Open Eye: Santa Claus:; a family tree

Two OU historians celebrate Christmas Present - by recalling the spectres of the Victorians' Christmas Past

There is a paradox at the centre of Christmas. It is at once our oldest festival and it embodies constants of the human condition: birth and death, plenty and dearth, merriment and fear. Yet it is eclectic in the traditions that festoon it and it has changed markedly over time as it has been refurbished and repackaged. We accept innovations but quickly persuade ourselves they are traditional.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had no sooner been depicted in the Illustrated London News alongside a Christmas tree than everybody adopted the German custom and within a few years thought they had always had them. A few years ago, houses draped with lights were unusual but now are everywhere; wreaths on doors are another recent innovation.

The Christmas we know was essentially a Victorian creation, suited to an urban society which idealised home, family and children. Yet as its great architects, Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, created the new Christmas Present, they put nostalgia at its heart. Irving's Sketch Book (1818) and Dicken's Pickwick Papers (1836) both depicted an idealised Christmas Past where jovial squires entertained friends and retainers by roaring fires, with coaches drives down snow-covered lanes.

Britain and America complemented each other in what became an Anglo-American Christmas. Re-packaged by Hollywood, it spread around the globe, penetrating even non-Christian cultures. Travellers to Asia discover that in December trees, bells and depictions of Santa Claus adorn shopping centres in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore, while the musak consists of Christmas medleys.

Perhaps the most important development has been the increasing hegemony of Santa Claus. The association of Santa Claus with St Nicholas is at best flimsy and he is in reality a pagan figure who presides over the modern festivities. Clement Moore's poem, A Visit From Santa Claus (1823), brought together different traditions. Present-bringing was Dutch and German, but Moore drew upon England for the jovial character and appearance of his creation. Indeed, if Santa Claus was part St Nicholas and part Father Christmas descended from the Lords of Misrule, the latter characteristics were more pronounced.

What made Santa Claus fitting to preside over the Christmas that we now consider traditional was his suitability for an urban, humanitarian, family- centred, child indulging and increasingly secular civilisation. In Britain Santa Claus rapidly imposed his personality and customs and the names Father Christmas and Santa Claus became interchangeable, although English artists drew him in a red habit with a hood rather than the red suit and cap made popular in the US by the illustrator Thomas Nast.

The progress of the Anglo-American Santa has not gone without challenge. In 1951, with the approval of the cathedral authorities, an effigy of Father Christmas was "executed". In Holland traditionalists, seeking to preserve the native Sinterklaas and the feats of St Nicholas of 6 December, have campaigned against the interloper and his reindeer.

If the dominance of Santa Claus represents a threat to the traditional Christmas from within, there are more overt threats. A combination of the politically correct and the commercially avaricious has sought to de-Christianise the festival and turn it into a celebration accessible to all. Hence "Happy Holiday" rather than "Merry Christmas". In Newark, New Jersey, in 1996 a Nativity tableau escaped expulsion only after the late addition of a Jewish menorah, a plastic snowman and Santa Claus. Even in Britain the multi-cultural zealotry of Birmingham Council resulted in an attempt to remove Christian symbols and rename the festival "Winterval".

There is little opposition to the introduction of the half Christian, half Hollywood, Christmas in south-east Asia, long accustomed to mix and match its festivals and religions. Here the question is whether the ability of receivers to interpret and use cultural imports in their own way totally alters meaning.

In the west, despite airports coping with increasing numbers departing in search of sun or snow, Christmas remains what the Victorians made it: a family festival, maintaining a Christian dimension, however slender, for many. Perhaps we are merely nostalgic and yearning for the more stable family life of the past. Most likely, we affirm an ideal at Christmas against the experience of the rest of the year. Different social values are enthroned for the season.

Cynics would perceive the modern festivities as epitomising the commercialisation rampant in society throughout the year, but reaching a peak at Christmas. Yet it is arguable that conspicuous, even reckless, expenditure is the modern equivalent of the great feasting when the cattle were killed. Where one was a defiance of the hungry time to come, the other is a defiance of January's bills.

Concentration on the home and family has been at the expense of carnival aspects of Christmas which were important before the sixteenth century.

There's been little of the "Ho-ho-ho", or of the world turned upside down, since the nineteenth century. The Saturnalian aspects have been tamed, the Lord of Misrule exiled, while, in a society that is permissive through the year, sexual licence enters its Lent at this time. Christmas Day is still the least public day of the year. Even young adults are corralled in the family home.

Complaints about Christmas and laments for its decline have always been part of the festival: medieval prelates complained about the bawdy and the sensual aspects. Commentators in the '60s bewailed the influence of TV, arguing that, while once the family played parlour games, now it sat watching TV. In 1998 they regretted the halcyon days when the family sat down together to watch the Morecambe and Wise Show. Now the family sits in separate rooms, watching different programmes, new videos or playing computer games.

Christmas isn't what it used to be.

Bill Purdue and John Golby are Senior Lecturers in History at the OU. Their book, 'The Making of the Modern Christmas' (Batsford, 1986) is being revised and republished by Sutton Publishing next year.

Cover photo: Some of the hundreds of students at Berlin's Free University who organised a service charging $72 to rent a Santa Claus for Christmas.