This Christmas, We Need a Visit from the Real Saint Nicholas – American Thinker
The Puritans may have had little inclination to celebrate the saint, but migrants to the later English province of New York were not similarly disposed. It was there that the gift-giving aspect of Santa took root. In Washington Irving s partially accurate History of New York (1809), Santa arrives on horseback on the evening of December 6. The image proved popular, leaving Clement Clark Moore, a professor of Greek and Hebrew, to write A Visit from St. Nicholas for his family at Christmas, 1822. It was published anonymously shortly afterwards. Moore did not acknowledge his authorship until 1837.
The illustrator Thomas Nast, whose caricatures of drunken Irishmen and Boss Tweed appeared in the pages of Harper s Weekly between the 1860s and 1880s, has Santa giving out presents to Union Army troops at Christmas, 1862. Nast s pen produced several dozen images of Santa in this time, in the course of which Santa was given a shop for making toys which seems to have become located at the North Pole.
Fifty years after Nast, 1931 color magazine ads for Coca Cola gave us the image of Santa that we have today. In 1939, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed reindeer was given life by ads for Montgomery Ward.
Through a millennium and a half, then, Saint Nicholas has been transformed from a saintly priest of unknown stature, a charitable man who performed miracles. He has become a bearded, jolly old man in a red coat whose seasonal occupation is to seat little kids on his lap in shopping malls, there to encourage the parents to buy more toys than the little ones could ever need. The only known instance of defiance of this job requirement is that by the character portrayed by Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street (1947).
Last night we watched the remarkable movie “Elf,” in which Will Ferrell plays a human brought up by elves, who visits NYC to find his real father. The first two-thirds is a pretty good movie, though it is remarkable how completely secular the movie is. There is literally not a single reference to anything supernatural, except Santa and his affiliated elves’ supernatural ability to manufacture toys and read children’s minds of what they want. When people stop believing in this fantasy, it causes Santa’s sleigh to lose power and eventually become stuck on the ground and impossible to fly. But start believing, the Clausomenter moves to the right and the sleigh revs up. The cast of the movie was great, except that most of the stars were communists, or democratic socialists I suppose you’re supposed to say. Ed Asner, a cameo by Burl Ives, Bob Newhart, and introducing an unknown singer as far as I know.