“He sees you when you’re sleeping…. he knows when you’re awake … so be good for goodness’ sake.” Generations of American children have grown up humming such cheerful (if somewhat creepy!) tunes at Christmastime, and are taught to expect that good little girls and boys will be the recipients of holiday cheer brought to their houses in the dead of night on Christmas Eve by a “right jolly old elf” named Santa Claus. The fact that the holiday marks the birth of the Christian Messiah notwithstanding, many would argue that it is in fact Santa, and not the baby Jesus, who is the iconic American Christmas figure. In the popular imagination—as evidenced and reinforced in movies, television, cartoons, games, cards, and shopping mall “North Poles” from coast to coast, Santa Claus is a portly old gentlemen with a long white beard, a red suit with white fur trim, a wide black belt, and boots. He lives with his toy-making elves and his wife, Mrs. Claus, at the North Pole, and he delivers toys to good children and lumps of coal to bad children on Christmas Eve, when he is whisked around the world in a marvelous sleigh pulled by magical flying reindeer.
Immigrants brought the tradition of Santa Claus to the United States from northern Europe and Scandinavia. Like many holiday-themed legends, Santa Claus evolved in North American storytelling and eventually assumed his recognizable, modern form; a jovial, gift-giving elf on a magical sleigh drawn by flying reindeer. (Library of Congress)
The American Santa Claus was originally derived from Old World legends and traditions associated with Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop from Myra in Asia Minor, or modern-day Turkey. The Feast Day of Saint Nicholas is December 6, which is thought to be the day of the saint’s death; Saint Nicholas is a patron saint of children, and various gift-giving traditions evolved around his Feast Day. One legend associated with Saint Nicholas suggests that he saved a trio of sisters from being forced into a life as fallen women by giving each a dowry of gold, thus evoking the oldest of Yuletide gift-giving narratives: that of the Magi, or the Three Kings (or Three Wise Men) who followed the light of a star to find the infant Jesus in the manger, where they bestowed upon him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Kris Kringle is another name given in the United States for Santa, and ultimately seems to derive from Christkind, “Christ Child,” the infant Jesus who is depicted as the primary holiday gift-giving figure in many parts of Central Europe and beyond. A Santa-like figure in Great Britain is known as Father Christmas, while the Scandinavian countries have figures such as the Danish Julemanden, “The Christmas Man,” who lives in Greenland with his nisse, or “elves,” the Danish equivalent of Santa’s little helpers. Such a figure combines ancient Northern European myth and folklore with Christian traditions, and may even evoke themes drawn from the pagan god Odin and the mythological theme of the Wild Hunt. Such influences most clearly resonate with the American Santa in the concept of the flying reindeer and sky-crossing sleigh. Although Father Christmas, Julemanden, and Santa Claus are all related figures, however, Santa’s direct ancestor in American tradition is the Dutch Sinterklaas or Sint Nicolaas, as the name suggests a gift-giving folkloric descendant of the legendary Saint Nicholas. Sinterklaas migrated to New Amsterdam (now New York) with early Dutch colonists, and remained Santa Claus after the American Dutch settlements became English-speaking.
American children traditionally leave milk and cookies out for Santa on Christmas Eve, and many leave out carrots or other treats for his reindeer as well. Young children also often spend a great deal of time making extensive Christmas lists, often mailing these to Santa at the North Pole. In fact, every year such letters accumulate in American post offices by the hundreds of thousands, and post office policy dictates that—unless they contain a valid U.S. return address—all of these letters must remain in the possession of the post office in the zip code in which they were mailed. Evidently this childhood tradition has been a bureaucratic nightmare for more than a century, because in 1912 U.S. Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock allowed postal employees and private citizens to handle and respond to such letters; indeed, a key plot point of the iconic Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street revolves around the masses of letters to Santa that come into the possession of the United States Post Office each holiday season.
Postmaster General Hitchcock’s decision also laid the groundwork for what was to develop over the years into the U.S. Postal Service’s “Letters to Santa” program. Under the auspices of this program, letters addressed to Santa are sifted through to find those that articulate an acute and immediate need, and such letters are matched through a double-blind system with willing donors, who—remaining anonymous—provide the requested items to the local post office, which forwards them to the anonymous child in need. The “Letters to Santa” program operates nationwide, except in New York City, where the equivalent “Operation Santa” program handles more than half a million letters just from the metropolitan area alone. One could say that the anonymous donors in the “Letters to Santa” and “Operation Santa” programs thus act in the capacity of true Secret Santas.
A “Secret Santa” drawing is an American Christmas tradition in which participants generally take names at random to determine to whom they will give a gift. Popular at office Christmas parties, Secret Santa giving is also a practice of some large families, especially those with numerous adult siblings. Various charitable organizations throughout the United States organize gift-giving drives along similar lines, allowing families to maintain their privacy and dignity, children to receive gifts, and individuals to express the Christmas spirit selflessly.
Santa Claus has been the subject of countless movies, television holiday specials, and cartoons, many of which have become holiday staples. These include 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street (which introduced filmgoers to future screen legend Natalie Wood), as well as the Rankin-Bass 1970 TV animated classic Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, which gave a fleshed-out backstory to Santa’s life, calling, and powers, featuring the voices of Fred Astaire and Mickey Rooney. A Christmas Story (1983)—which has since become so much of a tradition in its own right that it has regularly been shown in twenty-four-hour marathons on cable television—offered a cynically dark, comic spin on the department store Santa icon. This Santa rebuffed Ralphie’s request for a much-coveted Red Ryder B.B. gun with the words, “You’ll put your eye out, kid,” as he gently put the sole of his boot to Ralphie’s forehead and pushed him down the exit slide. The genre of the spoof Santa figure was perhaps born with 1964’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, while thirty years later saw the genesis of Tim Allen’s The Santa Clause, which became a franchise in its own right. The ubiquity of Santa throughout the holiday season and indeed the year, as well as his myriad avatars in every avenue of popular culture, attests to his prominence and longevity as an American cultural icon, in origin a figure of myth, legend, and folklore, but over time a manifestation of cultural zeitgeist that is reborn anew for each succeeding generation.
Perhaps the most notably new and original cultural manifestation of Santa in the mid to late twentieth century is Dr. Seuss’s Grinch, an anti-Santa of sorts born of a popular children’s book that was rendered into a classic holiday television cartoon, and which ultimately emerged as an icon in its own right. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, a 1957 children’s Christmas book by Dr. Seuss, was made into a holiday TV cartoon special in 1966, featuring the voice of screen horror legend Boris Karloff in both the title role and that of the narrator. The story subsequently was turned into a live action film starring Jim Carrey in 2000. The Grinch has made many appearances in Seuss-related programs and movies, and even in a musical that had a limited run on Broadway in 2006. A figure still wildly popular at Christmas, Halloween, and throughout the year, the Grinch regularly has been identified as one of the most abiding cartoon characters of the twentieth century and is evoked as an anti-Santa icon (eventually redeemed into a Santa-avatar) on par with the great Christmas archetype of selfishness incarnate embodied by Ebenezer Scrooge, the antihero protagonist of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Indeed, the noun grinch derived from his name actually appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “spoilsport or killjoy; (more generally) an ill-tempered, unpleasant person.” Although at first the Grinch seeks to deprive the residents of Whoville of their Christmas presents, decorations, and feast, he is born anew when he learns the true meaning of holiday generosity and spirit, accepting love and selfless joy. His heart—which had been “two sizes too small”—grows three sizes, and he gains the strength of a dozen Grinches. Like Scrooge, his closest British equivalent, the Grinch begins the story as a highly materialistic—some might suggest even satanic—character in direct opposition to Santa who embodies the greed and cynicism of those who equate Christmas with gift-giving and commercialization. Like Scrooge, the Grinch is reborn through his exposure to selflessness into a Santa-like figure that embodies the true spirit of Christmas.
Perhaps the ultimate acknowledgment of the centrality of Santa, harbinger of the birth of the Prince of Peace, to American culture—as well as this character’s ironic flexibility within that culture—is Santa’s adoption by a military missile-defense agency. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a U.S. and Canadian partnership born of Cold War fears of nuclear missile launches, metaphorically swaps its military beret for a fur-trimmed Santa hat each Christmas, offering an online “Santa Tracker” that marks Kris Kringle’s course across the globe on Christmas Eve. “Charm offensive” though this application may be, it is certainly also a testament to the abiding and pervasive influence of Santa Claus traditions upon American culture that this otherwise highly professional and somewhat humorless agency provides such a delightful and seemingly frivolous service.
C. Fee
See also Christmas Gift; Christmas Tree; Saints’ Legends; Thanksgiving
Further Reading
Bowler, Gerry. 2005 Santa Claus: A Biography. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
Elliott, Jock. 2001. Inventing Christmas: How Our Holiday Came to Be. New York: Abrams.
Handwerk, Brian. 2013. “St. Nicholas to Santa: The Surprising Origins of Mr. Claus.” National Geographic Online. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131219-santa-claus-origin-history-christmas-facts-st-nicholas. / Accessed October 5. 2015.
“Saint Nicholas and the Origin of Santa.” St. Nicholas Center website. http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/origin-of-santa/. Accessed October 5, 2015.
Seal, Jeremy. 2005. Nicholas: The Epic Journey from Saint to Santa Claus. New York: Bloomsbury.