The stories behind Father Christmas

Christmas leads many of us to wonder about certain festive traditions and their origins. Why, for example, do we have Advent calendars? Who on Earth thought sprouts were a good idea? And, to turn to the subject of today’s blog-post, where exactly does the bearded present-distributing bloke in red come from? Various places, as it turns out.

To begin with, Father Christmas is (or rather, was) the traditional English personification of Christmas. For centuries he could be found as a character in the traditional folk plays known as mummers plays, although he did also make appearances in various Christmas-related publications, especially in the mid-seventeenth century when the Puritans banned Christmas (from around 1644 until the Restoration in 1660, the celebration of Christmas was forbidden in England; Father Christmas, as the embodiment of the old festive traditions, thus became linked with the Royalist cause in some of the pamphlets of the time). He had no real connection with present-giving, or with children in general for that matter, until mid-Victorian times – traditionally, he was all about feasting and being merry.

By the 1840s, he was portrayed as having a beard, dressed in a long robe (green more often than not, although red wasn’t unknown), wearing a crown of holly and surrounded by a plentiful amount of food and drink. Among other works of the early Victorian period, this was the image presented in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which first appeared in 1843 and was hugely influential in terms of reviving interest in Christmas and the themes and traditions attached to it; although not named as Father Christmas, the Ghost of Christmas Present (“clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur … on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath … its dark brown curls were long and free: free as its genial face, its sparkling eyes, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour and its joyful air”) has many of the attributes associated with the figure sometimes also known as ‘Old Christmas’.

He became a gift-giver in the mid-nineteenth century as the Victorian idea of Christmas slowly evolved to become associated with giving children presents, among other things that we would associate with a modern Christmas; this was also the time when sending cards and decorating a Christmas tree became popular things to do in Britain at Christmas time. The Christmas tree is a German tradition that was popularised here by Prince Albert, although the Royal family were already accustomed to the idea as it was something they’d originally brought with them from Hanover in 1714. It was also in the mid-nineteenth century that the English idea of Father Christmas became inextricably linked with a similar personification of the festive season from the other side of the Atlantic, an American variant of the Dutch figure Sinterklaas.

Sinterklass is based on a real person – the fourth-century bishop St Nicholas who is the patron saint of children, sailors (in Greece he’s seen as a Christian version of the sea-god Poseidon), repentant thieves, lawyers, perfume-makers, murderers, pawnbrokers and orphans, among others. His reputation for gift-giving arises from one of many stories told about him – concerning a neighbour of his, a poor man who had three daughters but couldn’t afford to look after them, which had led him to consider sending them to work as prostitutes. Nicholas gave them money so they wouldn’t have to, but rather than doing this in person he threw the money through his neighbour’s window; on the third night of doing this, the neighbour found out who his family’s mystery benefactor was. A variant of this story has Nicholas climbing onto the roof and dropping the money down the chimney, with the coins landing in the girls’ stockings which they’d hung over the embers in the fireplace to dry.

In the Dutch tradition, Sinterklaas is usually depicted as an old man with a white beard wearing a red cape over a bishop’s robes, topped with a mitre. He gave gifts to children who’d behaved themselves on 6^th December (St Nicholas’s Day) and it was this tradition that was taken to the New World by Dutch colonists, although not before it had been altered somewhat during the Reformation, with the gift-giving date being changed to Christmas Eve and his name being altered to Christkindl, which translates as ‘Christ Child’ although it was anglicised as Kris Kringle, with the name Sinterklass evidently surviving long enough for it to be anglicised as Santa Claus. This Dutch background is overtly acknowledged in that classic Christmas movie Miracle on 34^th Street, when Kris meets with a young Dutch girl who doesn’t speak English and surprises everyone watching, including the sceptical Susan, by conversing with the girl in fluent Dutch and singing a Sinterklass song with her.

The extent to which Dutch Christmas traditions had survived into the early nineteenth century USA is debatable (New Amsterdam had become New York in 1664), but what is well-known is that the modern-day perception of Santa Claus owes a lot to a famous 1823 poem, published anonymously in New York and later attributed to either Clement Clarke Moore or Henry Livingstone Jnr, called ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ which is perhaps better known by its opening line, ‘’Twas the night before Christmas’. This is where the notion of Santa riding around on his present-laden sleigh pulled by eight reindeer (Dasher, Dancer etc – but not Rudolph, who didn’t appear until 1939 in a separate poem) comes from.

It’s believed that ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ was in part based on Washington Irving’s A History of New York (1809) which included a dream-sequence in which Santa Claus – the name first appeared in print in America in the 1770s – flies over the treetops in a flying wagon of some sort. Irving, who was as influential on the American perception and celebration of Christmas as Dickens was in this country, was apparently trying to lampoon Americans of Dutch ancestry with his Santa reference. For his serious essays about Christmas, which appear in The Sketch Book, he apparently made great use of mid-seventeenth-century texts about English Christmas traditions which had been written at the time when Christmas had been banned (see above).

It is worth noting that the St Nicholas figure in the poem is not described as wearing red – “dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot … his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot” is how his attire is described. Received wisdom will tell you that the idea of Santa wearing red comes from his long-standing association with Coca-Cola, although as I found out when I read a book about drinks last year, the red clothing actually pre-dates this. The famous adverts for said drinks brand began in 1931, and he’d previously been depicted in red in adverts for mineral water and ginger beer, as well as in pictures of him published in magazines and on Christmas cards in both Britain and the USA in the first few years of the twentieth century – the time when any remaining differences between Father Christmas and Santa Claus faded away.

Dickensian

After coming back from Canada, I noted that I had some catching-up to do on the iPlayer – and first up was the start of a surprisingly original take on the works of Charles Dickens.

I describe the BBC show Dickensian as ‘surprisingly original’ because I can’t believe that no-one had previously thought to take characters from different Dickens stories and put them into one story. Thus, we have a situation where a young Miss Havisham from Great Expectations and the future Lady Dedlock from Bleak House are best friends (although I guess they didn’t bond over the fact that both of those characters have been played by Gillian Anderson in previous, straightforward Dickens adaptations), Mr and Mrs Bumble from Oliver Twist are having Mr Gradgrind from Hard Times over for dinner, half the cast seems to have borrowed money from Ebenezer Scrooge and/or pawned something in the Old Curiosity Shop (or, if they’re really desperate, sold their valuables to Fagin), and Silas Wegg from Our Mutual Friend runs a pub whose clientele includes Bill Sikes and Nancy from Oliver Twist, the afore-mentioned Mr Bumble when he needs a break from Mrs B., Mrs Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit, Bob Cratchett and an unseen Mr Pickwick. Oh, and to top things off, Inspector Bucket from Bleak House is investigating the murder of Scrooge’s late business partner Jacob Marley.

This time, Marley was not dead to begin with – although, thanks to his as-yet-unidentified assailant, he was by the end of the first episode. Like Dickens’s stories themselves, Dickensian boasts a cast of many acting out various storylines which occasionally coincide with each other – and, like many a Dickens adaptation, it has a number of actors and actresses who you may recognise from somewhere else (among others, there’s Tuppence Middleton, Caroline Quentin, Stephen Rea, a couple of blokes from Spooks and Omid Djalili as a scene-stealing Mr Venus who, it turns out, is a chiropractor and the early Victorian equivalent of a forensics expert as well as a taxidermist).

There have been quite a few alternative twists on Dickens in the past – some time ago, ITV did a spin-off series following the (mis)adventures of Mr Micawber, while there has also been a novel in which Sydney Carton escapes the guillotine by agreeing to become a spy, setting up a Flashman-esque adventure at the time of the French Revolution which I really need to get my hands on sooner or later.

This one, though, is as far as I can see the first to throw characters from different Dickens stories together, and as a result it’s a real mish-mash of plots and sub-plots, albeit a highly watchable one. As well as Inspector Bucket’s investigation, in which several characters are of course suspects, we’ve got characters who are there for comedy value (the Bumbles, for there’s nothing quite as absurd as a couple with unrealistic expectations of social advancement, as well as a sub-plot between gin-loving Mrs Gamp, Silas Wegg and the latter’s wooden leg that wouldn’t be out of place in a Carry On film), a bit of social commentary (mainly concerning the twin spectres of debt and poverty, ongoing themes in Dickens’s works) as well as a few scenarios that are very much the precursors to the books.

Herein lies a problem for Dickensian – because some of the sub-plots are the events that precede those of the books, we know what’s going to happen. Amelia Havisham, for example, has become engaged to the villainous Merryweather Compeyson. If my knowledge of Great Expectations is anything to go by, this will result in her being jilted and defrauded, leading to a lifetime of hating men while wearing her wedding dress and sitting at the table in her decaying mansion, wedding breakfast untouched. Similarly, as far as the Bleak House characters go, we know that Honoria Barbary is going to marry the elderly Sir Leicester Dedlock even though she’s expecting Captain Hawdon’s child who will be raised by her spinsterly sister. Bill and Nancy? That’s not going to end well. Oh, and no need to worry about Tiny Tim being ill – his dad’s boss is going to bankroll all the medical treatment he needs after experiencing a ghostly vision.

Unless, of course, the writers have a few surprises in store. They’ve already departed from one Dickens storyline by ensuring that Little Nell doesn’t die – so who’s to say that, this time, some of the others aren’t going to get the ending that their creator gave them? That would liven things up a bit as, the murder investigation aside, it’s all looking a little too predictable (as I write, the show is 13 episodes into a 20-part series)

The main thing I’ve noticed, though, is how much like a soap opera this all is, even down to the cliffhanger endings of each half-hour long episode (Bob Cratchett getting arrested on his daughter’s wedding day was a good one, while the reveal of Honoria’s pregnancy was anything but a surprise for reasons outlined above). Could that be because the man behind this series is one of the writers from EastEnders? Or maybe it’s to do with the original author, with his multitude of characters and storylines? We may know of his stories as novels, but when they originally appeared they did so in regular instalments, spread over the course of months and even years, and he used cliffhanger endings to ensure that his readers remained interested enough to buy the next part.

Charles Dickens didn’t just provide the world with a large amount of interestingly-named and unforgettable characters. He also invented the concept that we know of today as the soap opera.

Watching and reading at Christmas

‘Tis the season – for watching Christmas movies. Some are good, some are pretty ropey and a few manage to divide opinion, in some cases on the topic of whether or not they can even be classified as Christmas movies. My own view on this is that if there’s a way in which a given film can be linked to Christmas, however tenuously, then why not? I take a similar view with literature – if a novel or short story has a Christmas link, then it can be a Christmas story.

Maybe I’m getting set in my ways in my late thirties, but over the past few years things have evolved to the point where there are four films, a TV show and three (short) works of literature that have to be seen or read at Christmas time.

Let’s do the films first. We start with two old-school black-and-white classics from the 1940s: Miracle on 34^th Street (1947) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). I tend to prefer the original version of the former which has a lot of charm with the New York department-store Santa called Kris Kringle who seems to be the ‘real’ thing – a role for which Edmund Gwynn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, while Maureen O’Hara (who died earlier this year, aged 95) is on top form playing a career-oriented, divorced single mother which must’ve been very ahead of its time in the 1940s. The court scene at the end, with the judge worried about re-election and the posties using it as an excuse to get rid of all the letters to Father Christmas that they’ve accumulated, is hilarious every time. On doing some background reading for this film, I was surprised to learn that it was originally released in the summer, with the Christmas element being downplayed in the advertising (20^th Century Fox’s logic being that they’d make more money with a summer release).

Less overtly Christmassy is that Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, set in charming small-town America with Jimmy Stewart’s selfless everyman standing up to the bad guy who comes in the form of the Scrooge-esque Mr Potter. George Bailey may get the girl but the rest of his life gets put on hold in a never-ending struggle on behalf of the less fortunate, and it takes a heavenly intervention when he’s at his lowest to show him how much of a positive impact he’s made on many lives. Yes, there’s a lot of ‘life’ before you get to the ‘wonderful’ bit (it’s actually fairly depressing in parts until the last ten minutes), but it really is a lovely film that shows just how much of a difference one person can make.

Moving swiftly to the late twentieth century and changing the tempo somewhat (although the notion of how much of a difference one person can make remains), it’s time for an action movie and, working on the principle that any movie with a link to Christmas can be a Christmas movie, there is indeed such a thing as a Christmas action movie: Die Hard (1988). Like many a Christmas movie protagonist, New York cop John McClane just wants to spend the festive season with his family (which is why he flies out to LA on Christmas Eve), but first of all there’s the small matter of meeting up with his estranged wife at the Nakatomi Corporation’s office party. If you’ve ever been to a work Christmas do that doesn’t quite go according to plan, be thankful that you’ve not had it interrupted by a bunch of heavily armed terrorists and then sit back and enjoy the mayhem as McClane takes them on without wearing any shoes. This film was so big it spawned four sequels, many imitations and redefined Bruce Willis’s career (before this, he was apparently considered more of a comedy actor) as well as marking out Alan Rickman as an actor who plays the baddies very well.

Finally, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and there are many options here with stand-out performances as Ebenezer Scrooge over the years coming from the likes of Alastair Sim and Patrick Stewart. My favourite, though, is the Muppets’ musical version from 1992 which is incredibly faithful to the original source material to the extent of providing much of the narrative word-for-word thanks to having Gonzo as Charles Dickens – a truly inspired piece of casting. Elsewhere, Kermit is Bob Cratchett to Michael Caine’s Scrooge – a rare example of a human character in a Muppet-based film not being overshadowed by the Muppets themselves. I guess I had to have Michael Caine make an appearance somewhere.

While we’re on the subject of A Christmas Carol, the TV show that is required viewing by yours truly is of course Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988) which inverts Dickens’s plot; in this, Ebenezer Blackadder is a nice and generous man who gets taken advantage of by everyone except Baldrick. A night-time visit from the Spirit of Christmas inadvertently prompts him to change his ways. This one’s got quite a good cast; as well as Blackadder regulars – Rowan Atkinson et al – do look out for Robbie Coltraine and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles, as the Spirit and Prince Albert respectively.

On the reading front, I have three perennial favourites which I (try to) read each year. Obviously, there’s A Christmas Carol which blends comedy and horror to perform two roles – celebrating Christmas while highlighting the condition of the poor. 172 years after it was written, the name of the main character is still used to refer to anyone who feels a bit cynical or jaded about Christmas. Dickens, who defined how we think of Christmas to the point where most cinematic depiction of London at this time of year tend to involve snow (despite actual white Christmases in London being few and far between) is one of those authors who seems to have a timeless feel, with quite a few of his books feeling surprisingly undated when compared to some of his contemporaries; Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a reading of the first and best of his Christmas stories.

The other two are – not surprising given my literary tastes – detective stories. Both happen to feature a seasonal plot based on finding out who nicked a precious stone which has been found hidden in a festive food item. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson go on the hunt for whoever stole the eponymous diamond which has been hidden in a Christmas goose which somehow finds its way into Holmes’s possession; after some hat-based deduction, their quest takes them from Baker Street to Covent Garden Market (which I always thought used to be a fruit and veg market, but according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it had traders selling poultry as well). I rather like this one because of the seemingly improbable hat deduction sequence and the confrontation at Covent Garden in which Holmes tricks the trader into revealing where he got the goose from. This story first appeared in 1892 and can be found in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Several decades later, Hercule Poirot – the little Belgian chap with the little grey cells – finds himself staying at an English country house during the festive season in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. He’s there to recover another stolen precious stone – a ruby this time – which turns up in some seasonal food (no prizes for guessing what). Needless to say, Poirot is dealing with a criminal who, rather like Hans Gruber, hasn’t bargained for having a detective on the scene. This is one of Agatha Christie’s later works (it first appeared in 1960 in the short story compilation of the same name) and while the identity of the thief is a bit obvious there’s entertainment to be had with talk of pudding-making (with reference being made to the ‘stir up’ collect which was and presumably still is said at church services on the Sunday before Advent, serving as a signal that that was the day on which the pudding should be made) and a fun sub-plot about a fake murder alongside Christie’s extolling of a traditional Christmas at the sort of venue where a lot of her murders took place.

Ah, Christmas stories. Now, where’s that Blackadder DVD?