The Autobiography of Santa Claus

by Jeff Guinn

  “Attila,” Charlemagne muttered. “An unusual name, isn’t it? The only person I’ve heard of called Attila was a fierce old Hun chief who—well, I suppose it doesn’t matter. That other Attila was eight feet tall and drank wine from a human skull, you know.”

  “Really?” I said politely. “No, that’s not my Attila at all. The Attila who travels with me is of normal height, and he uses a simple cup.”

  Charlemagne laughed. “Well, the man I’m thinking of had to have died a long time ago, anyway. If he were living today, he’d have to be three hundred or three hundred fifty years old. Impossible!”

  “Right,” I agreed, thinking to myself that Attila was really closer to four hundred. “Well, thank you for your time and your gift, great Emperor. We’ll remember you in our prayers, and many more children will have warm clothing or food to eat because of your kindness.”

  “Do me one favor, Nicholas,” Charlemagne said as I pulled up a flap and prepared to leave his tent. “Always keep December twenty-fifth special. It works wonders on human hearts, and I think more good is accomplished on that day than is done all the rest of the year. I don’t know why I wanted so badly to tell you that, but now I have, and I feel very peaceful. Visit me again whenever you like. Just show that order to my guards.”

  I visited Charlemagne on several occasions before he died fourteen years later. He continued to be a good and just ruler. Not all of Charlemagne’s fine plans worked. His son Louis succeeded him as emperor of the West; he died in 840. After Louis, Charlemagne’s successors weren’t quite as powerful. But they did rule what became known as the Holy Roman Empire, which existed from 962 until 1806.

  And when people told stories of Charlemagne, they often mentioned his determination that children should grow up in peace, and be well educated. So that idea survived, and remained a beacon of hope as Europe stumbled through several more unenlightened centuries.

  Layla, who’d been breaking up small branches and adding them to the fire, poked a stick into the flames so sharply that sparks crackled and jumped. We all had to slap our blankets to make sure they wouldn’t start smoldering.

  TWELVE

  “Let’s Give Gifts of Toys!”

  One night about three hundred fifty years after Charle magne died, Felix, Attila, Dorothea, Arthur, Layla, and I were sitting around the campfire in the hills of southeast Britain. It was a large fire, because autumn had arrived and the night air was cool. We’d eaten dinner—bread, fruit, cheese; nothing fancy, but still good, filling food—and now we were all lounging on our blankets.

  Our conversation stuck to ordinary subjects, such as how much money we had left with which to buy gifts, and when we ought to take a long trip southeast to Rome (where officials of the Holy Roman Empire still honored Charlemagne’s order to give us all the traveling supplies we required). The parchment on which that original order was written had long since crumbled with age. We’d requested a replacement copy, and gotten it, then needed a replacement for the replacement, and a replacement for that replacement, and so on. None of the officials we spoke to seemed to notice we didn’t age along with the parchment. They just gave us what we wanted without paying much attention.

  “I think we should spend the whole next century in Rome,” Felix said thoughtfully. “In this last century, Britain’s been more of a battlefield than ever. You had the Saxons being conquered by the Normans, and the Danish wanting to invade, and the wild tribes up in Scotland threatening to come south. Anywhere else would have been more peaceful.”

  “Think again,” Arthur said, sounding irritated. He always took it personally whenever Britain was criticized for anything. “Italy’s just a stopping-over place for all those knights going on the Crusades. We’d see more swords and armor there than we would if we stayed here.”

  I sighed unhappily, because it was true. The worst of the latest wars found Christian soldiers from Britain and Europe uniting in armies to attack the Muslims, who’d taken control of the ancient lands of the Jews, including the holy city of Jerusalem. Instead of asking for permission to share the city, the Christians decided to fight for it. Sometimes they fought better than others; in the so-called First Crusade of 1095 they’d actually recaptured Jerusalem, but the Muslim leader Saladin soon won it back.

  A recent crusade, led by kings Philip II of France and Richard I of England, had been a miserable failure. Richard, who was called the Lion-Hearted by his subjects, had been captured by the Duke of Austria on his way back home. The duke was asking for a large ransom. Richard’s brother John, who’d been left in charge of Britain while the king was away fighting, didn’t seem in any hurry to raise the money. No one in England knew what might happen next. Civil war, matching those lords and knights loyal to John against those remaining loyal to Richard, seemed to be coming.

  “Well, what will we do then, Nicholas?” Attila asked. “When I was a younger man, say, perhaps two hundred years old, I might have thought people would sooner or later get tired of fighting. But with the wisdom of very advanced years, I have to say I’m not certain they ever will. We’ve been hoping for centuries that better times might be coming. Maybe they’re not.”

  Layla, who’d been breaking up small branches and adding them to the fire, poked a stick into the flames so sharply that sparks crackled and jumped. We all had to slap our blankets to make sure they wouldn’t start smoldering.

  “You have no right to be discouraged, Attila,” she said sternly. “Our long lives are all the proof we need that things will get better someday, and I think they’ll get better a lot faster if we don’t spend so much time moping.”

  Attila looked hurt. Tough old warrior that he was, he still had very delicate feelings. Dorothea reached over and patted him gently on the leg, saying quietly but firmly, “Attila wasn’t moping. He was just saying what’s been on all our minds, Layla. How many thousands of nights have we gone out and left food and clothing for poor children, and what difference has it really made? The wars continue; poverty is everywhere. There’s no way to be sure we’re really making a difference. Nicholas, you’re our leader. Do you know something the rest of us don’t, some secret you could share so we’d feel more hopeful?”

  I shrugged. “Things keep changing for the worse. Sooner or later they’ll have to change for the better. There are so many new nations now: Denmark, Norway, Germany, Iceland, Poland—maybe their armies will be satisfied with what they have and stop fighting.”

  “Don’t forget rumors of a New World,” suggested Arthur. In recent decades he’d become fascinated with tales about boats sailing west and not falling off the edge of the world, but instead discovering new lands, countries rich beyond belief with forests full of wild game. As early as 875, Irish sailors were said to have done this, although the Irish kept few accurate records. But it was almost certain that in 982 Eric the Red, son of a Norwegian chieftain, sailed to some far-off country after being banished from Iceland for murder; he called this new place Greenland for its color. In 1001, Eric’s son—appropriately named Lief Eric’s Son, or Ericson—followed his father’s example by sailing west as well and discovering a place he named “Vinland” because he found grape vines growing there.

  Sometimes Arthur suggested we take passage on one of these expeditions and see these wonderful places for ourselves. But the rest of us remembered how Attila often got seasick and wouldn’t agree to such a long, turbulent voyage.

  “Rather than speculate about a New World, I think we should talk about what we’re doing in this old one,” I suggested. “Does anyone else share this feeling I’ve had for quite some time that there must be a better way to do what we do? I mean, we all work hard to see poor children get food and clothing, but the comfort these bring is only temporary. Food gets eaten, and children soon outgrow clothing. Since we move about so much and try to give to as many different children as we can, the ones we feed and clothe one night will be hungry again the next night, and ragged again the next month. What real good are we accomplishing?�
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  I half hoped my longtime companions would all rise up and begin shouting that I was wrong, that my words mocked the great things we’d done. Instead, they responded with nods and murmurs of agreement.

  It was no surprise that Layla, always outspoken, was first to reply at length.

  “I’ve been wondering when you’d come to this conclusion, Nicholas,” she said. “As much as I’ve loved the idea of helping you help others, for decades, maybe even centuries, I’ve had the same doubts. There’s nothing wrong with our intentions, but perhaps we haven’t thought enough about the way in which we carry them out. Food nourishes the body, and clothes keep the body warm and dry. But it’s the spirit inside the body that’s most important. I think we’ve neglected the spirit.”

  Felix spoke next. Though he’d never said so, I often guessed he felt he should be second-in-command because he’d been with me longest, longer even than Layla. “I want to say we’ve postponed this discussion too long, but it wastes time to think of what we might have done differently in the past,” Felix commented, looking first at the fire, then at each of us in turn. “The right question is, what should we do in the future? It’s not just the gifts we’ve been giving, either, but the way in which we acquire them. The carved wooden book covers are bringing less and less income. Books aren’t that rare anymore, and more craftsmen are turning out covers the way trees turn out leaves. We need to find a different way of making money.”

  Attila said impatiently, “Let’s think about money after we’ve decided how we want to spend it. Nicholas, if we’re not going to give food or clothing, what should we give?”

  “Toys.” Dorothea, usually the quietest among us, spoke this one word and the rest of us fell silent. We were all thinking.

  “Toys,” Layla repeated. “There may be something to that.”

  We hadn’t discussed this subject much before. In that year of 1194, toys weren’t something every child owned. They weren’t even common. Babies sometimes were given rattles—hollow gourds with pebbles inside. Marbles were made of river clay. There were occasional balls of cloth that could be thrown back and forth. Hoops and tops were rare, prized possessions. And at county fairs and bazaars, puppet shows had become instantly popular with adults and children alike. But the fact of the matter was that simply surviving occupied everyone’s attention most of the time. Anything beyond the most necessary elements of life—food, shelter, clothing—had to be an afterthought. The money to buy toys, or the time to make them, were luxuries far beyond the means of most families. So children usually had no toys at all.

  Adults had a few games. Chess was first played in India in about 500 A.D. The Persians learned the game there, and a few centuries later introduced it to Europeans. And it was about 500 A.D. that dolls made of cloth were found in Egypt. The Egyptians were clever craftsmen; they also gave their children carved wooden crocodiles with jaws that opened and closed.

  There were no wooden crocodiles, though, in the European countries where we spent most of our time. Until Dorothea’s comment, I think it’s fair to say none of us had ever really thought much about toys at all. But now that she had mentioned them, it was easy to remember the way children’s faces lit up on those rare occasions when they had wooden tops to spin or cloth dolls to play with.

  “As you said, food gets eaten immediately and clothes wear out quickly,” Felix mused. “But if we could give children toys so they could play—”

  “Then the joy from the toys might last much, much longer!” Arthur interrupted excitedly. “Nicholas! Let’s give gifts of toys!”

  Sometimes new ideas, ones never considered before, are obviously perfect. This one was. We spent the rest of that night and the next several weeks camped there in England, not arguing about whether we should give toys, but rather deciding how we should give them.

  The first and most obvious problem was how to get enough toys to give. No big companies were manufacturing toys, and there weren’t any toy stores where we could buy them. To make them ourselves, we’d have to purchase large amounts of raw materials—wood, cloth, and so forth. The magic would probably allow the six of us to carve, sew, and otherwise build toys faster than any hundred other craftsmen could, but we still couldn’t make enough each day to deliver them every night as gifts to all the children whose hard lives would be made happier by receiving them.

  “Well, then, why don’t we spend three weeks of every month making toys, and one week of the month delivering them?” Attila asked. All of us found this suggestion agreeable.

  Felix added, “And, little by little, why don’t we change the goods we make and sell from wooden book covers to toys? Rich parents would buy them for their children, and the money they give us for them will pay for the toys we give poor children. Doesn’t that seem appropriate?”

  Failed, early attempts at making toys

  “It does,” I said enthusiastically. “Dorothea, we have you to thank for this.” Dorothea, a modest woman, blushed. Attila gave her an enthusiastic hug.

  “That’s my wife,” he boasted. “She should have been the war chief. Then we Huns would have won every battle!”

  We spent the next few dozen years making a modest beginning. Our first toys were complete failures. We didn’t make marbles from the right clay, so our first ones simply broke in pieces when they smacked into each other. None of us knew how to cure wood strips with water to make perfectly circular hoops. The egg-shaped ones Attila and Arthur made rolled in crazy directions. Even Dorothea’s and Layla’s puppets and dolls looked more like mittens, until they learned how to sew them better.

  But we experimented until we got everything right, and when we did we took several sacks of samples to a fair in Rome, where every toy we had was sold within an hour. We used the profits to buy materials for more toys. These we distributed by night as gifts to poor children. How heartwarming it was to return the next morning and find them shrieking with delight as they rolled hoops, shot marbles, or played at make-believe puppet shows.

  “I know they’re still dressed in rags, and that most of them will be hungry when they go to sleep tonight,” Layla said. “But at least they’re happy today, and tomorrow they’ll have their toys to play with again.”

  Two years passed; Francis’s idea of a nativity scene to help celebrate December 25 spread quickly. A few villages had great debates about whether it was really proper to act out the night of Jesus’ birth since the actors would be mere humans, while Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were holy.

  THIRTEEN

  The Man Who Changed Christmas

  The man who changed Christmas forever wasn’t always known as Saint Francis of Assisi. In 1182, a wealthy Ital ian merchant and his wife named their newborn son Giovanni Bernardone. Young Giovanni was twelve in the year Dorothea suggested we give toys for presents instead of food and clothing.

  Unfortunately, Giovanni was quite spoiled as a youth. His family was rich; their home was one of the grandest anywhere in Italy. Giovanni had more clothes than he could wear, more food than he could eat, and, I’m sure, every kind of toy that had so far been invented. Giovanni’s father expected his oldest son to gradually take over the family business, and this is exactly what Giovanni did.

  But in those days, no city completely escaped war, and it was common for powerful Italian “city-states” to battle each other. When Giovanni was nineteen, Assisi got into a squabble with Perugia. As a member of one of Assisi’s most prominent families, Giovanni was expected to help lead the fighting. Well, he ended up being captured instead. The Perugians tossed him into prison, and he had been in there for over a year by the time the war ended in 1203.

  Giovanni was different when he got out of prison. He had spent most of his time in a cell thinking about the world and his responsibilities in it. He changed his name to Francis in 1205, the same year he told his father he no longer wanted to be a rich merchant. The name change was important—people who wanted to give up worldly things for a life of religion often did this. A differ
ent name showed that they were different, too.

  The newly named Francis began living a life that was exactly the opposite of his pampered childhood. He gave up everything he owned and walked around in ragged robes. Any money given to him was immediately used to buy food for the poor. It seemed to Francis that many Christian leaders only told people about how they’d be punished if they didn’t do what God wanted, instead of concentrating on how all Christians should be friends and help each other. Four years after he’d left his father’s house, Francis started a new program for others—priests, monks, and laypeople—who felt the same way. In Francis’s honor, they called themselves “Franciscans,” and dedicated themselves to doing good things for people. This group is still around today, so obviously Francis had the right idea.

  Francis wasn’t afraid of traveling long distances to spread his message. In 1212 he tried to go to Syria with the plan of converting Muslims to Christianity, or, failing that, to at least convince them that Muslims and Christians shouldn’t fight anymore. Francis never got there. His ship was wrecked on the coast of Croatia, and he had to return to Europe. Another attempted trip to Morocco didn’t work out, either. Poor Francis got sick in Spain and once again had to turn back. He was very discouraged.

  But no hero gives up, and Francis of Assisi was a real hero. In 1219 he finally managed to get to an intended destination—Egypt, where he spent a month with that country’s leaders talking about Christianity and how we should all be kind to each other. The Egyptian leaders didn’t become Christian, but they began treating their people better.

  When Francis got back to Italy after that trip, he decided to concentrate on problems in his native country. Too many uneducated people didn’t really understand what they heard about the church, he concluded, and so he left his small group to travel around by himself. Francis would go to tiny villages where most people couldn’t read or write, and he’d sing the gospel passages, which is how priests usually conducted a part of their church services. But instead of singing in Latin, the official language of the church, he’d sing in Italian so everyone could understand the words. This thoughtfulness made ordinary people love Francis very much. Since he insisted on remaining poor himself, the villagers would often invite him to live in their small homes for a while, and to join them when they celebrated different holidays, including Christ’s birthday.