Paying Attention To The Sky

St. Nicholas rescued sailors, saved women from brothels, and was patron saint to pawnbrokers. Ms. Allen is the author of “The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.”

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Haddon Sundblom
It’s a question many children wonder at this time of year: just how old is Santa Claus?

The answer of course depends on which version of him you’re talking about. For most people today there is only one: the round-bellied, rosy-cheeked man in red who announces himself on our televisions every November with a convoy of Coca-Cola lorries and the hushed promise that ‘Holidays are comin’. That Santa, you can tell any inquisitive youngsters, is 80 years old this winter.

Haddon Sundblom was the artist commissioned by The Coca-Cola Company in 1931 to create a ‘wholesome’ version of Father Christmas, and it’s his jolly image that any kid asked today to draw Santa Claus would approximate, giving rise to the popular theory that ‘Coca-Cola invented Christmas’.

In fact, it wasn’t the first time they’d latched on to the legend of St. Nick to sell more soft drinks. Coca-Cola had been refining the idea since the 1920s when their first Santa ad featured a stern-faced man who more closely resembled Civil War cartoonist Thomas Nast’s Union-supporting elf-Santa that first appear in Harper’s Weekly in 1862.

But by the ’30s, the penny had dropped — if Santa Claus looked like the very incarnation of happiness, then by association, a bottle of Coke would start to seem like the incarnation of happiness too.

Sundblom set to work, drawing inspiration from the real inventor of modern Christmas, poet Clement Clark Moore, whose 1822 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas – better known today as The Night Before Christmas – described Nick thus:

His eyes  –  how they twinkled! His dimples: how merry,
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow

Soon, arguably the most famous advertising icon in history was born as Michigan-born Sundblom spent the next 35 years painting the Father Christmas Coca-Cola still uses to this day. While earlier artists were first to give Santa a face, or even paint him as cheery, Sundblom was the first to give the world a consistent version of the man in the sleigh.

As Joanna Berry, Lecturer in Marketing at Newcastle University Business School, explains: “Whilst Sundblom didn’t invent Santa as the jolly, white haired rotund old man we all now expect, he certainly did more than anyone to imprint that image onto our minds in relation to Coca-Cola in one of the most enduring brand images ever to have been created.”

Despite this wholesome association, Sundblom had his racier side. He regularly took breaks from Santa Claus to paint pin-ups and glamour pieces for calendars, including his final assignment, a painting for the cover of Playboy’s 1972 Christmas issue. But to label him a one-character painter or simply a purveyor of saucy caricatures would, according to Berry, be doing him a disservice.

“Roger T. Reed wrote that ‘More than any artist including Norman Rockwell, Sundblom defined the American Dream in pictures, proved by his work for virtually the entire Fortune 500′. I think it’s important to remember that ‘Sunny’ was about a lot more than Santa.

“His ensuring legacy includes not only his body of work but also the many artists who went through his studio and came out influenced by his very clear style – including Howard Terpning, Gil Elvgren, Earl Blossom and Morgan Kane.”

Nevertheless for most of us, Sundblom will always be remembered for the modern day St Nick.

Seeking to create an advertising program that links Coca-Cola with Christmas, artist Haddon Sundblom created his first illustration showing Santa Claus pausing for a Coke. For the next three decades, from 1931 to 1964, Sundblom paints images of Santa that help to create the modern interpretation of St Nick.
Sam Parker in the Huffington Post

The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus
Nearly everyone knows that Santa Claus — the obese, old gent who squeezes himself down the chimney every Christmas Eve — is the American alter ego of St. Nicholas. Slimmer and less overtly jolly, St. Nicholas roams about Western Europe showering children with presents on his traditional feast day of Dec. 6. In the Netherlands and parts of Germany, children expect a visit from a white-bearded, ecclesiastically garbed “Sinterklaas” (his Dutch name), who decides whether they have been naughty or nice before handing out treats from his sack.

Dutch and German immigrants brought St. Nicholas to America in the early 19th century, and he began a process of assimilation, trading in his bishop’s miter and crosier for a fur-trimmed red suit and cap. The Santa we now know was the creation of poet Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), the author of “The Night Before Christmas”; cartoonist Thomas Nast; illustrators like N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell; and the magazine ads for painted by Sundblom starting in 1931, in which Santa took a break from the arduousness of setting up junior’s electric train by pausing to have a coke.

In “The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus,” Adam English, a religion professor at Campbell University in North Carolina, doesn’t spend much time exploring the various practices and traditions associated with this festive figure. Rather, Mr. English is in search of the man himself. He notes that the real St. Nicholas — if he even existed — is obscured not only by the trappings of Santa Claus but by the layers of medieval folklore that had grown up around him in earlier centuries. In one legend, Nicholas miraculously brings back to life three boys whom an evil innkeeper has murdered, chopped into pieces and thrown into a pickle barrel — hence Nicholas became the patron saint of children.

Another favorite story, first told by the eighth-century monk Michael the Archimandrite, concerned a once-wealthy man who lost his fortune and decided to sell his three daughters into prostitution because he couldn’t provide dowries. Nicholas, whose own parents had left him a large inheritance, sneaked up to the man’s house in the dead of night and threw three bags of gold through the window, enabling the girls to find respectable husbands. He thus became the patron saint of spinsters and of pawnbrokers (for whom he became a “guarantor of payment”); the three balls on pawnshop signs are stylized versions of Nicholas’s bags of gold.

“In this endearing and enduring story, we see all the raw materials for the magical Santa Claus tale,” Mr. English writes, “a mysterious night visitor who silently enters the home to bestow wonderful gifts to children.” Mr. English notes that Nicholas gives from his own pocket, secretly, and with a purpose of encouraging moral behavior.

Nicholas of Myra is believed to have been born around 270 A.D. and died in 343. Unlike other church fathers, he left no writings, and the first mention of him dates from only the sixth century. In 325 he supposedly attended the Council of Nicaea, the gathering of churchmen that affirmed the divinity of Christ. There, according to legend, Nicholas was briefly imprisoned for slugging the heretic Arius in a fit of righteous rage. But the earliest lists of attendees don’t mention a “Nicholas,” and many historians of Christianity have concluded the saint never existed.

Mr. English nonetheless builds a convincing case that there really was a St. Nicholas. Around the middle of the fourth century, he points out, the name “Nicholas” (a combination of the Greek words for “victory” and “people”), hitherto virtually unknown in public records and ledgers and on tombstone inscriptions, suddenly became popular in Asia Minor and elsewhere. A still-extant tomb at Myra (modern Demre), a Mediterranean coastal town in southwestern Turkey, dates archaeologically to the right period.

When the Seljuk Turks, who were Muslims, swept through western Asia Minor in 1087, Italian sailors transported the bones that were in the tomb to Bari, on the heel of Italy, where they are venerated to this day. The bones seem never to have been carbon-dated, but imaging tests conducted in 2004 revealed that they belonged to an elderly man who had suffered a broken jaw — perhaps as a result of that scuffle with Arius, or torture in the vicious persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire during the early fourth century.

On this hair-slender historical record, Mr. English attempts to reconstruct a biography of the historical Nicholas and uses data from the ancient world to argue that at least some of the legends that grew up around St. Nicholas might have been based on fact.

He suggests that the story of the sisters saved from prostitution plausibly reflects fourth-century social realities. The practice of destitute or debt-ridden parents selling their offspring to brothels or slave-traders was so common that the Emperor Constantine made public funds available to families so that they wouldn’t abandon their children.

The author seeks a historical basis for other St. Nicholas tales: his miraculous appearance aboard a foundering ship that guided it to safe harbor (an incident that made him the patron saint of sailors) and his intercession via a dream that prompted Constantine to spare the lives of three Roman military officers unjustly condemned to death. But while these stories might have some grounding in the perils of ancient sea travel or the vicissitudes of ancient justice, they reflect the devotion of the faithful toward a beloved holy man more than anything that might have actually occurred in fourth-century Myra.

In the end, the “true” St. Nicholas is as unknowable, and possibly as fictional, as a shopping-mall Santa. But does it matter? Whether historical, fantastical or a combination of both, he meant so much to those who revered him that he became forever associated with the gift of love that is Christmas. Today is a good day to eat a speculaas (the traditional St. Nick’s Day cookie in the Netherlands and Belgium), or slip a pre-Christmas gift into our children’s shoes — and consider just why we buy all those presents every December.
Charlotte Allen, The Real Father Christmas from the WSJ

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James Thurber’s “A Visit From Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner)

There was a time when James Thurber was one of the funniest men in America. This is from James Thurber’s “A Visit From Saint Nicholas (In the Ernest Hemingway Manner)” in The New Yorker, Dec. 24, 1927 (featured in today’s WSJ):

It was the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

“Father,” the children said.

There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We have visions of sugarplums,” the children said.

“Go to sleep,” said mamma. . . .

Out on the lawn a clatter arose. I got out of bed and went to the window. I opened the shutters; then I threw up the sash. The moon shone on the snow. The moon gave the lustre of mid-day to objects in the snow. There was a miniature sleigh in the snow, and eight tiny reindeer. A little man was driving them. He was lively and quick. . . .

He told them to dash away to the top of the porch, and then he told them to dash away to the top of the wall. They did. The sleigh was full of toys.

“Who is it?” mamma asked.

“Some guy,” I said.