(Info taken from a cool free kindle book i found).
So what does celebrating Jesus' birth have to do with stockings, gifts, reindeer, elves, and all that other stuff?
It all began in the 4th century with a real, compassionate, and very generous man by the name of St. Nicholas. He was a godly man who had a reputation for giving to people.
Nicholas and his parents were Christians who lived in Patara, Lycia, in Turkey during the 3rd century. Nicholas' parents had prayed and asked God for a child. From the time Nicholas was born in about the year 280, they considered him to be a gift from God. They taught Nicholas to be devoted to God, and to be very generous to the poor.
Nicholas became a priest when he was a young teenager. His uncle, the bishop who ordained him, prophesied that Nicholas would eventually become a bishop. It was after a return trip by boat from Jerusalem when this prophecy came to pass. Halfway into the voyage, a gale wind struck. For 2 days and nights, the waves crashed over the bows. At dawn on the 3rd day, they sighted land off Myra, which was about 20 miles east of Nicholas' hometown. As they made their way into the harbor, Nicholas' first thought was to find a church where he could give thanks to God for their survival. Unbeknownst to him, the old bishop of Myra had decided to retire, and all of the bishops of Lycia had come together to appoint his successor. An angel had appeared and told them to gather to wait inside the church, and said "whomsoever shall be the first to enter shall be worthy of the office. His name is Nicholas". He was only 19 years old, but was immediately acclaimed the new Bishop of Myra.
One story of St. Nicholas' goodness is the reason many pictures show him with three golden spheres.
These represent three bags of gold that he gave to a poor man so his three daughters could be married. The man was so poor that his daughters had no dowries. He was so desperate that he was planning to sell his oldest daughter into slavery so that one of the other two daughters could have a dowry. To keep that from happening, Nicholas threw a bag of gold pieces through the man's window in the night so nobody would know who had done it. Nicholas wanted God to get credit for it. Not long after that, Nicholas did the same thing for the second daughter, saving her from a similar fate. When Nicholas did it for the third daughter, the father caught him. Nicholas made the father swear an oath that he would never reveal who was responsible for these gifts while Nicholas was alive. This story is thought to be the basis of the tradition of hanging up a stocking (representing the bag) to be miraculously filled with gifts (representing the gold) during the night.
At the time that Nicholas was performing these acts of kindness, he was not a Saint. Because of his good deeds and charity to the less fortunate, he ascended to the Sainthood title in the Roman Catholic Church. He died on December 6, 342. In 1087, his remains were transported from Turkey to Italy, where a Catholic Church was built in his honor. Soon after, his popularity spread, and December 6 became St. Nicholas Day, along with the custom of gift-giving.
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| What St. Nicholas actually looked like! |
With the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, the worshiping of saints was denounced, so St. Nicholas Day was no longer observed in England. When this happened, the role of gift-giver was assigned to a mythical character named Father Christmas.
The day of gift-giving in England was later changed from December 6 to December 25 to coincide with the date that the Church had chosen to celebrate the birth of Jesus. In Holland and Belgium, the traditional day of December 6 was still celebrated, but there, Sinter Klaas (a Dutch version, meaning "St. Nicholas") rode through the streets on a white horse rewarding good children with treats and toys, but giving rods or switches to bad children.
In Germany, the saint was referred to as "Nicholas dressed in fur", and also left sweets for good children, and rods for the bad ones.
All of these traditions blended with the immigration to the New World. As the English and Dutch came and intermarried, Father Christmas and Sinter Klaas blended into one figure. Dutch Americans later adopted December 25 as their day of celebration, and by the end of the Civil War, St. Nicholas was generally known in the United States as Santa Claus.
The poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas", written in 1822, portrayed Santa Claus with words as a round-bellied figure with a huge pack on his back. Picking up on this image, a cartoonist added the North Pole toy workshop in his cartoons for the 'Harper's Illustrated Weekly' magazine.
In 1931, the Coca-Cola Corporation ran an advertising campaign of Santa Claus further defining him as a large man with a red and white fur suit, black boots, and a long, flowing beard.
So where do the reindeer come in? From a combination of several different legends. Some of the earliest depictions come from the Finnish legend of Old Man Winter driving his reindeer down from the mountains while bringing the winter's snow with him. Similarly, the Russian Father Frost comes around each winter riding a sled pulled by reindeer. Earlier versions of Santa's sleigh had only one reindeer pulling it. However, by 1823 with the introduction of the Christmas poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas", Santa's team changed to eight reindeer from then on.
The 9th reindeer, Rudolph, came along in 1939 when Robert L. May was commissioned by the retail store Montgomery Ward & Co. to write a children's Christmas story that could be handed out during promotions at their stores.
About 10 years later, the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was sung by Gene Autry and became very popular. In 1964, the stop-motion animated TV special aired on NBC.
What about Santa's helpers, the elves? They are a contribution from the Dutch. The story goes that St. Nicholas freed a little slave boy from a marketplace where he was supposed to serve for the rest of his life. Because of this, the boy decided to devote his life to St. Nicholas, and help him out with his work. Later on, the one "helper" became many.
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