#St Nicholas and Christmas in America before the 1800s

St Nicholas was appointed as the patron saint of New Amsterdam in the 1600s. His saint's day was observed on 6 December, and New York started practising Dutch customs fairly early on -- the idea that St Nicholas rides his horse along the rooftops and treetops and comes down chimneys to leave gifts, or birches, in the shoes that children have left out.

Alongside St Nicholas' Day, there was Christmas. Christmas wasn't consistently celebrated in 1600s-1700s North America. It didn't become a federal holiday until the 1870s. Massachusetts famously banned the celebration of Christmas from 1659 to 1681, and Puritan resistence throughout New England meant that it didn't take off there until much later. Anglican/Episcopalian areas, by contrast, were very keen, especially in Virginia. Penne Restad's Christmas in America. A history (1995) reports at page 12,

A French traveler, who along with his entourage of nearly twenty stopped unannounced at the Virginia home of Colonel William Fitzhugh in 1680, left one of the few accounts [of American Christmas celebrations] from the seventeenth century. "[T]here was good wine and all kinds of beverages, so there was a great deal of carousing," the visitor wrote. For entertainment, Fitzhugh provided "three fiddlers, a jester, a tight-rope walker, and an acrobat who tumbled around." When the travelers left the next day, Fitzhugh sent wine and punch to the river's edge for them and then lent them his boat.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, tales of Virginia Christmases had spread back to England and began to create an aura of romance around the South.

The reassignment of St Nicholas to Christmas, and the transformation of his image as an ancient bishop, dates to the first half of the 1800s. By that time Americans were already calling him names that were starting to approach 'Santa Claus': his first appearance, Restad reports, is in New York City in 1773 (p. 45) --

a New York paper, Rivington's Gazeteer, noted on December 23, 1773, that the anniversary of St. Nicholas, "otherwise called St. a Claus," had been celebrated the previous Monday by "a great number of Sons of that ancient Saint," ...

(Rivington's Gazeteer was published in Hanover Square, Manhattan.) Notice the incorrect date: 'the previous Monday' would have been the 19th, not the 6th. The following year, Restad reports, Dutch families observed St Nicholas' Day on Monday the 8th. It seems the day of the week mattered more than the day of the month.

{Edit: on reflection, in 1773 maybe it was a week earlier, on the 12th: there could have been a few days' delay in reporting the event after all. In that case it would seem they observed St Nicholas' Day on the Monday following the 6th.}

#Two German figures: the Weihnachtsmann and Christkindl

Now enters another pair of figures, this time from Germany. By the 1790s there was a personification of Christmas, the Weihnachtsmann ('Christmas man'), a folkloric figure who brought presents to children on Christmas Eve. The earliest reference to this custom I know of is in a 1799 play by Friedrich Gustav Hagemann called Weihnachtsabend, oder Edelmann und Bürger ('Christmas Eve, or nobleman and commoner'), Act 3 Scene 12:

... so packten wir auf, was der Weihnachtsmann bescheren sollte, und nahmen die Kinder auch mit, um den Abend hier feiern.

... so we packed up what the Weihnachtsmann had to bring, and took the children with us too, to celebrate [Christmas] Eve here.

As well as the Weihnachtsmann, Christmas presents were also brought by a more explicitly religious figure, the angelic Christkindl ('Christ child'), who had been introduced back in the 1500s as part of the Lutheran effort to discourage the cult of the saints.

In America in the first part of the 1800s, these figures began to blend with one another and with St Nicholas.

#The mash-up: Santa and Kriss Kringle

In 1809-1812 Washington Irving's A history of New York, a satirical take on Dutch colonisation in the 1600s, seems to have given St Nicholas' image a boost. His stories are the earliest appearance of some key motifs: St Nicholas now rides a wagon instead of on horseback; he smokes a long pipe; he has a characteristic gesture of laying a finger to the side of his nose.

The first major shift was the reassignment of St Nicholas to Christmas, as opposed to his saint's day on 6 December. There's no direct documentation of why this happened, but the 1773 newspaper report mentioned above already indicates some looseness about the date. I conjecture that there was also some pressure from the Weihnachtsmann.

An 1821 children's book published in New York has 'Santeclaus' bringing presents at Christmas, and the poem -- 'Santeclaus with much delight' -- shows further developments away from the bishop St Nicholas towards the modern Santa. He is dressed in fur rather than as a bishop; and his horse and wagon have turned into a reindeer (just one reindeer) and sleigh.

This was shortly followed by the famous poem 'A visit from St Nicholas', published in a New York newspaper in December 1823, which gives him eight reindeer rather than one, and the reindeer names that are still in use today. 'A visit' repeats the motifs from the 1821 poem of dressing in fur and visiting at Christmas Eve; and the motifs from Washington Irving of the pipe and the finger gesture. He's also depicted as tiny, as in some old Dutch sources, explaining why he can get down chimneys. 'A visit' also introduces the key word 'flew' for describing how the sleigh gets from ground level to the rooftop; but it's only in later times that the sleigh flies through mid-air.

Around the same time, the German Christkindl pops up in North Carolina, anglicised as Christkinkle. Though apparently not fully identified with St Nicholas yet, he has some St Nicholas motifs: the rod given to naughty children, and a connection to something Dutch (or is it Deutsch, 'German'?). Restad, p. 50:

He visited every home in the community where one visitor spent Christmas Eve in 1821. Dressed "in ludicrous masquerade," and carrying "a rod [in] one hand & nuts & cakes in his pockets," this "Christkinkle," awarded the rod to the "idle & ignorant" and gave favors to the deserving only after they had repeated "a tremendous round of [D]utch prayers."

The 'Christkinkle' reappears in books published in Pennsylvania in the 1840s, now as an adult man named Kriss Kringle. By now he is almost completely combined with St Nicholas. One 1842 book has the title Kriss Kringle's book on the outside cover, but the title page reads St Nicholas' book for all good boys and girls. And an 1845 collection of stories titled Kriss Kringle's Christmas tree opens with a story about a 'mysterious cup' that Kriss Kringle hangs on the Christmas tree as a present for a child, and where it is also suggested that he is identified with an old man who brings a similar cup to a young man in a story-within-the-story: he's described as 'an old man of a strange appearance', who looks at the young man 'benignly'. The 1840s is also when Clement Clarke Moore claimed to be the author of 'A visit from St Nicholas', a claim whose reliability is unknown.

With this hybrid figure -- an old man with a large belly who dresses in fur, smokes a pipe, rides a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer, and brings presents to children on Christmas Eve, and is identified both with St Nicholas and 'Kriss Kringle' -- we've pretty much got the modern Santa. Only a few motifs remain to be added: living at the North Pole; elves; Rudolf. I can't supply the origins of these motifs, but the figure we've got by the 1840s is so close to the modern Santa as makes no odds.

For further reading I recommend Penne Restad's Christmas in America. A history (1995). I find her account a little muddled chronologically, and she's inclined to a bit of hero-worship when it comes to Washington Irving and Clement Clarke Moore, but her source citations are very good indeed.