"Who Is This Guy in Red?"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
December 15, 2002

Meditation/Reading, by Ken Phifer
W. H. Auden wrote that to pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. In this season when it is so easy to dwell on the riches that we have, to think only of the gifts we will receive and the feasting that we will enjoy, the friends we will see again and the many joys that will fill our lives in this festive time, let us also pray in hope and in love

for those who still suffer under the ravages of war

for those who bear the burden of oppression and injustice

for those who are without friends and are lonely

for those who live with constant pain

for those who have known disappointment and despair as their constant companions

for those who despise themselves and for those who despise others

for those who know only failure

for those whose lives have been shattered by tragedy

for those who do not hear the song of the angels and

for those who do not see the brilliance of the Christmas Star.

As we rejoice and celebrate in these gladsome days, let us find new strength that we might live and work for the day when peace shall truly be on earth and good will among all people the whole wide world around.

Sermon: “Who is this Guy in Red?”
Who is Santa anyway? A couple of weeks ago I went to the library and dug up some facts. Now I have to say that my image of Santa has been changed forever. But it all began so innocently. I merely typed “Santa Claus” into my internet search engine and came up with 600,000 entries. That wouldn't do. A sermon about Santa can’t possibly justify my mulling through 600,000 sources. I attempted to narrow the topic a bit. I wanted the truth about Santa. So I typed in “Santa Claus” with the qualifier, “non-fiction.” The computer then told me there were no entries that matched that description. That was my first clue that in fact there is no part of Santa Claus that is non-fiction. The more I looked and read the more it became clear that Santa, or any of his or her incarnations, have always been whatever people wanted and needed at the time. It turns out that Santa is a composite personality coming from the traditions and countries we have all come from. True to Unitarian Universalism, the truth about Santa is with a small "t," and it's not simple.

It has been fascinating to learn how Santa has changed over time. The various pieces that are now the persona we call Santa came together in New York in 1822 in a poem, titled "The Night Before Christmas" credited to Professor Clement Clark Moore. The ironic twist for me is that he was a professor of theology, a guy who at least in theory ought to be more grounded in matters of the church rather than in Santa. And, of course, recently it has come out that he probably didn’t write it but took images from other writers. In any event it is with “The Night Before Christmas” that Santa became the person that now appears in television commercials and in children's storybooks.

I have become totally absorbed in learning about how the parts of the collage that is now Santa came together. Santa’s identity has come from all over the world. For instance, the whole idea of gift giving has a varied history. There has been a winter holiday involving gift giving for many centuries. Prior to Christianity, it was common for people to have a festival after the harvest. Sometimes it was held during the solstice and the owner of the land gave gifts to his servants in gratitude for all their hard work. In Rome this became a festival lasting for the entire month of December with great feasts and wild joy. The Pope prohibited this kind of heathen celebration in 742.

A more civilized celebration was St. Nicholas day, celebrated on December 6. Apparently there was a person who was born in 280 named Nicholas who later attained Sainthood and popularity during the 13th and 14th centuries. Like most saints his story is a blur and it's hard to get the details straight. When Nicholas was just a few days old he is reported to have stood up in his bath and raised his arms as if praying to God. Even more remarkable, we are told, he refused to nurse until after sundown on Wednesdays and Fridays, these being the traditional fast days of the early Christians. Such extraordinary acts are listed as reasons for his sainthood, hence the name St. Nick.

At any rate, when he was a teen his parents died in the plague and he was asked by his uncle to join the monastery. To do so he had to give away all his wealth. He had heard of a family that had fallen on hard times and their three young daughters couldn't be married without dowries. Nicholas, not known as St. Nick at the time, took bags of gold and on three consecutive evenings delivered them through the window into the house so the young girls could marry. Some say he slipped the bags down the chimney and they fell into the stockings the young maidens had hanging by the fire. And so the picture begins to emerge. He quickly became the patron Saint of poor young women who couldn't marry for lack of money.

St. Nick, of whom I just spoke, is from what is now known as Turkey . But the Italian story is of an old woman traveling from house to house giving gifts to children. Her name was La Befana and she was said to be looking for the Christ child. According to the story, she was a lonely woman whose child and husband had recently died. She spent each day alone at home sweeping and cleaning the house. One day the wise men, on their way to see the newborn messiah, stopped to ask her the way to Bethlehem . She didn't know the way but they offered her the chance to join them to greet the newborn. In her grief she refused, but later regretted her decision and started out after them. She looked from house to house for the baby and gave each child in the house gifts hoping that she would find the right baby. She is often depicted as an old hunched-over woman with a broom. In Russia she is said to have refused to help the wise men so that rather than just being ignorant she becomes evil and is punished by being forced to wander the earth each January 6th, looking for Jesus.

Santa got his red suit from Sweden where another gift-giver made the rounds on December 24th. He was Jul-Tomten, an elf who wore a red cap and had a long white beard. When Jul-Tomten came to deliver presents he rode in a sleigh pulled by a goat. He was probably the leader of the small people who inhabited that part of the world before larger humans like us. Leaving small gifts and food placated these little people, so we leave cookies and cocoa for Santa … or nowadays, Diet Coke.

But there are other pieces to the story beyond the gift giving. At the core of most of these stories is St. Nicholas himself and so I would like to return to him. St. Nicholas began to appear all over the place in the 1400's. His flying may have originated with the stories in which he would fly down from the sky and save sailors from terrible storms. He became the flying patron saint of sailors and with them he traveled the globe. During this time he also became the patron saint of children, because he is said to have saved three boys who were pickled in brine by an innkeeper who wanted to be able to serve royalty a dinner of meat during a drought. St. Nick brought the boys back to life and punished the innkeeper. Schoolboys in many countries honored St. Nick with celebrations that eventually got so out of hand, that Martin Luther, who didn’t like saints anyway, outlawed them. A replacement custom was created in which schoolmasters dressed up in suits, interviewed each boy on the previous year’s behavior and then handed out gifts or punishments.

It is these stories, of how the celebrations of Santa have changed over time, that really intrigue me. These tales became woven into one, or merged as nations were conquered and people were converted. For example, when early Christian missionaries entered new countries they would often require only a minimal conversion. In the name of expediency it was enough to re-interpret traditional rites and beliefs in terms of Christian values. So it was that St. Nicholas was used and reused and transformed with each new century. As a religious symbol, he might infiltrate the culture, but the people managed to hang onto the parts of their special winter holiday stories that they liked.

My favorite is what happened to him in Russia near the Arctic Circle where reindeer are greatly valued for food and transportation. Typically, the people of Siberia would travel all summer, then settle into milder climates in the winter. During the winter months they lived in huts that were supported by a large central pole. They celebrated a mid-winter ceremony that involved a shaman climbing up that pole to communicate with the world of spirits. Accompanied by reindeer as a bodyguard, the shaman would enter the hut and start to climb the pole, finally disappearing through the smoke hole in the roof of the hut. To induce the necessary state of mind, the shaman depended on hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms. When the Christians came to the Arctic Circle , St. Nicholas became a super shaman, a mystic go-between for the people and their new Christian god. Thus, the merging of this story with other stories about Santa brings us Nikolai, as St. Nick was called, who spent the dark midwinter of 300 years ago flying high, carrying gifts from God on his supernatural reindeer sled, and who would return to the mortal world via chimneys. Later he used vodka instead of mushrooms, hence his red nose and cheeks.

Finally Santa came to this country by way of settlers and immigrants from all over the world. It is said that it was the Dutch and their Sinter Klaas was the primary source of our present day Santa Claus. But it seems, at least according to a few articles I read, that the first Santa Claus in New York in 1793 was as a patriotic symbol of New York rather than as a Dutch custom for children. As one historian put it, "When New Yorkers resurrected St. Nicholas, they did so as satire because the image was anti-British and not to be taken seriously."

Since then Santa has continued to evolve and change. He grew in popularity in the late 1800s when he was part of Washington Irving's history of New York . He became codified with Clement Clarke Moore because of the poem, "The Night Before Christmas." And he became a permanent visual image with the drawings of Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly. In the 1920s he was shown drinking Coke in his first commercial appearance. In each successive decade he has taken on a slightly different image.

When I started doing research for this sermon I thought I would end with a simple picture of Santa. I was hoping for a straightforward spiritual message to justify a little indulgence in the old guy. (Alas, the dreams of a life long UU). But he doesn't tie up into a nice neat package. And I am still left with the question, "Who is this Santa Claus?" His history is twisting and turning through centuries and cultures. He certainly isn't a religious figure any more. He doesn't perform miracles any more except that he can make reindeer fly, and he does manage to get around the world in a single night. For some reason, perhaps the Puritan streak in us all, we have hung on to his judgmental quality. He still makes a list and keeps track of those who are going to get gifts or not. Though most of us pass the test, and we remain attracted to a genuinely good, honest, "more than human" being that gives unconditionally. This is a man who seems to simply enjoy life. He is a hard worker and runs a tight, busy shop. He still has his sleigh, which is certainly more ecologically sound than the big cars I have seen him with in California . Sometimes he is the thin Salvation Army type standing on the corner ringing the bell. Or he is the black Santa at Macy's who, as I read in Harper's, encourages kids who climb into his lap to get a career in Entomology. Or he is the guy in the big Cadillac who was passing out fifty-dollar bills in downtown Boston one year.

He certainly is a guy who is continually changing. I have even heard there are plans to push him and his gifts in China as a way of opening international trade and increasing the U.S. market share. Will his eyes change shape in China ? I wonder what will happen to him in the years ahead? Will there ever be a day when he changes gender again? Certainly the health industry must be having trouble with the overweight guy who smokes. Maybe he’ll quit one of these days. We seem to like the magic, the surprise -- and many of us like to have our children believe in him. He may have become too commercial for most of us, yet his familiar image is still around. I have never liked the commercialism, but I realize now that is only a short eighty-year part of one of the best examples of centuries of tradition.

I know I'll never look at Santa in quite the same way again. I will never be able to look at him without thinking of the enormous history and collection of customs that have gone into making him who he is. So I suspect in the end I will manage to resolve the question of Santa the way most Unitarian Universalists resolve all ambiguous questions of faith. We look at a few of the facts, in a nonjudgmental way, and then decide whether to make that leap of faith. Perhaps Santa and these holiday times are one of the best examples of what humanity could be: changing and shifting as we bump up against new ideas and customs. The hope of this Unitarian Universalist is that Santa will continue to evolve.