Some years ago I wrote a couple of pieces about Christmas that I shared with friends. Given Christmas is little more than three weeks away I thought I'd just share them here as well.
Santa Everlasting
Santa Claus endures, which is somewhat surprising given his age---also considering our highly technologically oriented and widely cynical age of the early 21st century, two centuries after our beloved Santa was born. And yet he remains pretty spry for someone of his years.
And how can he endure particularly in such cynical times? He isn’t of our time and he certainly doesn’t keep pace with the times. Santa might be used to promote all sorts of contemporary merchandise, as he always has, but he himself remains a steadfast icon of a time long passed. He doesn’t dress in contemporary styles fashioned in modern wrinkle free, dirt resistant, ready-to-wear fabrics. He doesn’t travel by plane, helicopter, train, boat, car or truck or even snowmobile. He doesn’t appear to communicate by email or even by phone. He doesn’t appear to have an ultra modern manufacturing plant to fabricate and fulfill his orders.
No, rather Santa dresses in natural fabrics and animal skins. He travels worldwide by old-fashioned open sleigh driven by reindeer. He receives his communications primarily by mail, prayer or passing wishes up the chimney. He oversees an old-fashioned workshop manned by anywhere from a handful to scores of elves as helpers. It boggles the mind that Santa could compete successfully with the large and efficient manufacturers of the world. And yet compete he does and most effectively.
Santa manages to endure because of primarily two significant factors: magic and faith. Santa is a master of magic for how else could he perform his miracles year after year after year? Certainly how else could he travel the entire world so swiftly and visit everyone all in one night? Indeed he is essentially in many places simultaneously. How else could he descend modern chimneys that are so very much smaller than the chimneys of ancient times? What of the homes and apartments that don’t even have chimneys? How could he manage to carry enough gifts in one sleigh for every home he visits? And how can Santa appear so differently to so many different people?
Magic.
Santa is also sustained by faith. While Santa appears an older gentleman he doesn’t age like the rest of us. He remains vital, invigorated and eternal, encouraged by the love and faith of millions down through the years, both young and old, who continue to believe in him.
Part of Santa’s enduring success is the irony of his existence. He has long been enlisted by businesses selling anything from toys to tools to appliances to jewelry to automobiles and even alcohol, cigarettes and guns. He has been used to promote political and social causes. He is the world’s most effective promoter and advertising agent. And yet for all of that Santa manages to remain apolitical as well as anti-commercial. Even as his image is invoked to peddle all sorts of things Santa himself remains outside those influences. He remains a timeless symbol of kindness, genuine goodwill and open heart to all and who asks nothing for himself in return. Few people see any contradiction in seeing Santa in a shopping mall or seeing him visiting a hospital or shelter for the poor.
Santa also harkens back to a simpler time. Not so much a simpler time in terms of history and society (though there is that as well), but more so a simpler time for each of us personally. He reminds us of when we possessed a great sense of wonder about the world and were not burdened by the cares and responsibilities of adulthood. He reminds us of when we could see the world in simpler and less muddied terms. And through that magic he manages to lighten our burdens and allow for a brighter outlook even if only for a brief time. At the same time as adults and parents Santa helps us relive our childhoods through our own children and partly by allowing us to help fulfill his role. For anyone, anywhere, who enacts a kindness without expectation of return, becomes, for that moment, Santa Claus.
Why does Santa continue? Because we need him. Just as 8 year old Virginia O’Hanlon was reminded of when she wrote a letter to the New York Sun in 1897 asking if Santa really existed. Soon after one of the paper’s editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, answered her in an editorial, “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus.” Santa represents our better natures and how dark and cold and terrible the world would be without our better selves, our dreams and without Santa Claus to spread joy, hope and wonder.
Christmas is upon us!
People often talk about longing for an old-fashioned Christmas. Hmm, how old-fashioned do they want to get? Fact is for anyone born after the early 1820s then chances are Christmas has been essentially the same as it is today including all the complaints over apparent greed and selfishness, overt commercialism, not knowing what to buy, the pressure to spend too much, toys that don’t last, the lack of real meaning and stressing out particularly over family.
When Christmas became more domestic and family centric in the 19th century it was a reaction and also added to the change happening to the social fabric of the time. Society was going from mostly agrarian to industrial and commercial. Public behaviour tolerated for centuries (such as the public forms of Christmas celebrating) became no longer acceptable. The available leisure time of the winter months (you can’t farm in winter) started to evaporate because many businesses were no longer dependent on weather. So those who remained occupied started to resent those who were idle (even if they weren’t idle by choice). The focus of gift giving went from between social classes to being centred on family and particularly children as Christmas became more domesticated. Our ideas of a "Christmas bonus" from an employer is basically a holdover from the days landowners were expected to give gifts (be they food and drink or money) to servants. And servants of the day were known to expect and even outright ask for these gifts, and the wealthy complied so as to not incur the displeasure of their servants. It was also a form of charity before organized charity started to emerge when the working class was replaced in the focus of gift giving to children and family. If you were one of the working poor practically any gift was a luxury. But if you were a child of a well-to-do family then you likely already had good clothes as well as good food so gifts became largely items of indulgence, which in many cases they remain today. There are numerous documents and personal letters clearly illustrating people of the 19th century experienced much the same concerns as those of us today.
Before the 19th century Christmas could be (and often was) a rather loud and public affair as bands of revelers prowled the streets singing, banging on makeshift instruments and calling on the doors of (mostly) the wealthy in search of holiday food and drink. And they were often well fueled when they got to each successive house. The Wassail Song (or “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”) is a rose coloured reminder of the old forms of public celebrations. And everyone accepted it as just the way things were. Some of the wealthier homes had “watchers” (armed security guards) to protect their residences from overly unruly revelers. Today people would get arrested for that same behaviour. The closest thing we have today are public celebrations of New Year’s Eve.
A lot today is made of religion getting lost in the commercial focus of Christmas. But this isn’t anything new either because although Christmas has Christ’s name the holiday is really two celebrations rolled into one. The greater elements of what we recognize as “the holiday season” are mostly derived from centuries old celebrations of the Winter Solstice. Our indulgence in food and drink and partying is a continuation of an agrarian society left largely idle during the winter months, and partly out of necessity partook of their best food and wine so as not to let it spoil. Our enjoyment of holiday decor is also a holdover when certain forms of decorating in winter were a way of appeasing benevolent spirits or warding off others. Decorating also brightened up the otherwise drab winter months, as did lighting candles and burning Yule logs. In extent Christmas lights and Christmas trees are holdovers of those same ancient practices.
Christ hasn’t been forgotten in the celebration of Christmas, but he remains a quieter part of the observance as he has always been. Since the beginning when the Church declared December 25 as the day to observe Christ’s birth the lines of conflict were drawn. The Church was attempting to reform the excesses of public behavior during winter celebrations as well as distinguish the observance from the other pagan rituals. For a brief time public celebrations were even banned (in a few places) in an effort to encourage focus on more subdued religious observance. But by and large people would have none of that and largely ignored such prohibitions. How interesting (and ironic) that Santa Claus helped manage to accomplish what the Church and the upper classes couldn’t do: get people off the streets and stay quietly at home. And in a larger sense people became freer to observe Christmas and the holidays each in their own manner. Those who wished to quietly observe Christ’s birth could now do so without being harassed by loud roving bands of revelers. And those who wished to focus more on family and friends could do so without scathing admonishments from the Church.
It’s widely believed that Santa Claus is essentially an extension of the myth of St. Nicholas. Well those who gave birth to Santa certainly encouraged that notion to foster the idea that Santa has been around since antiquity. In truth historians can’t agree that the Bishop St. Nicholas actually existed. Santa is essentially a reboot or reimagining of the ancient St. Nicholas’ myths when Upper Class New Yorkers sought to reform the noisy public holiday celebrations and get people to focus on a more civilized and quiet domestic oriented celebration. Santa was already a widely known idea in the early 19th century, but in 1822 Clement Clarke Moore’s holiday poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (also known as “The Night Before Christmas”) crystallized what Santa, and a domestic Christmas, was all about. Within a few years Moore’s poem really caught fire and was circulated practically everywhere---the 19th century version of going viral. By the end of the 1820s the holiday season and the celebration of Christmas began to look very much like it does today, right down to businesses advertising gifts to be purchased for Christmas. A generation later in the 1840s magazine illustrator Thomas Nast began a series of now timeless images that not only cemented the most widely accepted image of Santa Claus, but also built on the sentiment and imagery conjured in Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The Coca-Cola ads of the 1930s didn't invent Santa's familiar image but merely polished and popularized what was already several decades old.
In 1843 the reformation of Christmas got another boost when Charles Dickens published his story “A Christmas Carol.” Through fiction Dickens put forth the idea that a domestic Christmas was the ideal form of observing the holiday. He also offered up the idea that business had a hand in trying to spread cheer and “sharing the wealth” so to speak with those less fortunate. Much of what is fascinating about Dickens’ story is how much of it is so familiar to us: Bob Cratchett is eager to rush home to spend Christmas with his family, Scrooge experiences nostalgic sentiment when he revisits the Christmases of his youth, and business is focused simply on making money as well exampled by Ebenezer Scrooge. But the story is not only an affirmation of the idea of a domestic Christmas, but also one of reformation suggesting business has a role to play in the well-being of society as a whole. “A Christmas Carol” became enormously popular in much the same way a film or television series might be popular today and have some of its ideas filtered or assimilated into broader society.
An old-fashioned Christmas? I think many of us envision some sort of Dickensian simplicity that has never really existed other than in our imagination. It goes in hand with our sense of sentiment and nostalgia, a yearning for a time when things seemed simpler and less complicated: our childhood, when our lives were not cluttered with concerns and responsibilities of adulthood and many of us could be unaware of the concerns of our parents who also longed for a simpler Christmas like when they were young.
People will keep fretting about Christmas, but in truth Christmas is for you to keep in your own manner. And the goodwill of the season should allow you to accept how others keep it in theirs. Also, believe or not, in years to come today will be among “the good ol’ days” for our kids.
Merry Christmas, Everyone!
Santa Everlasting
Santa Claus endures, which is somewhat surprising given his age---also considering our highly technologically oriented and widely cynical age of the early 21st century, two centuries after our beloved Santa was born. And yet he remains pretty spry for someone of his years.
And how can he endure particularly in such cynical times? He isn’t of our time and he certainly doesn’t keep pace with the times. Santa might be used to promote all sorts of contemporary merchandise, as he always has, but he himself remains a steadfast icon of a time long passed. He doesn’t dress in contemporary styles fashioned in modern wrinkle free, dirt resistant, ready-to-wear fabrics. He doesn’t travel by plane, helicopter, train, boat, car or truck or even snowmobile. He doesn’t appear to communicate by email or even by phone. He doesn’t appear to have an ultra modern manufacturing plant to fabricate and fulfill his orders.
No, rather Santa dresses in natural fabrics and animal skins. He travels worldwide by old-fashioned open sleigh driven by reindeer. He receives his communications primarily by mail, prayer or passing wishes up the chimney. He oversees an old-fashioned workshop manned by anywhere from a handful to scores of elves as helpers. It boggles the mind that Santa could compete successfully with the large and efficient manufacturers of the world. And yet compete he does and most effectively.
Santa manages to endure because of primarily two significant factors: magic and faith. Santa is a master of magic for how else could he perform his miracles year after year after year? Certainly how else could he travel the entire world so swiftly and visit everyone all in one night? Indeed he is essentially in many places simultaneously. How else could he descend modern chimneys that are so very much smaller than the chimneys of ancient times? What of the homes and apartments that don’t even have chimneys? How could he manage to carry enough gifts in one sleigh for every home he visits? And how can Santa appear so differently to so many different people?
Magic.
Santa is also sustained by faith. While Santa appears an older gentleman he doesn’t age like the rest of us. He remains vital, invigorated and eternal, encouraged by the love and faith of millions down through the years, both young and old, who continue to believe in him.
Part of Santa’s enduring success is the irony of his existence. He has long been enlisted by businesses selling anything from toys to tools to appliances to jewelry to automobiles and even alcohol, cigarettes and guns. He has been used to promote political and social causes. He is the world’s most effective promoter and advertising agent. And yet for all of that Santa manages to remain apolitical as well as anti-commercial. Even as his image is invoked to peddle all sorts of things Santa himself remains outside those influences. He remains a timeless symbol of kindness, genuine goodwill and open heart to all and who asks nothing for himself in return. Few people see any contradiction in seeing Santa in a shopping mall or seeing him visiting a hospital or shelter for the poor.
Santa also harkens back to a simpler time. Not so much a simpler time in terms of history and society (though there is that as well), but more so a simpler time for each of us personally. He reminds us of when we possessed a great sense of wonder about the world and were not burdened by the cares and responsibilities of adulthood. He reminds us of when we could see the world in simpler and less muddied terms. And through that magic he manages to lighten our burdens and allow for a brighter outlook even if only for a brief time. At the same time as adults and parents Santa helps us relive our childhoods through our own children and partly by allowing us to help fulfill his role. For anyone, anywhere, who enacts a kindness without expectation of return, becomes, for that moment, Santa Claus.
Why does Santa continue? Because we need him. Just as 8 year old Virginia O’Hanlon was reminded of when she wrote a letter to the New York Sun in 1897 asking if Santa really existed. Soon after one of the paper’s editors, Francis Pharcellus Church, answered her in an editorial, “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus.” Santa represents our better natures and how dark and cold and terrible the world would be without our better selves, our dreams and without Santa Claus to spread joy, hope and wonder.
Christmas is upon us!
People often talk about longing for an old-fashioned Christmas. Hmm, how old-fashioned do they want to get? Fact is for anyone born after the early 1820s then chances are Christmas has been essentially the same as it is today including all the complaints over apparent greed and selfishness, overt commercialism, not knowing what to buy, the pressure to spend too much, toys that don’t last, the lack of real meaning and stressing out particularly over family.
When Christmas became more domestic and family centric in the 19th century it was a reaction and also added to the change happening to the social fabric of the time. Society was going from mostly agrarian to industrial and commercial. Public behaviour tolerated for centuries (such as the public forms of Christmas celebrating) became no longer acceptable. The available leisure time of the winter months (you can’t farm in winter) started to evaporate because many businesses were no longer dependent on weather. So those who remained occupied started to resent those who were idle (even if they weren’t idle by choice). The focus of gift giving went from between social classes to being centred on family and particularly children as Christmas became more domesticated. Our ideas of a "Christmas bonus" from an employer is basically a holdover from the days landowners were expected to give gifts (be they food and drink or money) to servants. And servants of the day were known to expect and even outright ask for these gifts, and the wealthy complied so as to not incur the displeasure of their servants. It was also a form of charity before organized charity started to emerge when the working class was replaced in the focus of gift giving to children and family. If you were one of the working poor practically any gift was a luxury. But if you were a child of a well-to-do family then you likely already had good clothes as well as good food so gifts became largely items of indulgence, which in many cases they remain today. There are numerous documents and personal letters clearly illustrating people of the 19th century experienced much the same concerns as those of us today.
Before the 19th century Christmas could be (and often was) a rather loud and public affair as bands of revelers prowled the streets singing, banging on makeshift instruments and calling on the doors of (mostly) the wealthy in search of holiday food and drink. And they were often well fueled when they got to each successive house. The Wassail Song (or “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”) is a rose coloured reminder of the old forms of public celebrations. And everyone accepted it as just the way things were. Some of the wealthier homes had “watchers” (armed security guards) to protect their residences from overly unruly revelers. Today people would get arrested for that same behaviour. The closest thing we have today are public celebrations of New Year’s Eve.
A lot today is made of religion getting lost in the commercial focus of Christmas. But this isn’t anything new either because although Christmas has Christ’s name the holiday is really two celebrations rolled into one. The greater elements of what we recognize as “the holiday season” are mostly derived from centuries old celebrations of the Winter Solstice. Our indulgence in food and drink and partying is a continuation of an agrarian society left largely idle during the winter months, and partly out of necessity partook of their best food and wine so as not to let it spoil. Our enjoyment of holiday decor is also a holdover when certain forms of decorating in winter were a way of appeasing benevolent spirits or warding off others. Decorating also brightened up the otherwise drab winter months, as did lighting candles and burning Yule logs. In extent Christmas lights and Christmas trees are holdovers of those same ancient practices.
Christ hasn’t been forgotten in the celebration of Christmas, but he remains a quieter part of the observance as he has always been. Since the beginning when the Church declared December 25 as the day to observe Christ’s birth the lines of conflict were drawn. The Church was attempting to reform the excesses of public behavior during winter celebrations as well as distinguish the observance from the other pagan rituals. For a brief time public celebrations were even banned (in a few places) in an effort to encourage focus on more subdued religious observance. But by and large people would have none of that and largely ignored such prohibitions. How interesting (and ironic) that Santa Claus helped manage to accomplish what the Church and the upper classes couldn’t do: get people off the streets and stay quietly at home. And in a larger sense people became freer to observe Christmas and the holidays each in their own manner. Those who wished to quietly observe Christ’s birth could now do so without being harassed by loud roving bands of revelers. And those who wished to focus more on family and friends could do so without scathing admonishments from the Church.
It’s widely believed that Santa Claus is essentially an extension of the myth of St. Nicholas. Well those who gave birth to Santa certainly encouraged that notion to foster the idea that Santa has been around since antiquity. In truth historians can’t agree that the Bishop St. Nicholas actually existed. Santa is essentially a reboot or reimagining of the ancient St. Nicholas’ myths when Upper Class New Yorkers sought to reform the noisy public holiday celebrations and get people to focus on a more civilized and quiet domestic oriented celebration. Santa was already a widely known idea in the early 19th century, but in 1822 Clement Clarke Moore’s holiday poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (also known as “The Night Before Christmas”) crystallized what Santa, and a domestic Christmas, was all about. Within a few years Moore’s poem really caught fire and was circulated practically everywhere---the 19th century version of going viral. By the end of the 1820s the holiday season and the celebration of Christmas began to look very much like it does today, right down to businesses advertising gifts to be purchased for Christmas. A generation later in the 1840s magazine illustrator Thomas Nast began a series of now timeless images that not only cemented the most widely accepted image of Santa Claus, but also built on the sentiment and imagery conjured in Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The Coca-Cola ads of the 1930s didn't invent Santa's familiar image but merely polished and popularized what was already several decades old.
In 1843 the reformation of Christmas got another boost when Charles Dickens published his story “A Christmas Carol.” Through fiction Dickens put forth the idea that a domestic Christmas was the ideal form of observing the holiday. He also offered up the idea that business had a hand in trying to spread cheer and “sharing the wealth” so to speak with those less fortunate. Much of what is fascinating about Dickens’ story is how much of it is so familiar to us: Bob Cratchett is eager to rush home to spend Christmas with his family, Scrooge experiences nostalgic sentiment when he revisits the Christmases of his youth, and business is focused simply on making money as well exampled by Ebenezer Scrooge. But the story is not only an affirmation of the idea of a domestic Christmas, but also one of reformation suggesting business has a role to play in the well-being of society as a whole. “A Christmas Carol” became enormously popular in much the same way a film or television series might be popular today and have some of its ideas filtered or assimilated into broader society.
An old-fashioned Christmas? I think many of us envision some sort of Dickensian simplicity that has never really existed other than in our imagination. It goes in hand with our sense of sentiment and nostalgia, a yearning for a time when things seemed simpler and less complicated: our childhood, when our lives were not cluttered with concerns and responsibilities of adulthood and many of us could be unaware of the concerns of our parents who also longed for a simpler Christmas like when they were young.
People will keep fretting about Christmas, but in truth Christmas is for you to keep in your own manner. And the goodwill of the season should allow you to accept how others keep it in theirs. Also, believe or not, in years to come today will be among “the good ol’ days” for our kids.
Merry Christmas, Everyone!
