EP 01 - Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

- Episode 01 -

Christmas Special

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Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

Friday 23 December 2022

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#78 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

Coca Cola advert from 1954 featuring Father Christmas first designed in 1931 by Haddon 'Sunny' Sundblom

Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this.

Santa Claus appeared broadly as we know him in 1810 in a note handed round the Knickerbockers, a New York local history society, by a poet John Pintard. He was then picked up by the Knickerbocker novelist, Washington Irving, who a couple of years later wove him into the second edition of his history of New York and then decamped to England, where he collected English Christmas customs together and romanticised them in the Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Back in New York, Santa acquired the big beard, the act of climbing down a chimney, with the stockings along the mantle and the sleigh with flying reindeer and was featured in The Children’s Friend, an American kids’ annual for 1821. But most people subsequently heard of him through a poem published anonymously a couple of years later and known to generations of children as ‘The Night before Christmas’. It was in fact the work of yet another Knickerbocker, Clement Moore, professor of Oriental and Greek Literature, Divinity and Biblical Studies in a New York theological seminary.

Father Christmas began appearing in person in department stores in the 1890s. He was brought to today’s ruddy-complexioned, red-and-white, ho-ho-ing form by Haddon ‘Sunny’ Sundblom, who was an artist from Muskegon, Michigan. His Father Christmas was based his friend Lou Prentice, and was created for a long series of adverts for Coca Cola from 1931 and still going today, even on diet coke!

Danish Nisse girls and boys on our mantlepiece this Christmas, handmade by Tove Middelboe

So Santa is a New Yorker? Well, no

Like most things in history, invention is the child of evolution. Historian Tom Jerman has shown that bearded old men in fur coats have been appearing across Europe in December or January since before the Romans. ‘Father Christmas’ apparently made his debut (without giving any gifts though) in 17^th century England.

There are also some Christmas-themed women, like the Russian snow maiden Snegoruchka or the French-Swiss Tante Arie, and some mythical creatures, like St Nick the Elf. Some, like the bad-tempered Rhenish Belsnickle, arrive to quiz children on their behaviour. Many fly, usually in a chariot pulled by goats, snakes or leopards. But the Alpine Berchta arrived on a broomstick before climbing down your chimney (if you’d been good).

In Scandinavia, Santa became confused with the traditional jultmote or nisse men (pronounced nisser), gnomes with long beards and the trademark pointy hats, who had long organised the winter solstice.

In Germany a whole crowd of similar characters had been banded together as the Weihnachtsmann. The Dutch had dodged the Reformation ban on celebrating saints by renaming their Christmas patron Sinterklass. In fact New York’s Knickerbockers may have been interested in Santa (or Sante as they first called him) because so many immigrants to the new USA, especially from Germany, had brought such similar stories with them.

#78 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

‘Come in and know me better, man!’ Scrooge's third visitor. With Illustrations by John Leech, pub. Chapman & Hall, 1843.

Christmas never used to be so commercial. Oh yes it did…

Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol appeared in December 1843 and has been credited (or blamed) for creating the cozy family Christmas and the tradition of gift giving, especially to children.

Historian Tara Moore has shown that Dickens’s book was part of a publishing drive to cash in on Christmas, dating back to the late 1820s and peaking from the 1830s through to the 1860s. It fitted neatly a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas but it also came out of a powerful mood of early-Victorian anxiety. The obvious prosperity of a few early industrialists had come to contrast all too starkly with the poverty of the majority. John Lhotsky’s shocking study of London poverty in 1844 recounted a series of tales of individuals literally starving to death in the streets of the capital.

Dickens (and other authors) had long campaigned against the scandal of London poverty. ‘Christmas in the workhouse’ was already becoming an annual image. Dickens was apparently inspired to write his Christmas book by a visit to a ragged school for poor children in October 1843. He had written his text by 2 December and it was published on 19^th. It is a secular morality tale for the rich, a call for generosity at least amid the conspicuous consumption of Christmas, and it played directly to the urban, Victorian middle-class conscience.

The Christmas panto achieved its current form in the 1880s and 1890s. It’s a long and complex story of the evolution of what had been fundamentally a mime – intended to get around the official censors. Just where the cross-dressing principal boys and male dames came from is another whole story. They certainly pre-dated panto.

According to the V&A, Christmas crackers appeared in the same decade (though had no bang until the 1860s). The first Christmas card was sent in 1843, coincidentally the year of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, when it was much colder than today (at the end of what geographers call the 'little ice age'.) Not surprising then that by the time mass produced Christmas cards became popular, in the 1870s, snow was an essential – and oh-so romantic - part of the scene. It still is.

Santa Claus Village in Lapland, North Finland, is open every day of the year. Korvatuntuni became the home of Father Christmas in 1927, before it was moved in the 1980s to Rovaniemi to boost Finnish winter tourism

Wishing you a 'traditional' Christmas?

In England, starting around 1820, as the poor drifted away from rural areas to find work in the towns, there was something of a craze for collecting rural folk-lore and this generated some studies of Christmas customs. Like sticking a plum pie on your cow’s horn, throwing cider in the poor animal’s face and seeing where the pie came down. From which you predicted the next year’s harvest! Well, that was what you did in Herefordshire.

Much of our present-day Christmas was, it seems, invented by the Victorians. Or at least, brought together in the way we know them today. The Nine Lessons and Carols, which most people think began at King’s College Cambridge in 1918, was in fact invented by Edward Benson, Bishop of Truro, in 1880. It’s often said – though nowhere proven – that he came up with the idea as a way to get the drunken Cornish out of the pubs.

It could also have been a means for Bishop Benson to get away from his wife on Christmas eve. In her diary she recorded her lesbian lovers – reportedly all 39 of them. The first time Benson tried the service, 400 turned up to the wooden shed that was his Cathedral until the present spectacular stone one could be built. The quality of the singing is not recorded.

Lapland came to be especially associated with Christmas by the English, in the 1890s, as a place where the gnome-like Jultomten worked. That was just a part of the romanticisation of the arctic north, which had been leading tourists and travellers further and further up into the ice and was part of what sparked a series of explorations to and around the pole.

As we’ll see in our series on explorers (following on from the popular Livingstone series), those explorations often turn out to be as much myth as Father Christmas! Ho, ho, ho.

Wishing you a merry Christmas, and good health for 2023,
and thanking you for your support for History Café

Jon and Penelope

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