What’s the most widespread tradition in the British Isles? A couple of centuries ago, it would probably have been something horrible like bull-baiting. These days, it might be the Americanised trick-or-treating of Halloween. But I’m putting my money on Father Christmas.
Combined with his Coca-Cola-friendly twin Santa Claus, Father Christmas features in the midwinter festivities of 95% of UK families with Celtic or Anglo-Saxon ancestry – a leaky statistic based on a favourite app of mine called Informed But Speculative Conjecture.
Another equally ambitious app tracks the movement of Santa and his freight sleigh of reindeer-drawn benison (venison benison?) across the world’s skies on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day morning. He’s never early, and he’s never late. This is one of the many advantages of not really existing.
However, if granted a wish on the run-up to Christmas, many kids would indeed want Santa Claus/Father Christmas to arrive early to ease the torture of an Advent that, for the average pre-pubescent, seems as endless as a double maths lesson on a Friday afternoon. What many British kids don’t realise is that Santa does indeed turn up early in some parts of Europe – 19 days early, in fact.
In Czechia, I have often accompanied my children to St Nicholas parties on 5 December (St Nick’s Eve), where Nicholas (known locally as Mikuláš) offers bags of sweets for all partygoers willing to sing a Christmas song. My children always demanded guarantees that the sweet stash would be worth the agony of warbling in public, and the combined stress and sugar blow-out made this one of the unhealthiest days of the year for them.
The point being that St Nick, in his original guise, pre-empts Christmas by more than two weeks in Czechia and elsewhere in Catholic Europe. The Saint himself doesn’t sport Santa’s cuddly hat and tunic but wears an austere bishop’s mitre and carries a staff. He’s sometimes dressed in red, sometimes in white, and his two companions are an angel and a devil. These sidekicks dole out goodies or punishment, depending on the prevailing direction of the child’s moral compass over the previous 12 months. It’s like a mashup between a winner-takes-all gameshow and Catholic confession (or perhaps those two things aren’t as far apart as I thought at the beginning of this sentence).
Over the border in Austria, people take the devil aspect of the triumvirate more seriously, engaging in Krampus processions in which, to an unwitting bystander, gangs of orcs appear to be roaming the streets whipping girls. This devil figure has many manifestations across Europe, including Pieten in the Netherlands and Père Fouettard in France.
In Czechia, the devil is less scary, and the angel-devil relationship is more Good Omens than Doomsday. Their smiley faces beam from the Czech chocolate shelves in a manner no self-respecting Krampus would tolerate.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the identity of St Nick, Santa, Father Christmas and their respective elvish, angelic and demonic helpers is about as clear as the River Humber at high tide.
Santa’s iconography has largely ousted Father Christmas’ in much of Britain. Sartorially, Santa wears a red tunic belted at his ample waist and a separate red pompom hat. As the 19th-century illustrations of Santa by artists such as Thomas Nast were often in black and white, the red colour was not essential at this point; but by the time Coca-Cola came to appropriate Santa for their advertising in the 1930s, the conveniently Coke-red colours were firmly established.
Traditionally, Father Christmas has a more monkish, Gandalf-y look. He wears a long hooded, fur-trimmed gown, sometimes red, sometimes blue, white, green, or any other printer’s dye available to Victorian Christmas card manufacturers. He sometimes wears a crown of holly or other greenery and carries objects such as a Christmas tree, a Yule log, a wassail bowl, or even a cross.
Regardless of FC’s eclipse, his name is still widely used in the British Isles, even when, in reality, we’re talking about that Dutch-American interloper Santa Claus. But the line between the two is now so thin that nothing three-dimensional could possibly squeeze through.
It wasn’t always like this, though.
…the season, at this point in time, is associated with the adult world of feasting, drinking and Lord of Misrule-orchestrated debauchery
In the blue corner – Father Christmas
Father Christmas’ origins are opaque. It is tempting to imagine him as a pagan survivor from the days of Roman Saturnalia and Danish Yule, but there is no direct lineage (although he does share a long white beard with the Yule gift-bringer Odin/Woden. Then again, he also shares the beard with Charles Darwin and most other Victorian gentlemen of a certain age.) Pagan wishful thinking apart, Father Christmas embodies the Bacchanalian spirit of feasting and festivity long associated with the midwinter festival. The point being that there is no uninterrupted tradition of Father Christmas stretching back through the ages.
Father Christmas materialises as an allegorical symbol of the season rather than a flesh-and-blood person, first cropping up in the 15th-century carol Sir Christëmas and given more substance in Ben Johnson’s 1616 seasonal offering Christmas, His Masque, a kind of mummer’s play that invokes “A right Christmas, as of old it was”. The play condemns the Puritan party-poopers who disapprove of Christmas merrymaking:
Why gentlemen, do ye know what you do? ha? Would you ha’ kept me out? Christmas? Ould Christmas? Christmas of London, and Captain Christmas? … Tis merry in hall, when beards wag all: I ha’ seen the time yow ha’ wish’d for me, for a merry Christmas, and now ye ha’ me, they would not let me in: I must come another time: a good jest: as if I could come more, then once a year. Why? I am no dangerous person … I am old Gregorie Christmas still, and though I come out of Popes-head alley, as good a protestant as any in my Parish.
Old Christmas is still a largely symbolic figure in the play, embodying the season through his implausibly named children Carol, Misrule, Gambol, Offering, Wassail, Mumming, New-Year’s-Gift, Post and Pair (a card game), Minced-Pie and Baby-Cake. Venus and Cupid feature in the action, underlining a key point in the evolution of Father Christmas – the season, at this point in time, is associated with the adult world of feasting, drinking and Lord of Misrule-orchestrated debauchery. The association of Christmas with children, family and presents didn’t take root until the Victorian era.
So, this proto-Father Christmas is a nostalgic embodiment of an imagined, boozy Christmas Past. He gained extra wind in his sails when Christmas was banned in 1647 during the po-faced English Commonwealth, when those of a High Church Protestant, Royalist leaning adopted Father Christmas as a mascot. In the 1645 pamphlet The Arraignment, Conviction and Imprisonment of Christmas, a woman asks Oxford’s town crier, “Where is old Father Christmas gone?” The crier replies, “The poor old man … was arraigned, condemned, and after conviction cast into prison amongst the King’s Soldiers, fearing to be hanged”.
Father Christmas also features in a 1652 pamphlet titled The Vindication of Christmas. Six years later, The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas portrayed him as a man with a white beard and an old-fashioned fur-trimmed gown, rather like Ben Johnson’s earlier characterisation. In this pamphlet, FC is on trial for his life, guilty of unholy Bacchanalian excesses, but is acquitted by the jury (despite being obviously guilty of said crimes, a bit like modern high-profile court proceedings in the USA). It is the right to party that is truly on trial here, and come the Restoration of Charles I in 1660, Father Christmas was triumphant.
Only, he wasn’t. The victory of the Merry Monarch over the Miserable Puritan robbed FC of his leading role in promoting old-fashioned Christmas. The battle was won, and he semi-retired into a bit-part role in mumming plays. Although the feasting and quaffing continued, it was not until the 1840s and the high profile of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s Christmas celebrations that Father Christmas made a nation-conquering return. But by this point, the waters had been muddied by a different character altogether – Saint Nicholas.
And in the red corner – Saint Nick
Under Victoria, the emphasis was on children and family at Christmas. This notion was set in stone by Charles Dickens’ perennial A Christmas Carol, with its message of generosity, gift-giving and family as the things that make the world go round. Ironically, his Ghost of Christmas Present is a green-clad, Bacchus-like figure, looking more like the pre-Victorian gluttonous Old Christmas than the child-pleasing gift giver and haunter of chimneys. A finishing touch was required to ease this character into his role as kids’ favourite, and the answer came from an unlikely source – Saint Nicholas, a 4th-century Greek bishop from Myra in what is now Turkey.
There are many legends associated with Nicholas, including one in which he resurrects three boys who have been murdered and pickled. Closer to the Christmas theme is one in which Nicholas meets a poor man who is considering selling his daughters into slavery. That night, the saint anonymously tosses three bags of gold down the chimney to provide dowries for the girls. The gold coins land in their stockings, which are drying by the fire.
Bingo – the chimney, the Christmas stockings. The tradition of giving gifts on Saint Nicholas’ day began in the 11th century as an alms distribution to the poor in northern Europe. St Nick was soon delivering sweets and small gifts to children on the 5th of December, the eve of his feast day. He survived the Protestant Reformation’s attempts to dispose of the cults of the saints, and the gift-giving traditions travelled with Dutch fans of Saint Nicholas-Sinterklaas-Santa Claus to the USA in the 18th century – probably via New Amsterdam, later renamed New York.
Father Christmas had been employed in the 17th century to champion the cause of feasting and boozing, but in early 19th-century New York, Santa Claus (a version of the name first coined in Rivington’s New York Gazetteer in 1773) was roped in as part of a drive against such excesses. Moral reformers wanted a gentler, home-and-family orientated Christmas and the curbing of violent drunkenness.
This new version of Santa Claus was exactly the makeover Father Christmas’ UK marketing team were looking for.
In 1821, an anonymous illustrated poem, Old Santeclaus with Much Delight, introduced Santa’s red coat, reindeer, and sleigh and shifted his arrival to Christmas Eve instead of St. Nicholas’s Day. In 1823, New York Hebrew professor Clement Clark Moore further enhanced the legend in his poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (aka The Night Before Christmas). In the poem, Santa is called St. Nick and is described as “a right jolly old elf” with “clothes all tarnished with ashes and soot”, and a beard “as white as snow”. His chosen travel mode is flying reindeer and a sleigh.
This new version of Santa Claus was exactly the makeover Father Christmas’ UK marketing team were looking for. Restoration roaring and puking gave way to Victorian carolling and gift-giving; but it was not until the 1860s that the Santa/Father Christmas of today was fully formed. The imagery was patched together primarily by the artist Thomas Nast, who combined elements from St Nick and other seasonal figures such as Father Christmas, the German Belsnickel, the Dutch Pieten and the French Père Fouettard. It is generally agreed that the modern FC/Santa was established in Nast’s 1881 illustration, Merry Old Santa Claus. The holly and pipe disappeared when Haddon Sundblum repurposed Santa Claus for Coca-Cola in 1931.
Santa Claus arrived in England in 1864, appearing alongside Father Christmas in American author Susanna Warner’s Carl Krinken: His Christmas Stocking. In this tale, Santa Claus delivers gifts, while Father Christmas appears in a traditional mummer’s play. The touchpaper was alight, and the tradition of waiting for Santa at Christmas spread like wildfire, notably during the 1880s; although the nostalgic name ‘Father Christmas’ managed to survive.
And who do Czech children turn to at Christmas if St Nick has been and gone on December 5th, I hear someone at the back asking? Well, they receive a Christmas Eve call from someone a few rungs up from Santa on the folklore ladder – Ježíšek, the Baby Jesus himself. This is the same character as the Hungarian Jézuska, the Austrian Christkindl, the German Christkind, and several other versions across Europe and South America. In Czechia, when the children have been rounded up to go on a post-teatime walk on Christmas Eve, Ježíšek dumps presents under the Christmas tree and then zooms off on a cloud in a puff of unlikelihood.
Unlike Father Christmas/Santa, Baby Jesus doesn’t get to star in mumming plays or advertise tooth-rotting cola beverages. Meanwhile, the American Santa has invaded Czech shops and homes, and you have to wonder whether Ježíšek will eventually follow Guy Fawkes into the Traditions and Customs Retirement Home.
And if all that seems as clear as mud – well, that’s folklore, isn’t it?
Read more from Paul on his I’m A Stranger In Your Country channel on Substack
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I highly recomend the book “christmas: a Biography” by Judith Flanders. To quote from the introduction—
And yet, even while we consider ‘our’ Christmas customs to be the true ones, we – most people in the West today who celebrate Christmas – in reality don’t adhere to ‘our’ customs, but to an amalgam of traditions drawn primarily from the Anglo-American world and the German-speaking lands. These were then shaken up, mixed together with a couple of centuries of newspapers, magazines and books, not to mention a hundred years of radio, film and television, to end up not with one culture’s Christmas, but with something entirely new, a holiday that is recognized across the globe, but comes from nowhere in particular.
And it is that Christmas, that strange hybrid growth that we all think we know so well, so well that we possessively refer to it as ‘ours’, that is the holiday, its history, myths, traditions, stories and symbols, that we will now explore.”
That word ‘amalgam’ sums it up perfectly. Thanks for flagging Judith Flanders’ book, Cyril.
Father Christmas first visited Bournemouth’s Beales department store in 1885. He was dressed in red and this was his first ever appearance in a UK store. (Santa Claus had started taking up seasonal residence in New York’s Macys in 1862.)
In Bournemouth for the next century Father Christmas was welcomed every year in a street procession from the railway station to the store where he appeared on the balcony. It was like a Papal visit. Beales closed in 2020.