Santa Claus: A Biography

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

When some 12th-century French nuns began “secretly leaving presents at
the homes of poor children on the eve of Saint Nicholas” (December 6),
they could not have imagined what forces they unleashed. The Yuletide
practice whereby presents were delivered by some secretive gift-bringer
spread through much of Europe and came to involve a wide variety of
mysterious gift-bearers, including a Yule log with an “ability to
defecate gifts.” How we got to Santa Claus centuries later, how the
Santa legend grew differently in North America and Europe (where he
usually had sidekicks), and how the North American version conquered the
world are described in this well-documented and enjoyable book by the
author of The World Encyclopedia of Christmas.

Gerry Bowler traces the evolution of Santa from his first appearance by
that name in a poem in a New York newspaper in 1810 to a riot in 2004 in
which some 4,000 mostly drunken Welsh Santas had to be subdued with
batons and tear gas. A political cartoonist named Thomas Nast in the
19th century and advertising campaigns in the 20th shaped our image of
the jolly old elf, and a Harper’s article placed Santa for the first
time in the Arctic shortly before the American Civil War. Santa served
on both sides in that conflict and also in the First World War, but
enlisted only with the Allies in the second. Santa has been more than a
political propagandist; he has shilled for just about anything.
(“Surely there were vices to which Santa could not lend his good name!
In truth, no.”) A final chapter assesses Santa’s future in an era in
which he has starred in appalling and profane movies, we can buy Santa
Claus–shaped condoms, and some of the churches that welcomed Santa in
the 19th century viciously attack the old fellow today. This book is a
captivating account of the life and varied careers of a man who never
lived and so can never die.