Radio Script #594

Little Talks on Common Things

December 22, 1963

As has been our custom for 16 years, we devote this broadcast to the subject of Christmas. So today let us turn first to Santa Claus.

The good saint has indeed a long history, although in various countries and in successive ages he has been called by different names. The name Santa Claus, one can readily detect, is a shortening of Santa Nickalaus, the Dutch pronunciation of St. Nicholas. When those Dutch settlers bought Manhattan Island from the Indians for the huge sum of $24, they handed themselves a pretty good present from St. Nicholas or Santa Claus. It was indeed the Dutch who introduced the European tradition of St. Nicholas into America.

In the beginning there was a real St. Nicholas. He had been Bishop of Myra, a Christian center in Asia Minor, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean in the fourth century, and is said to have died in the year 343 A.D. He was canonized as a saint of the church 500 years later.

Because many stories surrounding the miracles attributed to St. Nicholas were concerned with children, there sprang up allover Europe during the Middle Ages bodies of Christians who formed a kind of St. Nicholas cult, and they made that saint the special patron saint of children. While his original saint’s day was December 5, and for centuries that was the traditional day for giving presents to children, by the time the Dutch settled New Amsterdam St. Nicholas had become associated with the birth of the Christ Child, and December 25th became his recognized day.

It was in Russia that St. Nicholas gained his widest early acceptance. In 1003 the Russian overlord, Vladimir, went to Constantinople where he encountered most enthusiastic recognition of St. Nicholas in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Returning to Russia, he spread the idea there, and within twenty years St. Nicholas was considered the patron saint of Russia. It was because the people of northern Russia, especially the Laplanders, made St. Nicholas their special saint that we have, down to this day, preserved the tradition that St. Nicholas, alias Santa Claus, uses reindeer to go on his appointed rounds to distribute his gifts.

So widely spread was reverence for St. Nicholas by the end of the 11th century that, when the saint’s bishopric town of Myra was burned and sacked by the Saracens in 1087, more than seven centuries after St. Nicholas had died, the people of Bari, a port town on the heel of Italy, sent ships and armed crews to bring the saint’s bones to Italy, where over those bones was built a magnificent shrine.

When the Dutch brought St. Nicholas to New York, it was quite natural that they should recast him in their own mold. No longer was he the lean ascetic bishop of solemn mien, but a fat, jolly, rollicking Dutch burger, far more human than saintly. On Manhattan Island the Dutch named their very first meeting house the Church of St. Nicholas. It was Clement Moore’s famous poem, written long after Manhattan had been transferred from Dutch to British hands, that confirmed St. Nicholas firmly in American Christmas tradition. “Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.” But not even “The Night Before Christmas” could make the name prevail over the more colloquial Santa Claus. Not even the diminutive “St. Nick” caught on as well as did the term all Americans now know best. In our country St. Nicholas disappeared and Santa Claus took his place.

In most Christian countries St. Nicholas or Santa Claus is depicted as a bringer of gifts. He is usually thought of as rewarding good children and passing by the naughty, but in some lands he is just a good fellow to all, paying no attention to children’s behavior.

In my boyhood I cannot remember seeing a Christmas creche. That is probably because, though the creche is now honored by both Protestants and Catholics, it originally had Catholic emphasis. The standard symbol of Christmas in the Protestant countries of Northern Europe became the Christmas tree, in the southern Catholic countries it was the creche. The creche was therefore the common Christmas symbol in French Catholic Quebec, but not in Anglo-Protestant New England. The restricting influence of Puritanism made wide celebration of Christmas impossible during the 18th and part of the 19th centuries. Last year I told on this program that it was well into the 1850’s before Christmas had any public recognition in Waterville. Not until just before the Civil War did any Christmas advertisement appear in the Waterville Mail.

Legal recognition of Christmas, giving workmen the right to a holiday on December 25, was indeed long in coming to the United States. In the middle of the century a man was jailed in Boston for refusing to work on Christmas Day. It was as late as 1881 when North Carolina and Florida made Christmas a legal holiday. Maine legalized it in 1858, only three years behind Massachusetts. Considering how late were most southern states to give legal status to Christmas, it is surprising to note that the first state to do so was Alabama in 1836. In our six New England states the order of recognition was Connecticut in 1845, Vermont in 1850. Rhode Island in 1852, ,Massachusetts in 1855, Maine in 1858 and New Hampshire ‘in 1861. Candles have long been associated with Christmas. Symbolic of Christ as the Light of the World, candles have for centuries accompanied the Christmas festival.

In medieval Europe it was customary to light a monstrous candle as the special Christmas light large enough to burn every night until Twelfth Night. Still preserved in St. John’s College, Oxford, is an ancient stone candlestick used for holding the Christmas candle, standing on the dining hall’s high table. Martin Luther is credited with initiating the custom of placing candles on Christmas trees.

In certain countries it is still the practice to place candles in windows at Christmas time, because any chance knocking stranger at the door may be the Christ Child in disguise, trying to test the occupants’ Christian hospitality. Many rural Irish homes still put a candle in the window and leave the door open to attract the Holy Family, seeking lodging on the way to Bethlehem. It was in Ireland also that only girls named Mary were permitted to put out the candles in the church on Christmas eve.

The remnants of Christmas candles were considered to have magic power. So farmers fed them to hens, smeared their plowshares with the wax, and used it to mark crosses on cattle. In parts of Italy, farmers on Christmas eve lighted the animals to their stalls. As a ceremonial rite the head of a rural household would take a lighted candle into the barn, show it briefly in each of the four corners, then stand at the door as the animals came in to their stalls past the Christmas candle.

The question as to who created the first Christmas card has never been satisfactorily settled. There are at least four claimants for the honor. All we are sure of is that during the 1840’s, shortly after the publication of Dickens’ Christmas Carol, such greetings began to appear. In 1844 a vicar of Newcastle is said to have sent out lithographed Christmas messages. An artist at the Royal Academy in London claimed to have distributed hand-colored cards in the same year. Others insist the first such use was by an engraver’s apprentice in Birmingham. In 1884 the London Times investigated the various claims and came up with the conclusion that credit rightly belonged to John Calcott Horsley of the Royal Academy, whom Sir Henry Cole, a close friend of Prince Albert, had asked to design a Yuletide greeting to send to Cole’s friends in place of the usual letters. Horsley produced a three-paneled card, showing a grapevine around a trellis, with the side panels showing the reverenced Christmas charities of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. The center panel pictured three generations of a family celebrating Christmas by drinking wine together. That caused many protests from Temperance people in England. The Times learned that when Horsley’s card appeared in 1845, a thousand copies were lithographed and sold for one shilling each.

Whoever actually produced the first Christmas card, by 1850 they were generally on sale at every Christmas season. In the 1860’s one London firm created simple but beautiful cards that were produced cheaply and in large quantities. By that time the designs were carrying sprays of holly and mistletoe and winter landscapes with robins in the snow. In 1868 an American card appeared, featuring Little Red Ridinghood. By 1880 the sending of cards had become so popular that one British firm paid $35,000 for original paintings to reproduce on their greetings. Two years later a prize of $10,000 was offered for the best design. It is said that during the 80’s Christmas cards reached an artistic quality that has never been excelled. Louis Prang, a German immigrant to Roxbury, Massachusetts, was the first significant producer of Christmas cards in the United States. In 1874 he brought out his first cards with simple flower designs and the words “Merry Christmas”. The next year he offered prizes totaling $3,000 for new designs, and received more than 600 sketches. The high quality of Prang cards made them very popular, and he produced them in as many as twenty colors. It was also through Christmas cards that most Americans became familiar with the work of Grandma Moses.

Very interesting is the history of our best-known Christmas carols. We have time on this broadcast to refer to only one: “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”. That carol was written in 1739, inspired when Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, was walking to church on Christmas Day and was thrilled by the sound of the church bells of London. He at once composed “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” as a Christmas companion to his already well known Easter composition “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”. More than a century later it was the singing of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” that inspired Longfellow to write his beautiful poem “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”:

“The bells rang out more loud and deep.
‘God is not dead, nor doth he sleep'”
God, said the poet, is powerful enough to overcome the world’s strife,to
bring peace and good will to earth.

In this worldly time of 1963, when Christmas is pretty fully commercialized, into a pagan holiday, it may be well for us to be reminded by the words of the Christmas carol: “Hark, the herald angels sing, Glory to the newborn king.”

Year: 1963