Santa Claus

by Gerry Bowler

  Nor are adults immune to the desire for mystery and fantasy. An account of Santa Claus’s life would not be complete without a consideration of a little essay that appeared in the pages of the New York Sun on September 21, 1897, unheralded in the midst of weightier commentaries on the strength of the British Navy, chainless bicycles, and a Canadian railroad to the Yukon.

  We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the comunication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

  Dear Editor –

  I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

  Virginia O’Hanlon

  Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the scepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

  Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

  Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to have men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

  You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest mean, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

  No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

  “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” became the most famous editorial in history, and was reprinted every year until the newspaper ceased publication in 1950. The exchange between Virginia O’Hanlon and journalist Francis Pharcellus Church inspired two movies and was almost surely the only piece of editorial writing ever to be set to classical music.* In “Santa Claus: A Psychograph,” the American poet and biographer Gamaliel Bradford would echo these sentiments a generation later:

  So the legend of Saint Nicholas is a lovely and delectable myth, the last living relic of the vanishing world of dreams. The fairies are gone. No little children or innocent maidens watch any longer through the ardent summer nights to catch some echo of the songs. The witches are gone … Santa Claus alone still lingers with us. For Heaven’s sake, let us keep him as long as we can. There are some excellent people who are scrupulous about deceiving their children with such legendary nonsense. They are mistaken. The children learn to see soon enough, too clearly and too well, or to think they do. Ah, leave them at least one thrill of passionate mystery that may linger with them when the years begin to grow too plain and dull and bare. After all, in this universe of ignorance, anything may be true, even our dreams.

  One might say these sentiments are quaint relics of a bygone day of steam-driven automobiles, hobble skirts for ladies, and celluloid collars for gentlemen, but consider the spirited debate by otherwise sober citizens of Salt Lake City who not long ago were debating the merits of redrafting the city’s general aviation rules so as to completely ban low-flying small aircraft. To do so would have required deleting an important waiver that some whimsical legislators had earlier written into the code, to wit, a Christmas Eve exemption granted to “flying reindeer and any cargo they may be towing.” Playing the role of the Grinch was a group of airport managers for whom this was a serious question of safety; defending the realm of fantasy were city councillors who declared, “I would hate to see us outlaw Santa and the reindeer on Christmas Eve. I don’t think that would be fair to the children.” And, “If anything goes wrong, I want them to be low enough that they will be able to make an emergency landing. Also, if they have to fly that high it may make them late in their other deliveries.”

  In 1999, Robert William Handley, a rotund, white-bearded male of Franklin County, Ohio, a man of jolly disposition and wire-rimmed glasses, petitioned the court to be allowed legally to change his name to “Santa Claus.” He claimed that year-round he embodied the spirit of Christmas and was often stopped by families and children who hailed him as the genuine gift-bringer. He wished to be able to say that not only did he look like Santa but that he really was Santa Claus. Judge Lawrence Belkis deliberated long and hard about this and rendered a judgment worthy of Solomon: Handley might append “Santa Claus” to the first part of his name, but he must retain his accustomed last name. To do otherwise would be to put a cultural legacy in peril. Said Belkis: “The history of Santa Claus, the North Pole, the elves, Mrs. Claus, the reindeer, is a treasure that society passes on from generation to generation, and the Petitioner seeks to not only take on the name of Santa Claus, but also take on the identity of Santa Claus.” Should Handley misbehave or die, the effect on children would be too dreadful.

  But to inquire what children think of Santa Claus, or to gauge the effect on them of his story, is to ask the wrong question. The future of Santa Claus is not up to children – his life rests in the hands of parents. Santa Claus in the twenty-first century is a parental project. It is they who choose (or not) to tell the story to the next generation and to buttress it in countless ways. It is parents who give flesh to Santa Claus through half-eaten cookies, nibbled carrots, deer droppings spread on snowy roofs, letters from the North Pole, songs sung to sleepy boys and girls, and hundreds of other acts of loving folly. It is they, in study after study, who report more sadness than their children do when their little ones learn about Santa Claus, and it is today’s parents who intend to play no part in telling their children the truth. Woe betide the well-meaning skeptic who untimely tells a child about Santa Claus – priests have been rebuked by angry parents, teachers fired, and lawsuits filed when busybodies have chosen to convey the news of Santa Claus to innocent and unsuspecting ears. If belief consists of investing in a proposition and acting as if it were factual, then it is parents who are the true and necessary believers.

  Parents want many of those things for their children that educators and psychologists see as valuable. They want to see wonder on small faces; they want them to share in a heightened sense of excitement and expectation, and to experience a family tradition. They dismiss the likelihood of negative outcomes such as distrust of adults or religious skepticism, and they do not particularly cling to Santa Claus as an aid to inducing better behaviour amongst their offspring. The threat of a coal-filled stocking in the twenty-first century is no longer such an important component in child rearing. Few kids today will wake on Christmas morning to find a rotten potato, a horse apple, or “a long, black, birchen rod, / Such, as the dread command of God / Directs a Parent’s hand to use / When virtue’s path his sons refuse
,” and parents who were surveyed about the possibility of withholding gifts from naughty children were shocked at the suggestion.

  There are few things in life so unreciprocated as the gift-giving of North American parents at Christmas. Parents will spend infinitely more money on their children’s gifts than their children will spend on theirs (even when they have grown up). Parents will spend infinitely more time in shopping, wrapping, baking, decorating, concealing, and conspiring to bring delight into their children’s Christmases than their children will ever comprehend (until at last they learn to do the same things for their own families). Moreover, for parents not to take credit for this and to attribute the gift-bringing to a magical being, Santa Claus, only serves to magnify the unconditionality and generosity of these expenditures. Santa Claus lives and will live, not simply because he represents fantasy in an impersonal, scientific universe, but because he is the incarnation of parents’ love. On the cheeks and foreheads of every child are the invisible marks left by the lips of mothers and fathers who have stolen into their sleeping child’s room and kissed them in the night. Santa Claus is the midnight visitor whom parents long once a year to be – silent, benevolent, and universally loved.

  As our century progresses, Santa Claus will continue to be attacked and resisted, but as the family comes increasingly under assault, he will be evermore necessary. Parents will weigh the potential harm of telling what Plato would call a “noble lie” against their desire to manifest love in the form of a myth. Weighing an arid kind of scientific truth against deeper values, they will conclude with Gamaliel Bradford that “sacred as both are, the law of love is higher than the law of truth. For this there is a perfectly simple and unassailable reason, that truth at its best is deceiving, but love is never. We toil and tire ourselves and sacrifice our lives for the dim goddess Truth. Then she eludes us, slips away from us, mocks at us. But love grows firmer and surer and more prevailing as the years pass by.”

  * Barnett, p. 39. Poor Nimrod. Though he is mentioned in Genesis 10 only as a mighty warrior and a builder of cities, certain fundamentalist schools of biblical interpretation have made him into a figure of ultimate evil.

  * Annotated Night Before Christmas, p. 34. Revelation 21: 8 reads: “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”

  * “These are some of the ways Satan counterfeits himself,” says the fundamentalist Web site Blessed Quietness Journal. “He doesn’t care how you portray him, as long as he diverts your attention AWAY from God.” http://www.blessedquietness.com/journal/resource/santanti.htm. More scholarly sources have also made much the same point about the similarities between portrayals of Jesus and of Santa. Belk, “A Child’s Christmas in America,” p. 90.

  * School officials later claimed that the boy was banned because the Santa beard obscured his features and the Santa suit was improper attire for a “dress-up dance.” www.seacoastonline.com, December 2004.

  * Some of the literature on the age of discovery speaks about a secure faith in Santa Claus at age five, a period of transition and doubt by age seven, and disbelief by most children by age nine. Many researchers are content to simply state that seven is the typical age. See Norman M. Prentice, Linda K. Schmechel, and Martin Manosevitz, “Children’s Belief in Santa Claus: A Developmental Study of Fantasy and Causality,” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 18:4 1979; C.J. Anderson and N.M. Prentice, “Encounter With Reality: Children’s Reactions on Discovering the Santa Claus Myth,” Child Psychiatry and Human Development, vol. 25, no. 2, Winter 1994.

  * Virginia O’Hanlon grew up to achieve a doctorate and to work as a teacher and principal in the New York school system. She died in 1971 at age eighty-one in a nursing home in Valatie, New York, still professing a belief in the power of Santa Claus. Church died in 1906, at which point the Sun revealed who had written the editorial. NBC commissioned a cantata based on the piece in 1932, and in 1996 a musical play was created.

  Acknowledgements

  It is my pleasure to thank kind people and institutions whose assistance helped make this work possible: Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; the indefatigable staff of the University of Manitoba’s Document Delivery department; Stephen Nissenbaum, late of the University of Massachusetts, and Dennis Laurie of the American Antiquarian Society for help with a tricky footnote; Manfred Jager for his aid with wartime German Christmas cards; and Professor John Wortley for helping me track down Asterius of Amasea. Special thanks to the research assistance provided by Kate Bowler, Maria Bowler, and Stephanie Berrington. Finally, I must express my gratitude to the editorial staff of McClelland & Stewart, especially Jenny Bradshaw, for the ruthless expertise and tact that they employed in clearing away the verbal undergrowth and helping to clarify my account of Santa’s life.

  For allowing me to be their Santa Claus for so many years, this book is dedicated to Amelia Jane, Catherine Christiane, and Maria Elizabeth Victoria.

  Notes

  I: His Long Gestation and Obscure Birth

  1 The Alexandrian theologian Origen: “Eighth Homily on Leviticus,” Susan K. Roll, Towards the Origins of Christmas (Kampen: 1995), p. 86;

  2 “The festival of the Kalends”: Clement A. Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance (New York: 1976), p. 168;

  3 “You well know what joy”: Boniface Ramsey, tr., Sermon 60, The Sermons of St. Maximus of Turin (New York: 1989), p. 144;

  4 “Oh, the absurdity”: Asterius of Amasea, Homily IV, “Against the Festival of the Kalends,” Ancient Sermons for Modern Times (New York: 1904), pp. 111–129. See also C. Datema, ed., Asterius of Amasea Homilies I-XIV (Leiden: 1970), p. 38 and 228–230;

  5 “The subjectes send to”: Polydore Vergil in Samuel L. Macey, Patriarchs of Time: Cronus, Father Time, the Watchmaker God and Father Christmas (Athens, GA: 1987), pp. 133–34;

  6 Tenants might be required: Bonnie Blackburn, The Oxford Companion to the Year (New York: 1999), p. 519;

  7 “Forasmuch as it is”: Gerry Bowler, The World Encyclopedia of Christmas (Toronto: 2000), p. 27;

  8 Employees of London: Harry Ballam and Phyllis Digby Morton, The Christmas Book (London: n.d.), p. 213;

  9 “Three weekes before the day”: Barnabe Googe, tr., The Popish Kingdom or Reign of Antichrist (1553), in Frederick James Furnivall, ed., The Anatomy of the Abuses in England in Shakespeare’s Youth (London: 1877), p. 324;

  10 On the Greek island: W.F. Dawson, Christmas: Its Origins and Associations (London: 1902:), p. 325;

  11 “The curse of God”: Bowler, The Encyclopedia of Christmas, p. 20;

  12 The Nicholas legend: The best sources for the history of the cult of Saint Nicholas are Karl Meisen, Nikolauskult und Nikolausbrauch im Abendlands (Düssledorf: 1931); Charles Jones, St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan (New York: 1978); and Bernard Coussé, Saint Nicolas: histoire, mythe et légende (Paris: 1999);

  13 Saint Nicholas, it now appears: Polly Curtis, “The Real Face of Father Christmas,” Guardian Unlimited, 13 December 2004. http://talk.workunlimited

  .co.uk/christmas2004/story/0,15386,1372804,00.html;

  14 “Saint Nicholas money”: Googe, p. 340;

  15 “Saint Nicholas, patron”: Jones, St. Nicholas, p. 249;

  16 In towns across Germany: For more on the surprisingly developed medieval toy industry, see Karl Ewald Fritzsch and Manfred Bachman, An Illustrated History of Toys (London: 1966), pp. 13–26, and Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: 2001), pp. 167–74;

  17 In le Doubs, the log: Marie-Christine Mottet, Le père Noël est une figure (Paris: 1996), p. 54.

  II: His Youth and Character Development

  1 German immigrants had brought: Harnett T. Kane, The Southern Christmas Book (New York: 1958), p. 41;

  2 “What! My sweet little Sis”: http://w
ww.iment.com/maida/familytree/

  henry/xmas/livingstonmoore/moorefromstnicholas.htm; attr. Museum of the City of New York, Doc #54.331.4;

  3 We can see: See Lauretta Dimmick, “Robert Weir’s Saint Nicholas: A Knickerbocker Icon,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 66, no. 3, September 1984, pp. 465–83;

  4 “Ode to Saint Claas”: New-York American, 4 January 1828;

  5 In J.H. Ingraham’s: J.H. Ingraham, Santa Claus, or The Merry King of Christmas. A Tale for the Holidays (Boston: 1844). Ingraham was one of the most prolific authors of his, or any other age, turning out ten to twenty-five novels a year in the 1840s. It is estimated that he was responsible for 10 per cent of all American fiction titles written in that decade. R. Laurence Moore, “Religion, Secularization, and the Shaping of the Culture Industry in Antebellum America,” American Quarterly, 41 (2), 1989, p. 222;

  6 “because they know if”: Caroline H. Butler Laing, “A Visit to the Dominion of Santa Claus,” The Little Messenger Birds or The Chimes of the Silver Bells (Boston: 1851), p. 13;

  7 Truly one-of-a-kind: No author claimed credit for this work, published by John R. M’Gown of New York;