The Autobiography of Santa Claus

by Jeff Guinn

  We were still determined to help make Christmas a happier holiday in America, but we also wanted to enjoy a few European Christmases in countries that celebrated the season properly with traditional visits from Saint Nicholas, by whatever name and on whatever date. Leonardo and Willie Skokan happily went right back to work at the Nuremberg toy factory. Layla and I joined Arthur, Attila, and Dorothea on some of their gift-giving adventures, and went out on our own several times, particularly in Italy. How wonderful it was to be among people who held Christmas in their hearts, with carols and Christmas trees and nativity scenes and presents and, most of all, honest, grateful joy for the birth of Jesus that didn’t have to be concealed for fear of someone else thinking such happiness was inappropriate.

  In 1818, a few years after we’d come back to Europe, Layla asked me if the two of us might spend a special Christmas together. “I love our friends and our gift-giving, Santa,” she said, using the American name for me that all of us liked best. “But just once, after all these years, I wonder if we couldn’t spend one Christmas Eve quietly, just the two of us, going somewhere special and celebrating at a midnight church service just as normal people do?”

  In all our years together, this was the first favor Layla had asked of me. I was more than happy to agree. When we told our friends, they all had suggestions about where we should go for our holiday.

  “A second honeymoon for you!” Dorothea laughed. “How wonderful! What fun!”

  “We never had a first honeymoon,” Layla replied. “We were married in the afternoon, and we helped Felix give gifts that night. It’s taken me thirteen centuries to get this husband of mine alone for a while!”

  Attila had heard of an Austrian village named Oberndorf, just eleven miles north of the city of Salzburg.

  “It’s lovely country; the Salzach River runs right beside the town,” he said. “Best of all, the villagers there have their midnight worship service in Saint Nicholas’s Church! It’s named for you!”

  Obviously, Layla and I chose to spend our holiday in Oberndorf. We arrived there a few days before Christmas and arranged to stay at a comfortable inn. I hadn’t ever had a vacation, and was surprised how pleasant one could be. Layla and I slept late, ate what we pleased, and took long walks along the banks of the river. It was on the last of those walks, during the morning of December 24, that we passed Saint Nicholas’s Church and saw a tall man wearing a priest’s robes standing outside talking with a stocky fellow. They were obviously upset, although not with each other.

  “Pardon us, gentlemen,” I said as Layla and I approached them. “We don’t wish to interrupt, but tonight we plan to attend Christmas mass and wonder when the service will begin.”

  “There might not be a midnight service, or, at least, there might not be a very special one,” the heavyset man mumbled. “Christmas mass without music won’t seem like Christmas at all.”

  “We can’t give up so easily, Franz,” the priest said. He smiled at Layla and me and added, “I’m Father Josef Mohr, assistant priest of this church, and this is Franz Gruber, our church organist. We pride ourselves on our Christmas midnight mass, especially since our church is named for the saint who many believe is the example of true holiday spirit. People come from all over to celebrate Christmas with us, but we’ve just discovered our church organ is somehow not working. Franz thinks mice have been nibbling too much at the pedals, and I believe mist from the river must have damaged the pipes.”

  “It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with the organ, Father,” Franz said unhappily. “It won’t play and there’s no time to have it repaired before tonight’s service. Christmas without music just isn’t Christmas, as I said before.”

  “Can’t everyone just sing without music?” Layla asked.

  “The organ music is necessary for all the traditional carols,” Franz brooded. “Tonight’s mass will be a disappointment to everyone. Well, I’ll go back inside and work on the organ some more. Maybe Saint Nicholas himself will arrive tonight with a new organ so we can have music after all.”

  “Don’t think badly of Franz,” Father Mohr cautioned after the organist disappeared into the church. “It’s just that he loves music so much, and loves Christmas so much, too. We can still have a happy service without music. We’ll celebrate the birth of Jesus with songs in our hearts and not on our lips, I suppose.”

  Father Mohr seemed very agreeable. Layla and I invited him to eat lunch with us. Afterward, he invited us back to the church and showed us all around. There was a beautiful stained-glass window of Saint Nicholas in his old-fashioned red bishop’s robes trimmed with white.

  “Quite a handsome fellow,” I said.

  “A thin fellow, too,” Layla whispered rudely. I chose dignified silence as my best response.

  Because it was winter, darkness came early to Oberndorf. Although it was cold, the air felt crisp and the sky was clear. Layla, Father Mohr, and I stood outside the church looking up at the stars. In the village, families were inside their homes getting ready for dinner. Afterward, they’d walk to the church for midnight mass. Then there would be much bustling in the streets, and loudly shouted wishes to each other of “Merry Christmas.” But for now, everything was blissfully silent.

  “This is such a silent night,” Layla mused. “And somehow it feels like a holy night, as well.”

  Father Mohr’s brow furrowed. He pulled a stick of charcoal and a scrap of paper from his pocket and began scribbling. “Did you say this is a silent night, a holy night?” he asked Layla.

  “Yes,” she replied, looking puzzled.

  “Come with me—hurry!” Father Mohr blurted, turning and running into the church. “Franz Gruber! Franz Gruber! Come here quickly, and bring your guitar!”

  Three hours later, and just minutes before the first worshipers arrived at Saint Nicholas’s Church, Father Josef Mohr and Franz Gruber had written a new Christmas carol. It began with Layla’s words: “Silent night, holy night.” Using simple, heartfelt rhyme, Father Mohr had continued, “All is calm. All is bright.” From there, he let his song with its lovely melody and plain words tell the story of the night of Jesus’ birth.

  Just after midnight on December 25, 1818, the climax of mass at Saint Nicholas’s Church in Oberndorf came when Father Mohr and Franz Gruber stood before the congregation. Father Mohr held a sheet of paper in his hands, with words and musical notes written on it. He held the paper in front of Franz Gruber, who strummed his guitar. Father Mohr sang tenor. Franz Gruber sang bass. As their listeners sat transfixed, they sang:Silent night, holy night.

  All is calm. All is bright.

  ’Round yon virgin mother and child.

  As they continued to sing, many men and women in the church began to weep with joy. Tears running down their faces, they begged to hear the song again, and again. By the fourth time Father Mohr and Franz Gruber sang, the entire congregation was standing and singing with them. Standing with my wife, Layla, singing and crying at the same time like everyone else, I somehow knew, knew, that our voices were carrying up through the roof of the church, through the cold Christmas night air, all the way up to Heaven, where the one whose birth we were singing about was listening and smiling, pleased with the love and joy reflected in this new, incredible carol.

  After the service, the villagers of Oberndorf walked quietly home, as though speaking might somehow break a special spell. There was no need for Layla and me to hurry away from the church. We knew Attila and Dorothea and their helpers had delivered presents to the children of Oberndorf and all of Austria on December 6, Saint Nicholas Day.

  “Thank you,” Layla said softly to Father Mohr.

  “Thank you,” he replied. We took turns hugging him, and then Layla and I, too, returned to the village. I looked back once and saw Father Mohr staring up at the dark Christmas sky. Abruptly, he raised his hand toward the stars, waving to the Savior he’d just celebrated in a song that would be part of Christmas forever.

  We left Oberndorf the next day
, feeling especially joyful, and returned to Nuremberg, where we happily rejoined our friends and continued our gift-giving work. Then one morning, five years later, Attila told me he’d received a message from Arthur, who wanted Layla and me to return to London as soon as possible.

  “Has someone been hurt?” I asked worriedly. “Has there been an accident at Arthur’s toy factory?”

  “The message said it was nothing bad, but still a matter that required you to come right away,” Attila said. Layla, Leonardo, Willie Skokan, and I left immediately, traveling as quickly as we could, which was ten times faster than ordinary mortals.

  When we reached London, we hurried to the toy factory and burst into Arthur’s office. “What’s happened?” I asked.

  Arthur raised an eyebrow; in reply, he handed me a letter in Felix’s handwriting.

  It said simply, “Come back to America at once. Everyone knows about you now. You’re famous.”

  There was also a mysterious postscript: “Please bring flying reindeer. Eight, if possible.”

  “Simply shout out, ‘Now, Dasher, now, Dancer, now, Prancer and Vixen; on, Comet, on Cupid, on, Donder and Blitzen!’ Then they’ll run and the sleigh will take off.”

  TWENTY

  Reindeer Fly, and So Do I

  Among those who had read Diedrich Knickerbocker, Wash ington Irving’s book that included the Dutch colonists’ belief in Saint Nicholas, was Clement Moore, well known in New York as a great scholar and historian. Moore loved Irving’s book, and his favorite passages were about the long-lived saint who gave Christmas presents to children.

  In 1822, Moore invited several relatives to join him and his family for Christmas. Moore’s favorite daughter, Charity, begged him to write a poem for the occasion, because her father often wrote verses for special family gatherings.

  Now, Clement Moore was a busy man. For a while he forgot about his promise to Charity. On December 23, relatives began arriving for the Christmas celebration, and that afternoon Mrs. Moore asked her husband to go to the market and buy some food they needed for that evening’s meal. It was a snowy day, and Moore made the trip in a horse-drawn sleigh. He had allowed his daughter Charity to come with him, and on their ride home she asked if he’d written his special Christmas poem yet.

  “I didn’t want to disappoint my little girl,” Moore told us nearly ten years later, when we’d become his friends and often joined him for long evening talks. “When we got home, I went upstairs to my study and closed the door. I remembered reading Diedrich Knickerbocker, and took the book down from a shelf. Washington Irving is such a wonderful writer! I loved his descriptions of Saint Nicholas, especially when the saint would place his finger beside his nose and fly away.”

  Moore also referred to another small book, titled The Children’s Friend. That one included a sketch of Saint Nicholas driving a sleigh pulled by reindeer.

  “An idea for a poem began to form in my mind,” Moore said. “All my children loved the Christmas holiday, after all, and we’d always kept the tradition of having presents for the children to open on Christmas morning. From the history I’d studied, I’d long suspected Saint Nicholas really did exist, and that he somehow was able to bring gifts to children during the holidays. So I was determined to write my poem about him, and include all the wonderful stories from the Dutch colonists. My remaining problem was describing what he looked like, for I wanted my children and family to be able to perfectly picture him in their minds as they listened to my poem.”

  As it happened, the Moore family employed a gardener named Jan Duyckinck. He was of Dutch descent, white-bearded and somewhat overweight. Also, Jan was a jolly fellow who always did his work cheerfully, and with a small pipe clenched between his teeth.

  “When I thought of Jan, the whole poem seemed to come into my head at once,” Moore concluded. “I wrote for several hours. Then, after dinner on that night of December twenty-third, 1822, I called everyone into the parlor and began to read to them.”

  Every line, every word, was to become famous. Moore titled his poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.” It began:’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

  It was a short poem, fifty-six lines in all. When Moore completed his recitation, everyone clapped and cheered. He was pleased by his family’s response and thought that one reading was the last anyone would ever hear of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas.”

  But someone among Moore’s listeners that night—he never found out who—considered the poem too good to be forgotten. This person secretly copied the poem and gave it to the editor of the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in a nearby town. The editor obviously loved the poem, too, because exactly one year later, on December 23, 1823, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” was published in the Sentinel and became an immediate sensation. Every copy of that day’s newspaper was sold. Newspapers and magazines all over the rest of America reprinted the poem in its entirety. It seemed every American parent who read the poem immediately decided to make Saint Nicholas welcome, and all the children who heard the now-famous lines went to bed on Christmas Eve with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads, and in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would arrive to leave them presents.

  There were two other important, immediate reactions. Felix, Sarah, and Ben Franklin, my poor helpers who had stayed behind in America, were suddenly overwhelmed by the number of homes in which they were welcome, and in which they were now expected to leave gifts on Christmas Eve. They worked frantically to satisfy as many eager children as possible. And Clement Moore, who considered himself a serious scholar, felt embarrassed by the attention being given to something he thought of as an enjoyable but still silly little poem. The Troy Sentinel hadn’t printed the name of the poet, and for many years Moore tried to keep his identity a secret.

  Felix and the others thought the sensation caused by the poem might die down after a year or so, but instead the popularity of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” spread. Children now believed they knew all about me from that poem. By 1825, Felix felt he had no choice but to summon me back to America from Europe, and sent his urgent message to Arthur.

  Layla, Leonardo, Willie Skokan, and I were able to get back quickly. The first steamship had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1819, and this new method of sea transportation cut sailing time between England and America in half. Felix, Sarah, and Ben met us at the dock.

  “Whatever did you mean, ‘Bring flying reindeer. Eight, if possible’?” I asked Felix as soon as my feet touched land.

  “You’ll understand soon,” he assured me, and within hours we new arrivals were sitting comfortably in the house Felix and the others had built in New York, reading “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” for ourselves.

  I very much enjoyed the first dozen lines or so. “This is simply wonderful!” I chortled, but Layla, who read faster, suggested I save my rapturous comments until I’d read further. And when I got to the lines describing what the father saw as he “tore open the shutters and drew up the sash,” I began to choke. Everyone jumped up to pound me on the back.

  “I can’t believe this,” I bellowed. “Reindeer pulling my sleigh through the sky? Eight reindeer? Reindeer with names, for goodness sakes! Why, this fellow has me landing on a roof!”

  Most of the rest of the poem was acceptable, even pleasing—the part about filling the stockings was my favorite—but I didn’t feel I could overlook Moore’s rude comments about my weight.

  “He says I’ve got a little round belly,” I complained.

  “Well, actually, you’ve got rather a big round belly,” Willie Skokan observed, meaning, I suppose, to be helpful. Everyone enjoyed a good laugh at my expense before Felix added carefully, “You might also note the forty-sixth line.”

  I reread it and gasped with horror. “Why, I’m not an elf! I’m a full-grown man, and don’t you say what I know you’re thinking, Layla!” My wife had opened her mouth to make a sarcastic remark, but now she closed it again.
“This poem is going to cause us problems, my friends. Now, I’m glad it was written, and gladder still it’s become beloved and made Americans want us to be part of their Christmas holiday. But it’s always been our rule to become whatever children of each country expect us to be, and in this case it may be impossible. I’m not an elf, for one thing, and can’t become one to satisfy the expectations created by this poem.”

  “I really don’t think the children will care if you’re an elf or not,” Layla commented. “That can be like the myth of you coming down chimneys, part of the illusion but not really vital to the real mission, which is delivering the toys. It’s the flying-reindeer issue that we have to deal with.”

  “We actually have gone down a few chimneys if the chimneys were wide enough and if there was no other easy way to get into a house,” Felix noted. “The problem here in America, as I see it, is that countless children will be peering out windows every Christmas Eve, hoping for a glimpse of Saint Nicholas and his sleigh flying through the night sky.”

  “Let me just correct you by noting many American children, perhaps the majority of them, use the name ‘Santa Claus’ instead of ‘Saint Nicholas,’” Sarah interrupted. “On my last trip along the coast I learned this. I wish Clement Moore had chosen to write ‘A Visit from Santa Claus’ to avoid future confusion, but I assume he was trying to remain faithful to the Dutch traditions, and—”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but can we please concentrate on the flying reindeer?” I asked impatiently. “Everything else can be worked out, but we have a simple problem that can’t be ignored. Reindeer cannot fly.”