He breaks into
our houses every
year to the
delight of good
children
everywhere but he didn’t start out
delivering
presents to kids.
And did you
know that there
are parts of him that are probably
older than Jesus?
Find out all you
need to know
about a man
coming to a chimney near
you this
Christmas. Apart from his elves, no one
knows what
Father Christmas
really looks like
but the
characteristic white beard and
red clothing are
in fact creations
of American
cartoonists in the
Victorian era. The original
British Father
Christmas, as
depicted in 17th
century, sported
a beard, but it wasn’t white, and
his clothing
colour was
green, not red.
And we can
thank Scandinavian
myths for his
reindeer pulled
sled, though the
red nosed
reindeer leader, ‘Rudolph’, was
another
American
advertising
creation. His elves
have a Germanic and distinctly
devilish
background but
the mince pies,
milk and sherry
we leave out for Father Christmas
have an even
more ancient
origin. Such
offerings are
reminiscent of sacrifices to
pagan gods that
long pre date
Christianity. Another pre
Christian link is
Father
Christmas’s first
name, ‘Father’.
This is thought to be derived from
‘Woden’, or the
better known
‘Odin’, the ‘All-
Father’ head god
of North European and
Scandinavian
mythology.
Americans prefer
to refer to him as
Santa Claus, and this name derives
from the third
century saint,
Saint Nicholas. He
was a charitable
bishop from Myra (now called
Demre) in
Turkey. His first
gifts were
anonymously
delivered bags of gold coins to a
man so that a he
could afford to
have his
daughters
married. Some accounts say that
he left a gold coin
in each of the
daughters’
stockings and in
others that he dropped his gifts
down the man’s
chimney because
the door was
locked. There are
still other, more grim and graphic,
variations of the
story. One has
the three
daughters about
to enter prostitution to
escape financial
hardship.
Another has
three boys being
butchered in order that their
meat could be
sold off as ham
whereupon
Nicholas
resurrects the boys. Saint Nicholas
was, and is, such
an inspiring
figure that even
though the town
of his birthplace is now largely
Muslim, and so
no longer
recognises
Christmas, they
still celebrate the figure of Santa
Claus. Nicholas is
believed to have
died on 6
December and in
certain countries, like Holland,
children receive
gifts on this day,
the Feast of St
Nicholas, rather
than at Christmas. But if our Father
Christmas really
wanted to be
accurate and
come the night
before the birth of Christ, he’d be
popping down
our chimneys
sometime in
September. So
why does he come on the 24
December? Well,
the Gospels don’t
give a date for
Jesus’ birth so
the reason we celebrate it on 25
December is
because Pope
Julius I in the
fourth century
AD said so. He wanted to
popularise
Christianity and
so appropriated
existing pagan
practises as everyone from
the Romans to
the Babylonians
celebrated the
beginning of the
end of winter. This is perhaps
why early
representations
of Father
Christmas saw
him dressed in green,
representing the
green shoots of
spring in the
depths of winter. Americans
believe that
Father Christmas
is based in the
North Pole which
considering it consists of
constantly
shifting frozen
ice, is just a bit
unlikely. The
British and European
traditions are
more prosaic,
and believe his
workshop is in
Finland, in an area called
Lapland. Some
even think his
grotto is
somewhere in
the Korvatunturi mountain range. The address for
your letter to
Father Christmas,
is “Santa’s Grotto,
Reindeerland,
SAN TA1.” Please note, letters from
naughty children
may be read but
not always
actioned, and
please limit requests to single
items as Father
Christmas has
roughly
700,000,000
children to visit in one night.