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The Church’s relationship with the figure who, more than any other, seems to embody the secular Christmas – Santa Claus – has been ambivalent. For some Christians, the cult of Santa has eclipsed the real focus of the feast, the infant Saviour. Things came to a head in 1951 in France, where the cult was, besides its commercialism, very much associated with the Americanisation of the feast.
As the sociologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described it:
“A number of the clergy had, for several months, expressed disapproval of the increasing importance given by both families and the business sector to the figure of Father Christmas. They denounced a disturbing paganization of the Nativity that was diverting public spirit from the true Christian meaning of Christmas to the profit of a myth devoid of religious value. Attacks spread just before Christmas; with more discretion but just as much conviction, the Protestant Church chimed in with the Catholic Church.”
Matters came to a head on Christmas Eve, with an event described by a reporter from France Soir:
“School children witness Father Christmas burnt in Dijon Cathedral precinct.
Father Christmas was hanged yesterday afternoon from the railings of Dijon Cathedral and burnt publicly in the precinct. This spectacular execution took place in the presence of several hundred Sunday school children. It was a decision made with the agreement of the clergy who had condemned Father Christmas as a usurper and heretic. He was accused of paganising the Christmas festival and installing himself like a cuckoo in the nest, claiming more and more space for himself. Above all he was blamed for infiltrating all the state schools from which the crib has been scrupulously banished. On Sunday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the unfortunate fellow with the white beard, scapegoated like so many innocents before him, was executed by his accusers. They set fire to his beard and he vanished into smoke.”
The event sparked controversy, and the pundits piled in all over France. Catholics too were divided on the matter. In a France divided about secularism, Father Christmas was, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, a symbol of irreligion. The clerics of Dijon had a point. The state that unhesitatingly celebrated Santa in town halls and town squares across France was so rigorous in its secularism – religion had been banned from schools in 1903, with the religious orders – that it was unthinkable to discuss the Nativity, or have a crib, in any French school. Nonetheless, the effort was not repeated.
It is fair to say that Catholics nowadays are mostly unperturbed about Father Christmas. Every so often there is controversy when some English cleric – usually an Anglican – tells nursery children that he does not exist, to the dismay of the infants, but in secular life, Santa is way more ubiquitous than the infant Jesus.
Yet it’s possible to reconcile these two aspects of the season, the profane and the sacred, and to do it precisely in the person of Santa Claus. Because as the name ought to tell us, the figure in a white beard is in fact Saint Nicholas. That hoary poem, much loved in the US, The Night Before Christmas (1823), makes the identification quite clear: the first title was A Visit from St Nicholas.
“…The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
…. Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;”
In fact, the poet refers to Santa Claus throughout as St Nicholas. There has rarely been a public figure whose origins were more self-evident. For in the US, there were communities from Germany and the Netherlands who would have held to their native custom of celebrating the feast of St Nicholas on 6th December. The one departure from the norm was that the visit took place not on the eve of the feast when the saint puts presents in good children’s shoes, or visits their homes dressed as a bishop, but on Christmas Eve. Plus, of course, the reindeer and the episode in the chimney.
St Nicholas then is Santa Claus, only he has been prised away in the Anglophone world from his feast day. But to see him as a benign figure who comes to homes to distribute gifts, look no further than the ballet which is invariably performed over Christmas in Britain, The Nutcracker, in which the celebrations take place on the saint’s feast, and the fun starts when he arrives to present gifts to the children. St Nicholas appears as a bishop in the ballet – nowadays waving rather than blessing the party – but a bishop who bears gifts.
The association of the saint with gift-giving and with children derives from his story, written by John the Deacon in the ninth century. His most famous act, before ever he became bishop of Myra, was to fling a bag of gold coins on three successive occasions through the window of three girls whose father, having fallen on hard times, proposed to put them in a brothel. Nicholas was appalled at this and provided dowries for the girls from his own resources. They duly married respectably, and when the wicked father found who his benefactor was, he was effusively grateful. (Whether his daughters forgave him is not recorded.) The other miracle associated with him was during a famine in which an unscrupulous shopkeeper had killed three little boys to pickle like bacon in a barrel, but was thwarted when St Nicholas unhesitatingly blessed it, and the boys rose from their brine as good as new.
The feast of St Nicholas then, which was celebrated before the Reformation as the feast of the boy bishop, when a boy would be chosen to be bishop for the day, is a way of reclaiming Father Christmas for the Christian feast. He doesn’t deserve condemnation, but he does deserve reclamation. Catholic parents can, at least, with a clear conscience tell their children that Santa does exist. And his remains are in the cathedral at Bari, to this very day.
