An Orthodox icon of St. Nicholas the Wonder Worker, Bishop of Myra. |
Note: A
hardy perennial here at the Blog, back around on a sixth time with a tweak or
two.
When
our children were young, they always
found stockings filled on December 6, St. Nicholas Day. It was a custom in my wife’s Polish family which originated in Prussia where the peasantry was Slavic and
the aristocrats German. I’m told that
Poles from southern parts of the country are mystified by this.
Today
is St. Nicholas Day. A traditional Catholic Feast Day in the West, it celebrates the day Nikolaos
of Myra, the Greek Bishop
of Myra in Asia Minor died in 346.
He is one of the most important Saints in the Orthodox tradition
as well and is venerated in Greece and especially in Russia
where he is the national patron.
The bishop was considered a vigorous defender of what became orthodox
belief after the Council of Nicaea in 325. As legend has it, Nicholas actually
slapped the Presbyter Arius, the leader of a minority who held a crypto-unitarian
theology.
Despite this, Nicholas is best remembered in
the West for his kindness to children and his gifts of alms to
the poor. The major miracle
attributed to him, told in many variations, is that he discovered
the murder of three children by a butcher who was curing
their bodies in a barrel to sell as ham. Nicholas discovered the ruse, had the villain
arrested and then resurrected the innocent children.
Nicholas came from a very wealthy family. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised
by an uncle, also named Nicholas who was Bishop of Patara.
Later the very devout young man began discretely
using his wealth to make gifts to
the poor. He supposedly did so anonymously, often by throwing purses of coins over garden walls or through open windows in the dead
of night.
The
most famous story, also told with
many variations, is that he took pity on a poor
man with three daughters who
could not marry because they had no dowry.
For three nights running, or once a year for three years, or once each
girl reached marriageable age depending on the version being told, Nicholas
tossed a customary purse of gold into the man’s home. The third time the man sought to hide himself
so that he could thank his benefactor. Seeing this, Nicholas supposedly tossed the
final bag down the chimney, where it
dropped into the stocking of the
youngest girl who had hung it to dry. This is the origin of gifts in shoes or stockings associated with Nicholas in
later folklore.
St. Nicholas with a purse off gold for one of the three daughters of a poor man with the stockings into which it fell. |
In
commemoration of this story, most icons
of St. Nicholas show him with three purses tied
to his belt, which were often stylized into three golden balls. In the Netherlands, where so much of the gift giving tradition associated
with him became popularized, the
three golden balls became associated with oranges,
which the Saint would bring with him
on his annual visits from Spain.
This part of the legend is associated with the long rule of the Netherlands
by the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty.
In
an even stranger twist, the three
balls morphed into the three balls traditionaly emblematic of pawn brokers. St. Nicholas is the patron of these petty money
lenders, supposedly because they, like him, are the last resort of the poor. Nicholas is also venerated as the patron of sailors,
children, scholars, and thieves as well Russia and several
other nations.
Myra
was overtaken by the Seljuk Turks early in the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus
around 1085. To save them from the Islamic invaders sailors from Bari, an important port on the Adriatic
coast of southern Italy, seized
the relics of Saint Nicholas, from the
Cathedral in Myra over the objections of the local monks.
They arrived on May 9, 1087, and a new
tomb was built for the intact body
of the Saint. Bari became a pilgrimage site and the relocated Bishop is often called St. Nicholas of Bari in the west.
The Relics of St. Nicholas--his undecomposed body--are brought by sailors to Bari in Italy to save them from the Seljuk Turks who had captured Myra. |
About
this time, iconography in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions began to divide.
In the East he his generally shown bare
headed and bald in rich golden vestments. In the West he is usually portrayed in a bishop’s miter and red cloak, symbolic of his
office.
Much
of the change into a folkloric figure took place in the Netherlands and spread
across Northern Europe, where, particularly in eastern Germany, it was blended with
even older pagan traditions
associated with the worship of Odin.
As
the Dutch story evolved, St. Nicholas would arrive every year by ship from
Spain about two weeks before his feast day.
With the help of a small, dark skinned helper named Zwarte Piet, Black Peter, he would check
on the behavior of children.
Carrying a pack of goodies on
his white horse, St. Nicholas would travel from town to town on the eve of his feast day and leave gifts in
the wooden shoes of poor
children. This story spread over much of northern Europe and
was adapted to local customs. The names of St. Nicholas and his helper also
changed from place to place. In Dutch
he was called Sinterklass.
St. Nicholas in his Dutch incarnation on his white charger accompanied by his black servant Zwarte Piet on an ass bringing presents to good children on the eve of his Feast Day. |
St. Nicholas Day was a separate tradition from Christmas. But because it fell early in the Advent season, it was probably inevitable that the
celebrations and the Saint would become intertwined. Scholars
are unsure of exactly when St. Nicholas added Christmas to his rounds
of gift giving, but most believe it did not take hold until the early
years of the 19th Century in America.
The
Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam undoubtedly brought the
tradition of St. Nicholas Day with them to the New World. By the post-Revolutionary era it had passed on to English residents of New York. Washington
Irving, who preserved the old
Dutch folk tales—and made more than a
few up himself—noted that at some
point prior to the 1820’s, St. Nicholas had shifted his gift giving to
Christmas in areas of the Hudson Valley.
In
1823 a newspaper in Troy, New York published
an anonymous poem titled A
Visit from St. Nicholas that
was later attributed to Clement Clark
Moore. Within years it was being re-printed annually in newspapers
across the United States. In the poem, Moore invented many of the “traditions” associated with St. Nicholas’s
visit on Christmas Eve, including
his reindeer and sleigh transport and a physical description of the jolly old elf that strips him of his Bishop’s regalia, dresses him in fur, and transforms him from a tall, regal figure to a rotund, bearded little man.
This
new character was called Santa Claus,
derived from the Dutch Sinterklass regionally, but remained better known as St.
Nicholas through most of the following century.
Thomas Nast’s mid-century cartoons helped define his
appearance, including the fur
trimmed cap instead of the miter, top
hat, or cowl depicted in earlier illustrations. There was not much agreement on the color
of his outfit, which was often pictured as brown fur trimmed in ermine or
as green or blue, until the spread of cheap
popular color lithography in
which artists used the bishop’s red of Europe because it showed up so brilliantly.
Thomas Nast's Civil War era illustration of St. Nick a/k/a Santa Claus began to form the American image of the Jolly Old Elf. |
Nast
also dreamed up and illustrated for the first time Santa’s workshop and home located at the North Magnetic Pole, then—1872—located on ice packed land on an island
in the Canadian Artic Archipeligo. And he populated it with the industrious
elves of Nordic and Germanic
legend.
The
name Santa Claus did not really begin to overtake St. Nicholas nationally until
the New
York Sun published its famous
editorial Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus in 1897. It, too, “went viral” and became an annual event in papers across the
country. In 1902 L. Frank Baum, the creator of the Wizard of Oz published a
now largely forgotten book, The
Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which was so popular at the time that
it virtually completed the metamorphosis of St. Nicholas to Santa Claus.
The physical image of
Santa was refined by the illustrators of popular magazine covers
in the early decades of the 20th Century, including many by Norman
Rockwell. The fully definitive modern
Santa Claus was created by artist Haddon
Sundblom for Coca Cola advertising
that ran from 1931 to 1964.
Katherine Lee Bates's Goody Santa Claus, a feisty feminist, helped popularize Mrs. Claus. Hardly a trace was left of the celibate old Bishop. |
Along
the way Santa Claus picked up many
accouterments that had nothing in
common with the Bishop of Myra. The
most obvious of these is Mrs. Claus.
Although there were some passing references to a spouse for the gift giver as early as
the 1850s, she first got wide exposure in a poem by Katherine Lee Bates, best known as the writer of America
the Beautiful. In Goody
Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride, she is an uncompromising feminist who
shows Santa what she can do by making
his deliveries one year. She really took off as a separate character in
stories and films from the 1950’s on, where she is stripped of Bates’s feminism and is pictured as an adoring, chubby helpmate to her
husband.
The
power of American film, music, and television has brought Santa Claus to every corner of the globe.
Even in countries with strong St. Nicholas traditions, he has taken on
the characteristics of the American
Santa. He also appears in countries with
no religious celebration of Christmas
and is popular in Japan and Korea.
Under the Soviets, the
Russians transformed their patron saint
into Father Winter, as Santa Claus clone who visits on New Year’s Eve.
Haddon Sundblom's advertising illustrations of Santa Claus for Coka-Cola settled the image of the modern American Santa, now know all over the world. |
Symbolic
of the eclipse of St. Nicholas by
Santa Claus was the fate of the statue
of St. Nicholas in the town of Demre,
Turkey, near the site of historic Myra.
In order to facilitate tourism
the now Muslim town commissioned a statue of St. Nicholas
to be placed in the town square by a
Russian Iconographer. The Russian
government made it a gift to the
city and it was dedicated in 2000.
After just a few years, however, the local Mayor discovered that tourists were disappointed. They had not come to venerate a Saint, but visit the home of Santa Claus. So the
mayor had the original statue removed
and replaced by a plastic Santa in a
red suit—a Santa modeled after Haddon Sundblom’s Coca Cola creation.
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