Christmas Traditions

Groucho: "That's in every contract, that's what you call a sanity clause."
Chico: "You can't a fool a me, there ain't no sanity clause"
- A Night at the Opera (the Marx brothers)

Merry Christmas Eve!
What are the Christmas traditions in your family? In our house we open the gifts on Christmas day and enjoy two holiday foods. First – Christmas Lasagna. My wife makes a great lasagna and loves spinach so we decided spinach lasagna is green, red and white – just the right colors for Christmas! Second - each year we try a different game meat – past holiday meals have included rabbit, boar, buffalo, emu, duck, quail, and venison.
In this blog I’d like to look at the American tradition of Santa Claus.

In many countries the time of giving was Saint Nicholas day (Dec 6) with a tall, skinny St. Nick dressed in the robes of a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Bishop. The Dutch named him Sinterklaas, which was Americanized to “Santa Claus” by Washington Irving. Irving lampooned the Dutch culture of New Amsterdam and in his book, History of New York (1809), St. Nick lost his bishop’s apparel and was pictured as a thick-bellied Dutch sailor with a pipe in a green winter coat. This influenced Clement Moore in 1822 when he wrote the "Night before Christmas", originally titled “A visit from St. Nicholas”. Moore described St. Nick this way,

“He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself!”

The poem was quite popular and 59 years later, on January 1, 1881, it inspired Thomas Nast to draw the jolly “elf” for Harper's Weekly magazine (shown above). It was Nast who gave Santa his North Pole home, originated the elves and workshop making toys, letter writing to Santa and he also conceived the idea of "bad" children not getting gifts! [Nast also created the image of Uncle Sam and first used the Donkey and Elephant for the American political parties.]

If you look at Nast’s Santa pictures you’ll see that his St. Nick has a mischievous air, perhaps a little dangerous. It was Norman Rockwell in the 1920s who softened the image of Santa Claus into the friendly and lovable figure we know today.

Bottom Line

Traditions can be fun for adults as well as children. What I’ve written here just scratches the surface of the tradition of “Santa Claus”. Check out Wikipedia and other sources for different Santa traditions around the world:

Papa Noel in Latin America, France and Spain,
Babbo Natale in Italy,
Father Christmas in England with Charles Dickens overtones,
Kris Kringle in America
Sinterklaas in Scandinavia with a Yule Goat