On the Road with Kris

A couple of nights ago I was on a plane once again, flying off to yet another glamorous and exotic location to do some work for one of my company’s consulting clients. Seated directly across the aisle from me was a guy with white hair and a long, bushy white beard. He was about average in height, late middle age, with a pronounced paunch. He wasn’t wearing little spectacles but he was wearing some faintly spectacle-like wire-framed glasses. It appeared that I was en route to Minneapolis-St. Paul with Santa Claus.

He wasn’t wearing a red suit, but he was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt, jeans and sneakers. Basically, he was dressed the way I'm often dressed when I'm in my garage workshop, or generally any time I'm not wearing the slacks and jacket I put on to signal to clients and co-workers that I am a responsible professional. It would stand to reason that Santa Claus would also put on his fancy red suit for official appearances of a professional nature and, like me, prefer something a little more comfortable and casual when he's in Santa’s workshop or otherwise out of the public eye. It being a couple of months before Christmas, maybe he was using this more conventional form of travel than his flying sleigh to do a little business travel.

Now, just in case you're wondering at this point, I do know that Santa Claus is a fictional character. So I had to wonder: Is this guy deliberately trying to look like Santa Claus? Or is he a big chubby guy with white hair who just doesn’t care much for shaving and trimming his facial hair, and that’s all? Intentional or not, surely he is aware of his resemblance to old Kris Kringle.

Maybe he really enjoys looking like Santa. Maybe he's spent years perfecting the look, and plays the part at shopping malls and department stores so well that he only has to work for the approximately one month per year between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Maybe he pines all year for that single month, when small children will look on him with awe and wonder, and he goes from being just an average guy to being treated as some kind of demigod.

Maybe he’s relatively indifferent to the whole thing and isn’t particularly going out of his way to look like that. Maybe he laughs about it with friends or family, but doesn’t make any effort to capitalize on his resemblance to Jolly Old Saint Nick.

On the other hand, maybe he really hates the whole Santa thing: “This is the way I look and I’m not your holiday icon, so leave me alone.” Maybe he despises Christmas and looks the way he looks as a deliberate act of defiance. Maybe he’s a mean old guy who delights in scaring the bejeezus out of little kids who come running up to him on the street to tell him about all of the presents they want for Jesus’ birthday: “No, you don’t get the Hot Wheels. For you there will be only PAIN!”

Reflecting on all this I found myself reminded of the origins of this peculiarly American incarnation of St. Nicholas. One of the many people who shaped our American idea of what Santa Claus looks like was Thomas Nast, the nineteenth-century caricaturist who also gave us the donkey and the elephant as symbols of the two major US political parties. Nast was born in the town of Landau/Pfalz, not far from where my wife grew up, where he is one of those long-ago German emigrants who remain their home town’s main claim to fame.

In Germany they don’t have Santa Claus as we know him. Instead, they have Nikolaus (St. Nicholas), who looks like a Catholic bishop in a red, faintly Santa-like robe. Nikolaus has various regional names; for example, where my wife grew up I have heard older people refer to him in the local dialect (Pfälzisch) as "Belzenickel". Whatever they call him, German children wake up on the morning of December 6^th to find that the shoes they put outside their front door the night before have been miraculously filled with fruits, nuts, candy and maybe a small toy or two during the night.

Nikolaus doesn’t frequent department stores. Instead, he comes to your house pretty much any time between Nikolaus day and Christmas bearing a big book and often accompanied by his scary servant Knecht Ruprecht (“Ruprecht the servant”). Nikolaus consults the big book and reads out to the awestruck tykes all of the things that their parents have previously instructed the college student in the Nikolaus costume to tell them about their various good or wicked deeds of the preceding year. There is a sort of implied threat that Knecht Ruprecht is going to do them harm if their transgressions have crossed some unspecified threshold, so the visit from Nikolaus is not all candy canes and ho-ho-ho.

There are various other characters that show up around Christmas time in Germany. The American-style Santa Claus sometimes shows up in decorations and is referred to as “der Weinachtsmann” (“the Christmas man”). He doesn’t seem to have any discernable function other than decoration, i.e. there isn’t any kind of lore or activity associated with him as nearly as I can tell. He's just sort of there. I've asked my wife to explain this to me but she can never really give me a satisfying answer.

Another character that shows up at Christmas is the “Christkind”, which would translate literally as “Christ child”. In my wife’s family, the giving of gifts on Christmas eve (not on Christmas morning, as in the US), or the gifts themselves, are sometimes referred to under the loose label of “Christkind”. The Christkind as an entity is somehow the source of Christmas gifts, but the system by which the gifts are selected, procured and conveyed to their intended recipients is essentially unspecified. One may see decorative images of the Christkind as a sort of small child with wings like an angel's. So, I have asked, does the Christkind come to you and give you the gifts, or does he leave them under the tree when you are sleeping, or something like that? No, apparently not. How does the Christkind decide what to give you? Unknown. Is the Christkind baby Jesus? Negative on that one too. My German in-laws seem entirely unbothered by this sort of vagueness, whereas I’m a names-and-dates guy who needs to know exactly who’s responsible for what and when.

Of course, being a member of the Chosen People, even in the country of my birth I’ve observed all this stuff through the lens of an outsider all my life anyway. We don’t have any holidays on which a guy comes down your chimney and leaves you cool stuff in exchange for some milk and cookies you put out for him. The closest thing we have is a prophet for whom we leave a glass of wine on the table during one of our holidays, but we also leave the front door open because apparently Old Testament prophets prefer a more conventional means of entry into the home.

I have a very vague memory from when I was about five of being in a store or shopping center and seeing a guy in a Santa suit, and asking my mother what that was all about. She explained to me the basic tenets of Santa Claus theory, then told me in so many words that it was bunk, but that under no circumstances must I tell that to any of my non-Chosen friends because they would be severely traumatized.

A cousin of mine was not so well informed about these things at a similar age, although he apparently was slightly little more informed about current events than I had been as a five-year-old. The year was 1980 and the American hostages in the US embassy in Tehran were on the nightly news every day. At Christmas time he and his family were in a shopping mall where there was a Santa Claus posing for pictures with kids. Whereas I had been merely curious, he became quite unglued at the site of this man with the flowing white beard. He pointed at Santa and shrieked, “The Ayatollah!”