REVEALED: The Secret Origin of Santa Claus...and 'flying' reindeer

By Adrian Barnes

One of the most interesting things that one learns when studying the history of Christmas is how little the holiday, as practiced by the majority of Canadians, has to do with Christianity. The physical embodiment of the season, a plus-sized elf with a penchant for flying reindeer and home-baking, has roots that are, if anything, more pagan and corporate than Christian. The Christian roots of Santa Claus stretch back to around 300 AD and the waning days of the pagan Roman Empire. At that time Romans were still feeding Christians to the lions and being a Christian was a risky thing. Nicholas of Myra (a Turkish city) was a Christian. His life (if he ever lived--most church authorities now doubt he was real) was one of good deeds: coming from a wealthy family he was reported to have saved poor young women from marriage-less lives by placing dowry money in their stockings at night while the household slept. Interestingly, St. Nick, like Jesus himself, wasn’t 'white'. So much for a 'white Christmas'. Nicholas was known for his kindness to children and after his death this Catholic Bishop was canonized as Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children (though also the patron saint of lawyers in some places). Quickly, a tradition rose up and spread across Europe of giving gifts (at that time, fruit and sweets: the Xboxes and cell phones came a little later) to children each year on Nicholas’ birthday, December 6. [It’s worth noting that this tradition of gift giving reflected ‘pagan’ practices in the indigenous peoples of Europe: most cultures have mythical ‘gift givers’ and Christianity’s adoption of this practice is very much in line with such colonizing practices as holding Jesus’ birthday celebration at winter solstice.] Over the next thousand years or so, as the Dark Ages isolated national and ethnic groups following the fall of the Roman Empire, numerous variants on the custom sprang up across Europe. Bits and pieces of these customs survive today in modern Christmas practice. For example, in Germany the traditional ‘Yule’ (meaning ‘jolly’) festival merged with the now-accepted birthday of Jesus in a tradition where the baby Jesus was reputed to take care of gift delivery (Kris Kringle meaning ‘Christ Child’). In Holland, Sint Nikolaas (Sinter Klaus) would hand out gifts to the good boys and girls on the streets, followed by Black Peter (representing a Moor) who would hand out lumps of coal to children fingered by their parents as ‘bad’. In Scandinavia, malignant elves, ‘tomten’, were fed by fearful families who sought to appease them by placing steaming bowls of porridge outside at night during the winter solstice. But the easily strangest story of all has to do with the origins of chimney-entry and flying reindeer. In Siberia, there grows a mushroom, amanita muscaria, (also known as ‘fly algaric’) that has hallucinogenic properties and grows exclusively under fir trees. Unfortunately, this mushroom is also extremely poisonous. Somehow, Siberian shamans discovered that if they fed these mushrooms (bright red caps and white underbellies and stems, please note) to reindeer and the reindeer urinated before they died, the urine, if collected, would contain the hallucinogen but not the toxin, which had mostly been absorbed by the animal’s liver. Shamans would collect this psychedelic reindeer urine. Siberians, at that time, lived in underground pit houses (yurts) and entry was gained through a hole in top which also served as a chimney. The shamans would take the urine from home to home as a winter gift. As for how reindeer learned to fly—you can guess the rest yourselves. There are shamanic legends of winged reindeer who fly up and perch on the highest boughs of the ‘world tree’—a structure upon which all the planes of existence were said to be hung. Santa’s magical journey, in which his sleigh circles the globe in a night, is said to descend from the journey of the Big Dipper which, in northern climes, circles the north star once every 24 hours and is connected to Norse myths of Thor and Loki. These variants on the Christmas tradition were free-floating until the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when moneyed interests branded, formalized, and standardized them. Santa Claus in his modern gear is, of course, the creation of a Coca-Cola artist given the daunting task of trying to sell a frosty cold beverage in the depths of winter. And while for a century there were only eight flying reindeer, in 1939, at the tail end of the Great Depression, department chain Montgomery Ward decided to create a giveaway Christmas book and commissioned a copywriter, Robert L. May, to write it. The story of Rudolph was a hit, a song was commissioned and singing cowboy Gene Autry hired to sing it and the rest, as they say, is history. In short, Christmas as we know it today is an extremely odd amalgam of the Christian, the pagan, and the commercial. Merry Christmas! Please find below a link to a free downloadable version of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" as a Santa-dote to all the forgoing. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/9696 NEST WEEK: How Christmas Became THE Major Holiday of the Year