Folklore: Santa Clause

As writers like Nissenbaum have pointed out, the celebration part of Christmas is a 19th/20th century creation. The Puritans associated Christmas with high Anglicanism and paganism (or rather, they associated anything high Anglican with paganism). Even the Victorians, much to my dismay, were not as Christmas-oriented as they are often portrayed. Yes, Queen Victoria introduced German customs into the holiday, but the Nutcracker image of a Victorian Christmas is, according to my sources, an image of the time period rather than the reality.

In any case, the Santa Clause image appeared in America in the 19th century but didn't take off until the 20th. Washington Irving used this image in this fiction, and Clement C. Moore--a friend of Irving's--practically invented the standard description with "A Visit From Saint Nicholas." In Moore's poem, Santa has a "broad face and a little round belly/That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly/He was chubby and plump." He also smokes. Moore additionally named Santa's reindeer (although Rudolf wasn't added until 1920).

Despite Irving and Moore, the man who really popularized the Santa Clause image in America was Thomas Nast, a German-born illustrator. (By the way, both Irving and Moore also have German, or rather Dutch connections. As you can see below, there are distinct differences between the British or Celtic Father Christmas and the German Father Christmas.) Nast created his illustrations for Harper's Weekly (amongst other magazines) between 1860 to 1890. As well as Santa Clause, Nast is responsible for the donkey and the elephant as Democrat and Republican symbols; Nast is definitely an example of "high" or at least medium culture seeping into the lore of a nation. Rather impressive influence for one guy!

The Nast/Moore/American image of Santa is different from British versions: for a comparison, check out Lewis' description of Father Christmas in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and see the images below. However, like Nast and unlike Moore, Lewis makes no overt attempt to associate Father Christmas with St. Nicholas. The connection has pretty much disappeared these days although it remains in books and on blogs explaining the origin of Christmas symbols. Unlike the Thanksgiving-Mayflower story, there would probably not be a Santa without a St. Nicholas first, but Santa, in this day and age, has gained his own image and persona.

There are many folk stories and performances surrounding Santa, the most prevalent being that children should be allowed to believe in Santa as long as possible. Pretending Santa exists is a deliberate, hmmm, fib that kind parents allow their children to believe for the sake of the holiday.

And I sort of see it. Except when I don't. Believing in Santa, at least for me, wasn't exactly the same as believing in, say, aliens. (Aliens might be out there.) I asked my mom if Santa was real when I was about five. Some kids at the bus stop had told me he wasn't. I already knew the answer, so when she reluctantly said, "No," I didn't have a fit and start crying. I went, "Oh, okay."

On the other hand, it would have been nice if I could have believed some jolly, rich, old uncle was paying for the gifts under the Christmas tree. I was the kind of kid who felt guilty about everything (and I mean, everything) and naturally, the money my parents spent on my gifts got added to the list.

On the other other hand, I can't imagine pushing the idea of Santa Clause very hard. People in my childhood household talked about Santa, we selected gifts for our Santa lists from the Sears Roebuck catalog, and I put out milk and cookies (although that was really more of a joke), but my parents never presented Santa as an actual possibility. "Santa" always seemed to be said in inverted commas. Even before my fifth year, I never believed in a North Pole hide-out or reindeer or a guy sliding down the chimney. I didn't not believe. I just didn't have any reason to believe (other than the guilt thing).

Do kids believe? Or do they really know, in their heart of hearts, that Santa is Mum & Dad? Do parents still spin elaborate tales about Santa's time traveling abilities? Or has Santa become an image and only an image: have your picture taken with the red-coated symbol?

Literary/Popular Appearances: Clement C. Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas" naturally. Grinch in How The Grinch Stole Christmas wears the traditional Santa Clause outfit. The awesome Bones' episode "The Santa in the Slush" uses multiple red-coated Santas, and there's a very funny Due South episode where a number of Santas, reindeer, and Elvises ("I said elves, you fools! ELVES!") wander around the police station.

On a far more literary note, Tolkien wrote and illustrated Letters to Father Christmas. Tolkien's Father Christmas (to the left) is more German than British/ Celtic (to the right). There's also the hilarious William Dean Howells' story "Christmas Every Day," although the main character there is a Christmas Fairy rather than Santa Clause. And I mustn't forget the famous editorial: "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Clause" by Francis Pharcellus Church.

Whatever the image--symbolic or decorative--Santa adds a lot to the festivities!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

"R" is for RealWhoDunik (Roosevelt)

What I read: Murder in the Oval Office by Elliott Roosevelt.

"R" contains a plethora of mystery authors: Kathy Reichs (who, despite my love of Bones, I have not read); Ruth Rendell; Kate Ross (author of the very good Julian Kestrel books); Mary Roberts Rinehart; Gillian Roberts; Laura Joh Rowland; and Deanna Raybourn whose Lady Julia Grey books I've just begun.

I checked out an Elliott Roosevelt mystery on the mistaken assumption that I was checking out one of Margaret Truman's novels. Not that I customarily confuse Roosevelt with Truman: my thought was "mystery novel about politics? this must be from that series . . ."

It wasn't. Elliott Roosevelt's books star Eleanor Roosevelt as the detective while Margaret Truman's detectives appear to vary. Elliott Roosevelt's mysteries take place in a historical time period replete with historical personalities. Margaret Truman's novels, from my brief exposure, are more about the political/Washington setting than the historical one.

I found both authors fairly unreadable. This is mostly because politics do not interest me in and of themselves. That is, while I might be interested in a particular time period or country, I don't feel the same way about political people and locations. Reading Murder in the Oval Office is like reading People magazine: very little mystery; lots and lots of name-dropping (and then Eleanor met the young, brash Lyndon B. Johnson!).

Margaret Truman's mysteries aren't riddled with name-dropping--the president of Murder in the White House is entirely fictional. Rather, her mysteries are riddled with political minutiae. Reading the beginning of Murder in the White House is rather like reading a Tolstoy spy novel: twenty billion people from twenty billion organizations conferring in little groups throughout the White House and . . . yaaawwwn.

The political murder mysteries I do like are by the mystery writing team, Emma Lathen (as R.B. Dominic). Emma Lathen is better known for her Wall Street mysteries starring John Thatcher. Her political mysteries are mostly out of print. I like them though. Like in her economic mysteries, she focuses on "domestic" crimes, employs humor, and uses a detective who, while important (a Senator), isn't high profile.

Politics is always best dealt with indirectly.

Folklore: A Re-examination

I am scheduled to teach Folklore & Literature this Spring. It is not clear whether the course will get enough students to run. I comfort my ego by reminding myself that my English Composition students do ask me, "Are you teaching Literature next semester?" (Literature is the other required English course; the answer is, "No, BUT . . ."). Electives, unfortunately, don't have a high cache at community colleges and have a particularly low cache in the current economy (get in/get the degree/get out).

Whether or not I get the opportunity, I have found posting about folklore this fall extremely helpful. I'm a big believer that you can't teach something until you teach it. I did tons of research on folklore, collected massive numbers of articles and short stories, created detailed lesson plans . . . all of which would have been useful but all of which, now that I've had a chance to actually present the material, I need to alter.

In fact, I'm actually grateful that I didn't teach the course this fall although yes, I really would like to teach it one of these days.

In any case, I decided that there aren't enough direct links between New England literature and folklore to justify making them. That is, although Melville may have been influenced by scary monster stories as a child which led him to create Moby Dick, the link is extremely tenuous (it's easier to make these kind of links with Shakespeare although those links may be just as shaky).

I also decided that although folklore fascinates me all by itself, finding itty-bitty folkloric symbols in stories just doesn't. It never has. I'm all about formal criticism, but I think the story matters more than the itty-bitty symbols (and that kind of analysis always strikes me as rather desperate).

This doesn't mean I have to throw out my material, folk or literary. I just need to morph it slightly. This isn't difficult because what I've been aiming for all along is the flexibility of ideas (I just didn't know that till I "taught" it).

Here's what I mean:

Human beings tend to categorize things. Categories make stuff easier to remember. So, historically-speaking, in Europe, you've got Ancient Civilizations, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Age, then the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, etc.

As C.S. Lewis tried to point out long before it was cool to point out, the real historical experience wasn't like that. Ideas that we think of as "Renaissance" appeared much earlier. Attitudes that we think of as "medieval" continued until much later. Art, music, literature, and ideas don't exist in tidy little boxes before and after which they cease to function. Same with people; there's a great scene in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time where Grant, the police inspector, realizes in exasperation that Thomas More, chancellor for Henry VIII, was six when Richard III was king (and therefore, would have had no direct adult knowledge of Richard). And Ellis Peters consistently has her characters refer to the days before William the Conqueror. (The books take place during the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Maud.)

Two boxes for literature are "highbrow" and "lowbrow." "Highbrow" literature is academic, snooty, non-linear, and doesn't sell. "Lowbrow" is often raunchy, usually genre-based, narrative, and does sell. (Sorry, a bit of my bias is showing here.) "Highbrow" and "lowbrow" attitudes definitely exist in our culture whereby one group will pour scorn on the tastes of the other group.

However, in reality, nothing takes place in a box. I recently had a very interesting discussion with a student who wrote his research essay (for my composition class) on Thomas Wolfe's edited work. The student was refuting the idea that an edited work is no longer "pure" and therefore, the author is no longer a "genius." (I remember a very silly English teacher telling me that Mozart was a genius, because the notes just came out of him, but Shakespeare wasn't because Shakespeare worked on and edited his plays.)

The student and I discussed the difference between writing and editing and also how writers are influenced by other writers. Coleridge and Wordsworth, for example, wrote poems at the same table, trading ideas and sometimes even paper. (This is one reason, by the way, that I dislike placement writing tests. I'm all about students "paddling their own canoes," but 99.9% of business and creative writing involves some kind of feedback. Even if I work alone, I'm influenced by what I read and the rejection letters I receive. The idea that writing should take place in some kind of timed bubble is ridiculous.)

I believe that images, ideas, and words--whether "high," "low," or "middle"--have this kind of flexibility. Just as writers feed off and trade ideas with each other, mediums and genres feed off and trade ideas. Something that starts out as "literary" ends up as popular or low. Something that starts out as folk becomes literary, specialized, or sanctified. Ideas float about.

Take stories about magic. These stories show up in folklore. They show up in movies. They show up in the fantasy genre. They show up in literary works (where they become "magical realism," rather than fantasy). They creep into music and into art (the Pre-Raphaelites). Nothing stays still. Van Gogh's The Starry Night, for example, shows up in a song by Don McLean. Economists call this "liquidity"; as O'Rourke explains it, "Liquidity is the Wall Street word for having things you can do with your money and being able to do them." Creative liquidity would be having places (forms, genres, mediums) to play out ideas and being able to do so.

And these floating-about ideas color our perception of new works. "Puff, the Magic Dragon" was not about marijuana, but everybody believed it was. The cultural perception was more powerful, in many ways, than the reality, and the cultural perception became its own piece of folklore.

Consequently, the ideas that show up in folklore are flexible ideas that may have originated elsewhere and may show up anywhere else, altering the way new ideas are written about. With this in mind, I intend to keep more or less the same material I've already collected but broaden my scope to include material that is not technically folklore. (I will also continue to post; I've only posted about a month of material so far!)

To conclude, as an example of cultural intermingling, here are titles from various television shows. Where did they come from? What ties do they have? I've listed potential answers in a comment (there may be more than one answer for many of these).

From Lois & Clark:

The Ides of Metropolis
Fly Hard
Tempus Fugitive

From House:

TB or Not TB
Sleeping Dogs Lie

From Stargate:

The Devil You Know

From Due South:

They Eat Horses, Don't They
Hawk and Handsaw
You Must Remember This
The Man Who Knew Too Little

From CSI:

Cats in the Cradle . . .
Scuba Doobie-Doo
And Then There Were None
Anatomy of a Lye

From NCIS:

The Good Samaritan
The Truth is Out There

From X-Files:

Ghost in the Machine
How the Ghosts Stole Christmas

Q is for Quality (Quattlebaum)

What I read: Grover G. Graham and Me by Mary Quattlebaum.

There aren't many "Q's" when it comes to fiction authors. I'm sure there are loads of "Q" fiction authors in the Library of Congress, but "Q's" in local libraries tend to accompany one to two shelves--at the most.

At my local library, I looked over the two "Q" shelves in the adult fiction section and then went to look at the three or four "Q" books in the children's section. There I found Quattlebaum, and I decided that anyone with such an awesome last name deserved to be read.

The book is actually quite good. It belongs to the topic, "Fiction about orphan/foster children." Cynthia Voigt's Homecoming series comes to mind. Grover G. Graham and Me is told from a young foster boy's point of view. He is on foster home number eight or nine. There he encounters a toddler who reminds him of himself (this is never stated directly) and decides to rescue the toddler when the seemingly irresponsible mother comes to reclaim him.

The rescue part of the book is actually, realistically, quite short. It would have been interesting to see if the boy could have survived with the toddler for more than a day, but the book is really about the boy deciding to set down roots, not about the kidnapping.

The only slight snag is the boy's voice. This is actually a common problem with books told from a child's point of view. How do you make the child sound like a child without making him or her sound, well, boring? I'm not sure that children are too different from my cats: I'm hungry. I'm bored. Is there anything to do? Are we there yet? Can I go out and play?

I mean, how much critical thinking actually goes on? I don't remember much from my own prepubescence, but then, I've always liked getting older. I never wish myself back to my own youth.

My lack of memory (or desire to remember) may be why I don't write children's books. C.S. Lewis, for example, may not have liked children very much, but he vividly remembered his childhood. His child characters, therefore, although adult-like in many ways, have responses that are rooted in childhood's common experiences. For instance, there is a delightful passage in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where Lucy "got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer." I remember reading that as a child and going, "Yes! Yes! That is the best feeling in the world."

On the other hand, C.S. Lewis provides his children with far more authority than your average child has--which is kind of the point. But "realistic" fiction (which, I have complained elsewhere, is sometimes terribly unrealistic) can't make that trade-off. In real life, children don't have power. Consequently, "realistic" children are given far more introspective thoughts about their powerlessness than I think they probably have.

But then, a lack of introspection would make such books pretty uninteresting. When I'm reading books of this type, I simply increase the age of the heroes or heroines in my mind: the hero isn't eleven, I tell myself; he's thirteen. And then I have no problem with the story at all!