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>3) Santa Claus only sounds like
Satan's claws in English. Santa Claus
>however does sound like "St.
nickolas" if you say it fast and run
it
>together.
"Santa" only sounds like "Satan" to
audio-dyslexics; the brain-dead fundies who persist in equating "Santa"
with "Satan" forget that the term "Santa" is Latin for "saint", and if the
term "Santa" equates to "Satan", then there is a whole plethora of cities
in the southwestern US (including California) that must be causing them to
have apopletic fits...
Okay, here's the real scoop on the
modern mythical icon known as "Santa Claus"...
There was a
Roman Catholic bishop from Asia Minor born in the 4th century BC, named
"Nicholas", who was renowned for his good deeds towards the poor; some
time after his death the church made him a saint, hence "Saint
Nicholas".
This saint's birthday was December 6th, so that
became the designated "Saints Day" for that particular saint; check out
the history of the Catholic Church, and you will see that almost every day
of the year has a designated saint conveniently assigned to it. Many
times these saints had (or were assigned) traits corresponding to an
earlier pagan god whose holiday corresponded with that saint's "day",
sometimes many prior pagan customs were accumulated into one "saint's
day"...
(And contrary to the braindead
fundie/thumpers, paganism does NOT equate to satanism...)
In countries where Christianity replaced
previous pagan religions, St. Nicholas' day -- December 6th -- was usually
celebrated as the beginning of the Christmas season; the actual St.
Nicholas never actually did anything to associate himself with Christmas,
it was only the fact that his birthday was at the beginning of December
that he became associated with the holiday.
After the
Reformation most Protestant countries disassociated themselves from
Catholic saints, but the beloved figure who delived gifts to good children
was transformed into "Father Christmas"; but whether Catholic saint or
Protestant icon, St. Nicholas/Father Christmas bore little resemblence to
the roly poly elf in red velvet and white fur we currently associate with
the name "Santa Claus"...
Take a look at European
designations, and indeed American representations up until the early 20th
century, and St. Nicholas/Father Christmas/Santa Claus was rarely shown
wearing red; rather he either is shown as a stern bishop or a stern
paganistic woodsman, or in the late Victorian era as a well-fed benevolent
businessman -- again, rarely in red, often rather in white, green, blue,
brown...
So what was responsible for the transformation to
our modern icon?
We need to go back to that bishop/saint
known as Nicholas; when Spain conquered the Netherlands St. Nicholas,
being amongst other things the patron saint of sailors, was adopted by the
Dutch to be the patron saint of their country. And so they adopted
the saint's day with gusto; according to Dutch tradition, St. Nicholas
arrives in Holland from Spain (no North Pole legend here) on the night of
December 5th; St. Nicholas is always shown as a Catholic bishop in full
regalia, never in a red velvet suit. St. Nicholas rides about the
Dutch countryside that night on a white horse dispensing treats (usually
candy and small toys) to good children while his servant (who was
originally designated his 'slave) "Black Pete" dispenses coal and twigs to
those who have been naughty...
The Dutch never confused the
celebrating of St. Nicholas' day with Christmas, other than to use it as
the opening of the Christmas season; to this day the Dutch have a
month-long season, starting with St. Nicholas' day on Dec. 6th, which is
usually seen as a "children's holiday"; Christmas Day itself is celebrated
more along the lines of the American Thanksgiving, it is a day to go to
church and to have a big meal with family, but rarely are gifts exchanged,
but if they are it is done on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, and the
gifts are usually small; New Year's Day is a day to visit family and
friends, and small gifts may be exchanged; finally the season is wrapped
up on Epiphany/3 Kings Day on January 6th...since this is supposedly
the day the Magi arrived at the stable and presented gifts to the baby
Jesus, this is considered a gift-giving day, and the Dutch celebrate it
much like we celebrate December 25th...
Okay, we're working
our way up to the transformation of St. Nicholas into Santa
Claus...
Remember who bought Manhattan from the Indians for
$24 worth of beads? Yes, it was the thrifty and crafty Dutch, who
established the colony of "New Amsterdam" at the tip of Manhattan as a
trading post, and who continued to immigrate to it and to establish farms
in Long Island in the east and the upper Hudson Valley to the north, until
England and the Netherlands went to war in the early 1700's, a war that
the Netherlands lost, which required them to cede New Amsterdam to the
English who promptly renamed it "New York"....
But not
only did the Dutch immigrants remain in New York, so did many of their
customs (not to mention their accent, which is the basis for the modern
"Noo Yahk" accent), especially their Christmas customs. At the time
most English colonists in the northeast didn't even celebrate Christmas,
other than perhaps to go to church on December 25th. To do anything
else was considered "papish", e.g. any blatant celebration on December
25th was considered a Catholic custom, which the Puritan colonists
considered not only shocking but outright evil...
But most of
the Dutch colonists were Catholic, and didn't want to give up their
beloved Christmas customs, which they continued to observe. The
result was that by 1800 the Dutch celebration had become anglicized,
adopted and adapted by most people living in and around the former Dutch
colony (and since most 19th century immigrants to the U.S. came thru
New York, people from other cultures were introduced to the "American"
Christmas customs for the first time, which they then carried with them
when they continued on to establish themselves in other parts of the
country).
And what did that mean? First off, the Dutch
name for St. Nicholas, "Sinte Klaas", was anglicized to Santa Claus.
No "Satan" involved, it was just the Dutch adaptation of the Spanish/Latin
"Santa" to the Dutch "Sinte", which was then changed by the English
colonists back to "Santa"; "Klaas" was just the shortened form -- nickname
if you will -- for "Nicklaus", Dutch for "Nicholas"...
The
English colonists, wishing to disassociate from the Catholic celebration
of saints days, dropped the separate celebration on December 6th of St.
Nicholas' day, and rather had him deliver his gifts on Christmas Eve; the
Dutch custom of leaving their wooden shoes by the front door, where Sinte
Klaas would then leave treats, was modified by the English colonists into
stockings hung on the fireplace...
But even tho he was now
referred to as "Santa Claus", representations throughout the 19th century
rarely bore any resemblence to the modern icon. It took Clement
Moore's "T'Was The Night Before Christmas" to provide the first
description in a work that became a national 'best seller', followed by
the drawings of Thomas Nast, that transformed Santa Claus from a rather
thin and rather stern (and sometimes downright scary) bishop to a
jolly fat elf (not to mention being the first mention of driving a sleigh
pulled by reindeer).
But still no red suit.
That
took Coca Cola's popular ad campaign, starting in the early 20th century,
where the artist transformed Santa from a tiny, albeit fat, elf, into a
full-sized businessman (probably with a seat on Coke's executive board of
directors), wearing Coke's corporate colors of red and
white.
>4) for the origins of the
specifics of the Santa Claus myth look into the
>stories of the
laplanders, where their shamans would eat red and white
>garbed
mushrooms (amanita muscaria) and their visions included things
like
>flying reindeer.
While I won't dispute that the
mythos of the Winter Solstice god, whose cult included the ingestion of
'sacred mushrooms', was transformed by the Christian church into various
Christmas customs, the red and white suit of Santa Claus is purely an
American invention of the 20th century as part of Coke's popular ad
campaign...prior to that, Santa/St. Nicholas was either shown as a
Catholic bishop in full bishop regalia, or was shown as a type of ancient
woodsman wearing a long hooded robe (sometimes trimmed with fur,
oftentimes not, and if there was fur it could just as likely be brown or
black as white) of green, brown, light blue, sometimes white, but never
red.
June
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