Stores began to advertise Christmas shopping in , and by the s, newspapers were creating separate sections for holiday advertisements, which often featured images of the newly-popular Santa Claus.
In , thousands of children visited a Philadelphia shop to see a life-size Santa Claus model. In the early s, the Salvation Army needed money to pay for the free Christmas meals they provided to needy families. They began dressing up unemployed men in Santa Claus suits and sending them into the streets of New York to solicit donations.
Those familiar Salvation Army Santas have been ringing bells on the street corners of American cities ever since. It is Nast who gave Santa his bright red suit trimmed with white fur, North Pole workshop, elves and his wife, Mrs.
Nicholas-inspired gift-giver to make an appearance at Christmastime. There are similar figures and Christmas traditions around the world. Christkind or Kris Kringle was believed to deliver presents to well-behaved Swiss and German children.
Nicholas on his holiday missions. In Scandinavia, a jolly elf named Jultomten was thought to deliver gifts in a sleigh drawn by goats. In Italy, there is a story of a woman called La Befana, a kindly witch who rides a broomstick down the chimneys of Italian homes to deliver toys into the stockings of lucky children. In the United States, Santa Claus is often depicted as flying from his home to home on Christmas Eve to deliver toys to children.
Stockings can be filled with candy canes and other treats or small toys. Santa Claus and his wife, Mrs. Children often leave cookies and milk for Santa and carrots for his reindeer on Christmas Eve. He sees you when you're sleeping He knows when you're awake He knows if you've been bad or good So be good for goodness sake! The red-nosed wonder was the creation of Robert L. May, a copywriter at the Montgomery Ward department store. Initially opposed to Christmas observance, by the s Sunday Schools had discovered that a Christmas tree, Santa and gifts, greatly improved attendance.
Santa was then portrayed by dozens of artists in a wide variety of styles, sizes, and colors. However by the end of the s, a standard American Santa—life-sized in a red, fur-trimmed suit—had emerged from the work of N. Wyeth, J. Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell and other popular illustrators. The image was solidified before Haddon Sundblom, in , began thirty-five years of Coca-Cola Santa advertisements that further popularized and firmly established this Santa as an icon of contemporary commercial culture.
This Santa was life-sized, jolly, and wore the now familiar red suit. This commercial success led to the North American Santa Claus being exported around the world where he threatens to overcome the European St. Nicholas, who has retained his identity as a Christian bishop and saint. However, if you peel back the accretions, he is still Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, whose caring surprises continue to model true giving and faithfulness.
There is growing interest in reclaiming the original saint in the United States to help restore a spiritual dimension to this festive time. For indeed, St. Nicholas, lover of the poor and patron saint of children, is a model of how Christians are meant to live. A bishop, Nicholas put Jesus Christ at the center of his life, his ministry, his entire existence. Families, churches, and schools are embracing true St Nicholas traditions as one way to claim the true center of Christmas—the birth of Jesus.
Such a focus helps restore balance to increasingly materialistic and stress-filled Advent and Christmas seasons. Nicholas, otherwise called St. Nicholas, will be celebrated by the descendants of the ancient Dutch families. Used by permission. Christoph, Peter R. Jones, Theology Today , October Jones, Charles W.
In the Netherlands, for example, St. Nicholas Day was a time for a person dressed up as the saint to go from house to house with a servant, either rewarding or punishing children depending on the work they had done.
The good students got a gift meant to resemble a sack of gold, while the bad ones got lumps of coal. Sound familiar? In France and England, books became the gift of choice as more people became literate, Flanders notes. Gradually, small jewelry, wine and luxury foods became gifts of choice as well. But how St. Nicholas, otherwise called Santa Claus. And then the name or word is impossible to find in print for a couple of decades.
He positioned St. Nicholas as a symbol of a simpler, kinder way of life at odds with the growing, more bustling New York City in the early s. His version of early New York history was definitely not accurate: he mentions a church named after St. So what really happened? If anyone brought the name Santa Claus to the Americas , Flanders says credit should probably go to the roughly 25, Swiss people who settled in large concentrations in New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Nicholas in various dialects of Schweizerdeutsch, or Swiss-German, becomes either Samichlaus or Santi-Chlaus , both of which sound far more like Santa Claus than the latter, supposedly Dutch derivation from Sint Niklaas.
Another story tells of three theological students, traveling on their way to study in Athens. A wicked innkeeper robbed and murdered them, hiding their remains in a large pickling tub. It so happened that Bishop Nicholas, traveling along the same route, stopped at this very inn. In the night he dreamed of the crime, got up, and summoned the innkeeper. As Nicholas prayed earnestly to God the three boys were restored to life and wholeness.
In France the story is told of three small children, wandering in their play until lost, lured, and captured by an evil butcher.
Nicholas appears and appeals to God to return them to life and to their families. Nicholas is the patron and protector of children. Several stories tell of Nicholas and the sea. When he was young, Nicholas sought the holy by making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Returning by sea, a mighty storm threatened to wreck the ship. Nicholas calmly prayed. The terrified sailors were amazed when the wind and waves suddenly calmed, sparing them all. Nicholas is the patron of sailors and voyagers.
Other stories tell of Nicholas saving his people from famine, sparing the lives of those innocently accused, and much more. He did many kind and generous deeds in secret, expecting nothing in return.
Within a century of his death he was celebrated as a saint. Today he is venerated in the East as wonder, or miracle worker and in the West as patron of a great variety of persons-children, mariners, bankers, pawn-brokers, scholars, orphans, laborers, travelers, merchants, judges, paupers, marriageable maidens, students, children, sailors, victims of judicial mistakes, captives, perfumers, even thieves and murderers!
He is known as the friend and protector of all in trouble or need see list. Sailors, claiming St. Nicholas as patron, carried stories of his favor and protection far and wide.
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