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Our Christmas Santa ornament is 5½ inches tall. The Christmas Santa ornament is holding a red and gold, candy cane shaped, staff decorated with holly leaves in one hand and metal streamers with a lantern and a tiny tree in the other. There is a teddy bear holding a present on Santa’s shoulder. Santa Claus is wearing a red Santa Suit. Santa is walking on a patch of snow covered with iridescent glitter and decorated with holly leaves and berries. The metal Christmas Santa ornament hangs from a gold cord.
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History of Santa Claus in America.
The most famous of the Christmas gift bringers, Santa Claus is only about 200 years old, the descendant of older European figures and the product of a movement to produce a distinctively American Christmas.
The history of Santa Claus begins with Saint Nicholas of Myra, an early Christian bishop of Asia Minor, whose popularity throughout the middle ages and around whom numerous stories of kindness to children developed. By the 12th century he was the patron saint of children and in his name gifts were given to little ones on his feast day of December 6 or on its eve. Children left out stockings or shoes for him by the window or door, as chimneys were rare in Europe until the 1500’s. In the 16th century, religious reformers attacked the excessive devotion given to saints and in Protestant areas Saint Nicholas lost his job as bringer of Christmas gifts. He was replaced either by the Christ Child or by secularized versions of himself, usually dressed in fur. Thus in 17th and 18th century Germany figures appeared such Knecht Ruprect, Pelznickel or Belsnickel, which meant “Furry Nicholas”, who either accompanied the Christ Child, who came to be known as the Christkindl or who appeared in his stead. In other Protestant countries such as England, the giving of gifts to children declined and there was no particular gift bringer. In Scotland, the Calvinist Church forbade Christmas festivities of all kinds and so gift giving and merriment shifted to New Year’s.
During the late 1700’s in much of the United States, Christmas was a time of boisterous, outdoor fun, with feasting, noise making and wandering about at all hours of the night troubling one’s wealthier neighbors for hospitality. During the first half of the 19th century, Christmas would be remade with rowdiness and social inversion being replaced by a child centered, family oriented holiday that rendered the streets safer and the merchant happier. Central to this important social change was the invention of Santa Claus by a small group of New York men of letters.
To some in the newly independent United States things Dutch were symbols of anti British republicanism. St. Nicholas had been a rebel symbol in New York during the revolutionary war and with tension still running high in the early years of the 19th century St. Nicholas would be useful again. In 1809 American writer Washington Irving wrote a mock chronicle entitled Diedrich Knickerbockers History of New York in which he claimed that the early Dutch settlers revered Sinterklass or Saint Nicholas who visited every December. He was widely believed to ride a horse and wagon through the skies, slide down chimneys with presents and smoke a pipe. Irving seems to have invented this Dutch American attachment to Saint Nick. The first mention of him in the New York area dates to a dinner on December 23, 1773, in honor of the saint otherwise called “St. a Claus.” The next year George Pintard published a pamphlet in Dutch and English showing pictures of St. Nicholas dressed as a bishop, presents stuffed into stockings by a fireplace a good child with treats and a bad child with a switch. The verse read in part; Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend! To serve you, ever was my end, If you will, now, me something give, I’ll serve you ever while I live.
A couple of weeks later, another poem, this time anonymously written, appeared in a New York newspaper praising “Sancte Claus” for the gifts he brings, asking him to spare the rod and promising, “From naughty behavior we’ll always refrain, In hopes that you’ll come and reward us again.”
Within two years the new legend of Santa Claus had spread far enough to provoke an attempt to disprove his existence. In 1812 Samuel Woods, in his false Stories corrected tried to debunk Santa Claus, but the legend was already too powerful.
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