by Sandra Lowen

Created on: January 27, 2010

THE MYTH OF SANTA CLAUS AND ITS IMPACT ON CHILDREN

“Sit on Santa’s lap and ask him for whatever you want,” Parents push their anxious children toward the beatific, white-whiskered gentleman in his candy apple red coat. The children recite their lists and scamper away, clutching their candy canes that Mom or Dad won’t let them consume until they get home, and they dutifully set out milk and cookies for the jolly old chap to snack on while he goes on his appointed rounds, rewarding deeds good and bad: dollies and coal, bikes and nothing. Those upon whom Santa showers his largesse rejoice as they tear into their tinsel-covered rewards, while those left bereft of asked-for trains and bikes and trinkets search their young souls and wonder what they did to be denied, when they tried so hard.

How did it come to this?

The original St. Nicholas, a canonized Fourth Century bishop who cared for those in need, inspired Christians everywhere. He survived the purging of the lists of saints. He came with Columbus on his ships to the New World, and on his saint’s day (December 6) in 1492, Columbus named a Haitian port city for him. The present city of Jacksonville, Florida was originally called St. Nicholas’ Ferry. But perhaps the saint’s greatest proponents in the West were the people of New York. After becoming the patron saint of the New York Historical Society, he became the subject of author Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker Tales.

The saint’s evolution into the roly-poly, pipe-smoking giver of gifts came about when the citizenry tired of the way Christmas was being celebrated in the early 1800s: laborers celebrating the concurrent end of the harvest season often thundered drunkenly through the settlements, damaging property and frightening the American nobility. To promote a more familial spirit, officials took the concept of St. Nicholas and urged people to celebrate at home. An anonymous lithographed book, ‘The Children’s Friend’, placed the saint in a sled, coming from the remote North to reward or punish children for their good or bad deeds with toys and books for their play or bundles of black birch for their flogging. The 1823 poem ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’, now known famously as, ‘The Night Before Christmas’, gave description to the saint, and subsequent artists supplied the visuals. In subsequent years the upgraded saint supported the Union during the Civil War,

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