How the Victorians Made Santa Family-Safe
Around Christmastime in the mid-1990s, hundreds of people would dress up like Santa Claus and congregate in the downtown areas of major west coast cities. However, instead of going around asking children what they wanted for Christmas, these flash mobs would parade from bar to bar, getting rowdier at each stop. These unsanctioned processions were marked by drunkenness, brawling, and arrests.1
As you might guess, public reaction was not positive. Many people were alarmed that these “bad Santas” were making it unsafe for families to enjoy the holiday.
It was a case of history repeating itself.
More than 400 years earlier, England was having a similar problem. Santa Clause, as we know him today, hadn’t been invented yet. But people were dressing up as such proto-Santa characters as Sir Christmas, The Yule Rider, and Captain Christmas and leading raucous processions through the streets. One complaint said they were guilty of “verie (the spelling at the time) rude and barbarous” behavior.2
By the mid-1600s, Father Christmas had become the personification of Christmas revels. But the Puritans, who were in power at the time, did not think that a rowdy atmosphere contributed to public virtue, and so they banned the holiday altogether.
Meanwhile in America, Dutch settlers were domesticating their own wild personification of the holiday: Sinterklaas. Based very loosely on Saint Nicholas (a 4th century Greek bishop), Sinterklaas would dress in red and secretly leave gifts for good children. It was said he could pass through locked doors and descend down chimneys.
Sinterklaas himself was nice. But his entourage was a cast of frightening characters whose job it was to punish the bad children. These included Rough Nicholas, Old Man Whipper, and the nightmarish Krampus.
By the early 1800s, traditions around both Father Christmas and St. Nicholas had softened considerably. Christmas itself was being transformed from a holiday marked by drinking and revelry to one celebrated quietly at home. At the height of Victorian England, popular writers began to combine the two characters into the jolly, elderly Santa Claus we recognize today.
Tom Moriarty writes that, “Santa was exactly the kind of hero the Victorians needed for their new, family-friendly Christmas.”
We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief background on Santa’s wild origins and can use it to impress your friends and relatives at upcoming get-togethers.
We wish you a wonderful holiday season and look forward to connecting with you in the New Year.
Sources:
1. http://go.pardot.com/e/91522/wiki-SantaCon/9727vc/2979225508/h/vnezmohQDi7I4NIQRHE7ymGNkn6urutdPKDT1_7efxY
2. http://go.pardot.com/e/91522/e-history-of-father-christmas-/9727vg/2979225508/h/vnezmohQDi7I4NIQRHE7ymGNkn6urutdPKDT1_7efxY
