This week: Santa, Baby! That's right, we're talking about the jolly man in the red coat, Saint Nick himself. But which version? And what does that even mean? Read on!
Santa, Baby
Years ago, I attended a midnight reading by Neil Gaiman1. A couple hundred of us sat packed into one of the rooms at the San Diego Convention Center and listened to Neil read some of his stories to us. Towards the end of the reading, he debuted a short piece that he had written as a Christmas card for his friends. It was called Nicholas Was...and it knocked me on the floor.
It wasn't just that the story was clever and fun, it was that it took every idea of Santa Claus I had had drilled into my head by pop culture and turned them around and made me re-examine my own understanding of the world. Call it an epiphany, but for me, that short reading changed my understanding of lore and canon in a way that had never really sunk in before.
It’s hard to explain why this was such a revelation for me until you remember that in 1994, we hadn’t yet moved into remix / mash-up culture. The t.v. shows and movies that would take popular tropes from the cultural landscape and flip them upside down and inside out were a few years away yet2. And while there had been a few instances of pop culture taking a new spin on things, they were mostly just that - spin-offs and sequels.
For the most part, however, these offerings stayed within the spirit of the original. But not Nicholas Was…. With Neil's 100-word short story, he flipped the lore completely on its head. And here's the thing - he didn't do it in an established IP, this wasn't another revision to Star Trek or Star Wars, this was Santa Claus, a staple of the zeitgeist, someone we all already knew everything about.
I mean, consider this entry from Etymonline regarding St. Nick:
Santa Claus (n.)
1773 (as St. A Claus, in "New York Gazette"), American English, in reference to the customs of the old Dutch colony of New York, from dialectal Dutch Sante Klaas, from Middle Dutch Sinter Niklaas"Saint Nicholas," bishop of Asia Minor who became a patron saint for children. Now a worldwide phenomenon (Japanese santakurosu). Father Christmas is attested from 1650s.
or this from Wikipedia:
Santa is generally depicted as a portly, jolly, white-bearded man, often with spectacles, wearing a red coat with white fur collar and cuffs, white-fur-cuffed red trousers, red hat with white fur, and black leather belt and boots, carrying a bag full of gifts for children. He is commonly portrayed as laughing in a way that sounds like "ho ho ho".
and this from Encyclopedia Britannica, just for kicks:
Santa Claus is said to live at the North Pole with his wife, where he spends the year making toys with the help of his elves. There he receives letters from children asking for Christmas gifts. On Christmas Eve he loads his sleigh with toys and flies around the world, drawn by eight reindeer, stopping at each child’s house; he slides down the chimney and leaves the gifts, refreshing himself with the milk and cookies left for him by the household’s children.
Within those three paragraphs you have all the common tropes regarding Santa Claus. But in Nicholas Was…Santa is miserable, the elves are evil, and the presents are invisible. Mind blown.
So, the idea that took root in my seventeen-year-old head was this: while only George Lucas could mess with the Star Wars canon and only Paramount could decide on what was or was not legit in the Star Trek universe, anyone3, absolutely anyone, could create their own take on our shared cultural icons4. Anyone could add to the lore. So, I did.
Not right away, of course. No, it would take me fifteen years and moving continents to find my chance, but I put my limited spin on the Santa lore the first time I found myself teaching kindergarten.
Faced with unexpected time left after my presentation about Christmas and Santa to a bunch of small children, I made the dreadful decision to take questions. Most of these were answered easily and, more importantly, supported by the pictures I had found online:
How many reindeer does Santa have? Nine. Next question.
Is Santa married? Yes, Mrs. Claus lives with Santa at the North Pole.
How does Santa know what I want for Christmas? Did you write a card? That's how.
Japanese houses don't have chimneys. How does Santa get in? Oh, uh...you know how your house has a kitchen door? Well, Santa has a magic key5 that works on any kitchen door. He has to use the same magic he uses on chimneys to squeeze through those narrow doorways, so if you hear that door open on Christmas Eve, it's just Santa popping inside!
I live in an apartment... Looks like that's all the time we have*!
Over the years, my presentation evolved from a bunch of disparate vocabulary terms with minimal explanation to a full story that incorporated bits of Rudolph and Frosty, trouble with the elves in the factory, a summer home in Hawaii, costume changes for visiting the Southern Hemisphere, and a list of Santa's preferred snacks6 for children to leave him in different countries.
It got pretty complicated, but the kids always loved it. And, truthfully, so did I. Every time I learned a new fact about where our modern ideas of Santa (and Christmas) come from, I updated my personal version of Santa's lore.
Over the years, my presentation added and dropped different bits from a bunch of different stories like Rudolph and Frosty. In my lessons, Santa had trouble with the elves in the factory, a summer home in Hawaii, costume changes for visiting the Southern Hemisphere, and a list of Santa's preferred snacks sorted by country. Eventually, however, I condensed my updates into one smooth paragraph:
He actually has nine reindeer since Rudolph joined the team. Frosty is Santa's best friend and often drives the sleigh for him. Mrs. Claus doesn't like Santa to have so many cookies and so she asks children to leave a variety of snacks out for Santa, based on what people in their countries like to eat.
It may not have been all that widespread, but for a group of Japanese kids in my town, in my school, during the right years, the Santa lore had just a little extra, all thanks to me.
But. There’s that word again, lore. When I first started thinking about this, I wasn’t sure that lore was the word I wanted to use. I considered canon and mythology, but to me, lore seems the most apt. I’ll explain, but first, here are a couple of definitions.
1: a particular body of knowledge or tradition; the lore of baseball heroes
2: something that is learned:
a: traditional knowledge or belief; tribal lore
b: knowledge gained through study or experience; the lore of religious architecture
and Cambridge:
traditional knowledge and stories about a subject
As it turns out, when you run the word lore through the corpora7, a small pattern emerges - in recent years lore has begun to be applied to the history and stories within our stories. It’s become a shorthand for developing the history inside a fictional universe. World of Warcraft has lore. So does Lord of the Rings.
And so does Santa. Just look at the paragraphs quoted above. Children know these facts almost without being told, we adults spin them around to make the narratives fit our lives and our kids, we remix and mash-up with abandon, taking the familiar tropes and finding something new. We add to the lore. And we can all thank Santa for that.
Merry Christmas!
Down the Rabbit Hole
Something I've gotten overly invested in over the past few years is the idea that Santa is actually a team of Santa's working together. This incorporates as many near-synonyms and variations on Santa as I've been able to find. Here are just a couple:
From the Archives
What could be more appropriate this week than digging into the archives for another Santa-related article? Here's one from 2018 that features a photo of yours truly all geared up as Santa for a one-off gig as the jolly man himself. Enjoy!
This was back before Neil Gaiman was Neil Gaiman, award-winning creator of award-winning streaming t.v. shows, and merely Neil Gaiman, pretty good comic book writer. Time is a flat circle, all things are ephemeral, yadda yadda, I miss those days sometimes.
Indeed, the early 90s saw the phrase mash-up being used derisively to describe how DJs took pieces of other songs to create new ones.
I mean, being an award-winning author might help, but it's not required.
In later years, this formative experience would solidify my support of copyright reforms like Creative Common licenses and legal protections for ensuring public access to public domain works.
Santa's magic key would evolve so that it works on any wall by turning a small section into a door whenever Santa touches it with the key.
The kids I taught almost always voted for green tea and senbei (rice crackers) as an appropriate snack for Santa.
Based on a half-hour skimming through the results returned for lore in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the NOW corpus, and the iWeb corpus. In other words, this assertion won’t hold up in court, but it does seem to be so. And, were I a scholar and academic unpressed for time, I might even write a paper trying to replicate those results. But I’m not, so if you’re looking for a thesis…