Santa Claus ate Father Christmas. It happened quite suddenly. Well, it took about a decade, but that’s suddenly in cultural terms. Over the course of the 1870s the venerable British figure of Father Christmas was consumed by an American interloper.
Father Christmas (first recorded in the 14th century) was the English personification of Christmas. Just as Jack Frost is a personification of the cold and the Easter Bunny is a rabbitification of Easter, so Father Christmas stood for Christmas. He was an old man (because Christmas was ancient) and he was plump (because Christmas was a feast). But Father Christmas did not give presents, did not come down the chimney, had nothing to do with stockings or reindeer and did not live at the North Pole. All that stuff was Santa, and Santa was a New Yorker. Indeed, he’s pretty much entirely the invention of a single organisation: the New-York Historical Society.
Ultimately, Santa Claus goes all the way back to an obscure third-century chap called Saint Nicholas of Myra, who had a reputation for gift-giving. The result of that was that the Dutch used to give their children presents on St Nicholas’s day, which is the sixth of December. Their children would leave their shoes on the windowsill overnight and in the morning St Nicholas would have left little presents in them. It was the Dutch tradition that excited John Pintard, who was founder and head of the New-York Historical Society. Everybody knows that New York had once been New Amsterdam and Pintard’s mission in life was to re-Dutch the place.
Pintard started a campaign to revive the habit of giving presents on St Nicholas’s day. He printed pamphlets and tried to have Nicholas made patron saint of New York, and generally made himself a little ridiculous.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in