and is now more famous than ever. And it is primarily the Dutch who can be thanked for it.
While his fame spread throughout the Middle Ages (thousands of churches were named after him), St. Nicholas found himself the victim of persecution once again, this time during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, and was banned from most European countries. The Dutch, however, kept him busy as their patron saint of sailors; a likeness of him even rode nobly upon the prow of the first Dutch ship to reach America. Sint Nikolaas, as they called him, found plenty of additional work on the side by moonlighting throughout history as the patron saint of Russia, Greece, prisoners, bakers, pawnbrokers, shopkeepers, unwed maidens and even wolves.
It was in the New World, however, that his gift-giving Christmas routine returned with aplomb - but in a slightly different form. In Holland, children would leave wooden clogs by the hearth filled with straw for his hungry donkey, whereupon the good-hearted saint would leave a treat in return. Overseas, the clogs were exchanged for more fashionable stockings; his name was altered to Sinter Klaas, which in turn evolved into Santa Claus.
He was Americanized even further thanks to a man named Clement Clarke Moore and his 1822 poem, An Account of a Visit From Saint Nicholas, which began with the now-famous words, "T'was the night before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse." The poem, originally written for his children and later published in the Troy Sentinel in Troy, New York, described St. Nicholas as a chubby, plump little elf dressed in furs and covered in soot - rather different from the stately Bishop of Myra and his ivory steed.
That didn't stop Thomas Nast, a famous political cartoonist for Harper's Weekly, from taking Moore's ball and running with it for over 20 years, further developing the Santa Claus character in a long series of definitive Christmas cartoons and drawings produced from 1863-86. Perhaps more than anyone else, Nast was responsible for creating the modern incarnation of Santa Claus that children know and love today.
It's an image that has changed a lot over the past 1,500 years, but the message is still the same. Santa Claus represents nothing less than the kindness, the generosity, the love and the goodwill of all mankind - and hope for the human race.
And he'll be around for a while yet. A doubtful young girl named Virginia wrote a letter to the New York Sun in 1897 asking if there really was a Santa Claus. Francis P. Church told her the simple truth. "Thank God! he lives, and lives forever," he wrote in his famous reply.
"A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."
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