A history of Father Christmas - 27 December 1996

Among all the sights and sounds that make Christmas time recognisable in any city or small town in the Western world, I suppose no symbol or institution means more to children than the scarlet figure of Santa Claus. Indeed it's a terrifying thought that in every life there comes a point when his very existence is in question.

I was going down in our elevator – lift – the other morning, and a neighbour, a pretty, dark-eyed young mother we know, got in and said: "Is there anything you can do to quicken it, get it over with, so the boys and we can get some sleep? They're so excited they're fit to be tied".

I wondered if they knew the truth. "Not quite," she said. "But I guess this is the last year. They do want to know how he can drop down the chimney stack of this fifteen-storey building, deliver presents on every floor, fall through a roaring fire or two and get back to Donna and Blitzen without even singeing his beard."

Santa Claus – the alias Father Christmas is unknown in this country – Santa Claus is I suppose, so taken for granted that very few people wonder where he came from. There are legends and clichés that get repeated every Christmas: how Prince Albert, the ever-loving and forever mourned consort of Queen Victoria introduced the Christmas tree from Germany and the Yule log, and maybe the old man himself.

During the First World War, I remember the German origin of these cheerful sights and customs was very much played down. We were taught they were all invented by Charles Dickens, an inventive cockney if ever there was one and a genius without a drop of German blood in his veins.

Well whether we're hazy or dogmatic about the origin of Christmas habits and customs, we have no cause anymore to stay ignorant.

On the very eve of Christmas, of Christmas Eve, an old American died who was the world's foremost authority on the roots and traditions of Christmas. He had for a simple, scholarly, Republican, the improbable name of Earl Count, which sounds like a jazz band leader. But Professor Earl Count he was: famous anthropologist, anatomist, neurologist, biologist and Episcopal minister, and a linguist accomplished in ten languages.

His compact but definitive work on Christmas tells you in its title what you're in for: Four Thousand Years of Christmas.

We discover that the Germans were just as much Johnny-come-latelies as we are in the matter of Christmas customs, which began in Babylon, with wealthy men initiating two of our customs: they exchanged presents with other rulers to demonstrate their peaceful intentions and they imagined that evil spirits could be placated by specially decorated evergreens, the fir tree, in particular.

Professor Count puts the origin of Christmas back to the end of the Roman Empire, after the dreadful heresy of Christianity began to overtake the old gods and godheads. Their main annual festivals celebrated the solstices until, he says, eventually the early Fathers of the Church took the merriment, the greenery, the lights and the gifts from Saturn and gave them to the babe of Bethlehem.

Enter in the 5th century AD Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, Asia Minor, patron saint of sailors, renowned for many odd legends through about twelve centuries when he suddenly – I mean throughout say a hundred years – shows up in Holland, which established 6th December as his feast day, and it was on that day that the Dutch combined merrymaking and the exchanging of presents.

The Dutch took this, many other customs and names, across the Atlantic to New Amsterdam. And who came along and took and renamed New Amsterdam? Why the English of course, calling the town New York and holding an annual merry festival complete with fir trees and presents and music on the feast of the Dutchman's Sinterklaas, which the English turned into Santa Claus. The Oxford Dictionary still marks the phrase as "of American origin".

For quite a time, 6th December was the merry day, not the 25th, for, as the Yorkshireman William Bradford who kept a diary of the Mayflower voyage remarked: "What day so ever our Lord was born, certainly it was not 25th December." Santa Claus was by then the festival's patron saint and merriest of hosts.

And so now there he is, everywhere at once. Outside department stores, inside shops, lunch counters, on the telly, the most magical of childhood fantasies.

And, in this city anyway, many of them are graduates of a school for Santa Clauses up the Hudson where portly, old men apply themselves and graduate from such courses as: greeting the child, problems of denial, father substitute or father rival? One class in personal cleanliness in the role of Santa Claus, nowadays more than delicately stresses the role of sobriety, after a run of years some time ago when too many Santa Clauses at twilight, were taking a swig from a flask and voicing WC Fields' complaint: "Somebody has been putting pineapple juice in my pineapple juice".

Anyway the selection of Santa Clauses is well watched and I can't remember a scandal of any sort that's been attached to them until this year. Not Santa Claus really but a charming and lovable surrogate: an old nun. She stood between the outer and the inner doors of department stores, an architectural feature as necessary in these winters as in summer cottages – an outer door and an inside screen door bans all flying objects.

The old nun did not solicit money though many kind folks dispensed it anyway. Shoppers would appear on their way out with their bulging shopping bags and ask if she'd be kind enough to hold the bag while they ducked outside and hailed a cab or caught up with a wandering child. She was willingness personified.

This went on for I think a couple of weeks until the store guards remarked on the speed with which some articles vanished from the counters. Quite simply the nun was the fence for a well organised band of busy kleptomaniacs. The daily news headline ran, "Nun in a Bad Habit." She lost her habit and as I talk, is I think, pondering behind bars the memory of her ingenious caper.

Talking of Christmas articles that have been too smartly gone from the counters, we have this year the rare case of a manufacturer who way underestimated the likely popularity of their product. Remember a year or two ago the mania for the Cabbage Patch doll? Its popularity pales before the mania that has overtaken the country over the toy doll called the Tickle Me Elmo.

Not being any longer much interested in teddy bears and such to put on my pillow, I first heard about Elmo when I saw an ad in the newspaper offering to sell a Tickle Me Elmo for two hundred and fifty dollars. Two hundred and fifty dollars! What is it made of? Some plastic material. Sells, was advertised to sell originally in the shops for, I don't know, six, eight ninety-five.

Well even less unlikely is the true story, just in, of a couple with two small children and an old car, which they were eager to trade in for a new one. Plainly their old car was not in very bad shape, but their case was desperate in a way that you'd never guess. The salesman looked over the expiring model, did a little arithmetic, and came up with a handsome offer – you need to know that he too was a father with, this Christmas, a soon-to-be satisfied toddler. The salesman said: "Well I can give you two thousand seven hundred dollars on your old car, or"...They jumped at the offer. "How about," they said, "a Tickle Me Elmo?" Done and done, two thousand seven hundred dollars.

I've not heard any late word from the manufacturer but I can see their factories working through graveyard shifts and mobilising mobs of downsized employees to get out millions more Tickle Me Elmos, by which time Tickle Me Elmos will be available in a saturated market for a dollar a throw.

I think the best Christmas story is one about reindeer. There was a brief television interview the other day – the first ever, they claimed of a people, a tribe – maybe a tribe but certainly a community remote from their fellow humans – in northern Siberia. They live with and by the reindeer and what can be made out of him: food, shelter, clothes, the lot. They are, or were, a long isolated part of the Soviet Union and this week they wanted to learn from the visiting Westerner the news of the outer world. They were told that the Soviet Union had collapsed. They asked, "What was the Soviet Union?"

Now it's time to wish you all the traditional greeting, but according to whose tradition? New Yorkers have abandoned the old forms and now say what they say before all the Jewish festivals: happy holidays.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas and I wish you now a Happy New Year. And oh yes, to any small child who's beginning to share the doubt of that famous little American girl who wrote a questioning letter to the New York Sun exactly one hundred years ago, the answer, triumphantly enlarged into the paper's Christmas Day editorial is the same: "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus".

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