The Origins of Santa Claus

RELATED LINKS:

Thomas Nast came up with that image of Santa Claus.

In 1931, the Coca-Cola company used its signature red color to dress Santa and market its products at Christmas. Although this was not the first red-robed Saint Nicholas (a 1653 English woodcut portrays a red Santa ) it took this major marketing campaign to convince the world that Santa was a jolly old man in red suit.

How did the idea for Santa Claus originate?

The American version of the Santa Claus figure received its inspiration and its name from the Dutch legend of Sinterklaas (a Dutch variant of the name Saint Nicholas).

Dutch colonists took this tradition with them to New Amsterdam (now New York City) in the American colonies in the 17th century.

As early as 1773 the name appeared in the American press as "St. A Claus," but it was the popular author Washington Irving who gave Americans their first detailed information about the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas. In his History of New York, published in 1809 under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, Irving described the arrival of the saint on horseback each Eve of Saint Nicholas.

This Dutch-American Saint Nick achieved his fully Americanized form in 1823 in the poem A Visit From Saint Nicholas more commonly known as "The Night Before Christmas" by writer Clement Clarke Moore. Moore included such details as the names of the reindeer; Santa Claus's laughs, winks, and nods; and the method by which Saint Nicholas, referred to as an elf, returns up the chimney. (Moore's phrase "lays his finger aside of his nose" was drawn directly from Irving's 1809 description.)

The American image of Santa Claus was further elaborated by illustrator Thomas Nast, who depicted a rotund Santa for Christmas issues of Harper's magazine from the 1860s to the 1880s. Nast added such details as Santa's workshop at the North Pole and Santa's list of the good and bad children of the world. In the first Nast illustration, Santa was delivering Christmas gifts to soldiers fighting in the Civil War. The cartoon, entitled "Santa Claus in Camp" appeared in Harper's Weekly on January 3, 1863.

A human-sized version of Santa Claus, rather than the elf of Moore's poem, was depicted in a series of illustrations created by Haddom Sundblom for Coca-Cola advertisements introduced in 1931. In modern versions of the Santa Claus legend, only his toyshop workers are elves.

An advertising writer named Robert May, invented Rudolph, the ninth reindeer, with a red and shiny nose, while working on a catalog for the Montgomery Ward Company in 1939.

In looking for the historical roots, one discovers that Santa Claus, as we know him, is a combination of many different legends and mythical creatures.

The basis for the Christian-era Santa Claus is Bishop Nicholas of Smyrna (Izmir), in what is now Turkey. Nicholas lived in the 4th century A.D. He was very rich, generous, and loving toward children. Often he gave joy to poor children by throwing gifts in through their windows.

The Orthodox Church later raised St. Nicholas, miracle worker, to a position of great esteem. It was in his honor that Russia's oldest church, for example, was built. For its part, the Roman Catholic Church honored Nicholas as one who helped children and the poor. St. Nicholas became the patron saint of children and seafarers. His name day is December 6th.

In the Protestant areas of central and northern Germany, St. Nicholas later became known as der Weinachtsmann. In England he came to be called Father Christmas. St. Nicholas made his way to the United States with Dutch immigrants, and began to be referred to as Santa Claus.

In North American poetry and illustrations, Santa Claus, in his white beard, red jacket and pompom-topped cap, would sally forth on the night before Christmas in his sleigh, pulled by eight reindeer, and climb down chimneys to leave his gifts in stockings children set out on the fireplace's mantelpiece.

Children naturally wanted to know where Santa Claus actually came from. Where did he live when he wasn't delivering presents? Those questions gave rise to the legend that Santa Claus lived at the North Pole, where his Christmas-gift workshop was also located.

Reprinted courtesy of “Tricky Trivia”

Who Was the Real St. Nick?

Shopping-mall Santas might be good sports, but the real St. Nicholas was a true humanitarian. By the Middle Ages, the kindly bishop's reputation as a miracle worker made him the most popular saint in Europe.

The legends about St. Nicholas are abundant, but the facts are few. Historians agree that he was born around the year 280 in what is now Turkey. During his youth, Nicholas's homeland was under the control of Diocletian, the Roman emperor. Anti-Christian edicts made it a dangerous time for a Christian such as Nicholas, and many believers in Asia Minor were martyred.

Life for Christians got a lot easier in 312, when the new emperor, Constantine, converted to Christianity and called off the persecutions. The next year, Nicholas became a bishop. We have no records of his years as a bishop, but it seems he was revered as a kindly fellow who helped the poor and sick. He died on December 6, sometime between 343 and 353, and was buried in the town of Myra, which is now a city in modern Turkey called Demre or Kale.

Stories about the miracles performed by the beloved local bishop were told and retold, and by the 6th century a huge church was built in his honor in Myra. Countless pilgrims traveled to the basilica, which contained the saint's bones, to pray for his protection and blessing.

An influential biography of St. Nicholas appeared in the 9th century, enhancing the saint's reputation. Many of the stories describe miracles such as calming the sea with his prayers, arranging for the magical replenishment of wheat during a famine, and even raising people from the dead.

But the story most repeated about St. Nicholas has nothing to do with the supernatural. Instead, it highlights the man's generosity. According to medieval biographers, Nicholas's parents died and left him an inheritance when he was young. The teen-age Nicholas heard about an impoverished neighbor, who had three daughters and no money to feed them--much less provide dowries for them. No one would marry any of the girls without a dowry. There was talk that they would have to prostitute themselves to survive.

After Nicholas learned of the plight of this family, he anonymously left three small bags of gold coins at their house. This tale, coupled with Nicholas's celebrated kindness to children, appears to be the inspiration for the tradition of giving small gifts on his feast day of December 6.

For hundreds of years, the church at Myra attracted pilgrims from all over the Mediterranean. Then, in 1087, it attracted some Italians with larcenous intentions. The men smashed into the sarcophagus that contained the saint's relics and spirited them away to the town of Bari, near the heel of boot-shaped Italy. (It was all the rage in the Middle Ages to steal bits of saints from one church and display them in your local church, thereby diverting all the pilgrims--and their spending money--to your hometown.)

By 1089, a new church was built, and Pope Urban II came to Bari to lay the bones in the crypt of the church. As plays and paintings depicted episodes in the life of this generous saint who protected children, the cult of Nicholas kept growing. The church at Bari became a great pilgrimage site.

Before long, Nicholas was the patron saint of--take a deep breath--sailors, children, unmarried girls, barrel makers, orphans, prisoners, lawyers, newlyweds, Greeks, Russians, and just about everybody else. He is even the patron saint of pawnbrokers, who still indicate their trade by displaying three golden balls, a reference to the three bags of gold St. Nicholas gave to those unmarried girls 1,700 years ago.

St. Nicholas's popularity waned only when the practice of praying to saints was condemned during the Reformation, starting in the 1500s. Of all the Protestant countries in Europe, only Holland continued to revere St. Nicholas, whose name they pronounced "Sinterklaas." In 1626, a group of Dutch settlers traveled to America in a ship adorned with a figurehead of St. Nicholas. It wasn't long before the legend of "Santa Claus" took root in the New World.

Colleen Kelly
December 23, 2004

Santa Claus is Coming To Town

Is there really a Santa Claus and, if so, how does he do all of the wondeful things he's alleged to do? Top scientists have pondered just this question for many years and have come to some astonishing conclusions. Consider the following:

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).

This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man- made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.

On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine.

We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each.

In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force..

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

Author Unknown

Enter content here

Enter content here

Enter content here

To post your opinion regarding this page, please click on

A POINT OF VIEW, and post your opinion in my Forum.