So I’m always fascinated by where our traditions come from and Satan Claus is not exception. Here’s a chapter from a book that is not yet published about where the Santa myth may actually come from. And be prepared for some folks to be unhappy.
Of interest only to history geeks like me
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I’ll assume the “Satan” is a typo …
It’s a tough one. There’s strength and value in folklore, even where the historical fact differs (or is unsubstantiated). A lot depends, I’d think, on how said folklore is applied. I don’t find the St Nicholas/Santa tradition to be so horrific as to require debunking. I values the truth, but I also value (within some bounds) the societal consensus, especially when it comes to the past.
Typo true, but the article does draw parallels to a Wild Man.
It’s not so much that I need to debunk Santa (although that may be the original intent of the author) as I find the evolution very interesting. Maybe it’s my anthropology background, but I find the origins of things we take for granted every day very compelling. And I think understanding the evolution of the stories we like to lean on helps us be more open to the cultures around us, whose cosmogonies often seem foreign. Our stories may have more in common with theirs than we suspect, we’ve just ‘forgotten.’
It’s an interesting article, and there are a few useful nuggets (and research into this sort of thing is always interesting), but the chapter strikes me as oversimplistic in a few areas, reliant on a bit too much folk etymology, containing at least a few errors (the “horns” on Moses have nothing to do with Wild Man myths), and as a whole reads as a bit unprofessional.
I don’t hold that St Nicholas was an actual historic figure (hey, “Christopher” is my patron saint, so I know from sketchy history), and certainly Christianity (like society) has been syncretic in how it’s picked up bits and pieces of stuff around it, but the chapter comes off as a long blog post, driven more by the author’s preconceptions than an actual research project.