The battle to own Father Christmas

THIS being Christmas and the season of quizzes, here is a question to mull over: What links pawnbrokers, Coca-Cola and child-snatching?

The answer is: Father Christmas. Or should that be Santa Claus? Or Sinterklaas? Or Saint Nicholas?

The row over the origins of this large-bellied, chimney-clambering man are almost as much a constant of the season as turkey. But the disagreement has been taken to another level this week: the UN.

A German museum has applied for Father Christmas, in his specifically German form, to be added to the official Unesco list of 250 items that make up our Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Unesco's list of world heritage sites is fairly well known and includes blockbusters such as Stonehenge, the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon. But its sister list of intangible monuments is a little more difficult to pin down.

Backed by a yearly budget of $8-million (about R82-million), the list recognises cultural traditions that are either at risk of disappearing, or important to certain communities. Many are local festivals, songs or dances.

To give a flavour, here are some of the most recent additions to the list: The Paach corn veneration ritual celebrated in Guatemala; the Empaako child-naming system practised by the Batooro, Banyoro, Batuku, Batagwenda and Banyabindi tribes of west Uganda; and the Mediterranean diet of Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece and Morocco (surely more tangible than intangible).

However, neither the UK nor the US has signed up to this Unesco convention.

The campaign for jellied eels and Morris dancing will have to wait another day.

Felicitas Höptner, a director at the Deutsches Weihnachtsmuseum - German Christmas Museum - in the Bavarian city of Rothenburg, thinks that the German origins of Father Christmas are under threat.

She says he is not the rollicking, red-coated fat man of countless Hollywood films and adverts, and certainly not the pathetic versions, dressed in Poundland suits and stick-on beards, who upset children at the recent Milton Keynes winter wonderland.

"The real Weihnachtsmann, the German Father Christmas, is wearing a big coat with a hood, but not necessarily red. It could be yellow, green or brown," she said. "He is usually holding a Christmas tree with candles and, importantly, he is not always smiling; he is often very serious. And he is allowed to punish children as well as give them gifts."

She has competition on her hands. A rival application to make the Dutch festival of Saint Nicholas on December 6 a part of the intangible cultural heritage has already been lodged by the Saint Nicholas Society of the Netherlands.

Lucia Iglesias from Unesco points out that both bids can be successful, because the organisation does not make any judgments about which is better or more historic.

"It is not a beauty contest," she said. But the rival bids underline the slipperiness of so many folk traditions, especially those that fuse Christian saints with pagan rituals.

There have been midwinter festivals since the dawn of time, many of them raucous celebrations of darkness being conquered and the imminent return of spring. The Romans celebrated Saturnalia during the third week of December; evergreens were brought into homes and gifts exchanged. The Norse custom of Yule - putting aside the copious blood-letting - lent many features to Christmas.

As the centuries pass, vague paternalistic figures who act as master of ceremonies emerge.

And by the 1650s in England, the figure of Old Father Christmas, bearded with a fur cap, appears in royalist pamphlets, harking back to the pre-Puritan days of feasting and good cheer.

None of these figures is the Father Christmas we know. He arrived - as with nearly all aspects of modern Christmas - only between 1820 and 1850, when Prince Albert brought many German rituals to the English court and Charles Dickens was in his prime. But to attribute the bearded, gift-giving figure to one particular country or specific culture would be a mistake.

"Father Christmas and Santa Claus are clearly one and the same thing," said Mark Connelly, a historian at the University of Kent at Canterbury and author of Christmas: A Social History. "Father Christmas comes from the same North European tradition of Saint Nicholas. It's just that Saint Nicholas never really arrived in England."

Legend has it that Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Myra (in modern-day Turkey), rescued three boys whom a wicked innkeeper had cast into a brine butt to sell as pickled pork. This explains why he is the patron saint of children. He also threw three bags of gold down a chimney to help an old man who had been forced to sell his three daughters into prostitution - the three bags are now the international sign for pawnbrokers (why it is not the sign for brothels is a mystery lost in time).

His saint's day - associated with high jinks and a child being elected a bishop - was celebrated in England until it was outlawed by Henry VIII, a few years before the king decided that all Catholic rituals should be abolished.

However, St Nicholas's Day flourished in protestant Germany and particularly in the Netherlands - children, on the evening of December 5, would put out shoes next to the fire for him to place gifts in. Sinterklaas, as he is known there, is accompanied by his black-faced servant Black Peter, who punishes or kidnaps bad children.

"Black Peters are all part of a child-snatching tradition that is very big in Northern Europe," said Connelly. "It fits into the Pied Piper tale, stories about gypsies. Parents use these stories of reward and punishment to bring about obedience, but also to act out their own fears through their children."

The Dutch application to Unesco rather optimistically tries to explain that the reason Saint Nicholas's companion is black-faced is because of the soot from the chimney. When Dutch settlers took Sinterklaas across the Atlantic with them, he soon became Santa Claus. And it was in the US in 1822 that Clement C Moore, a New York minister, wrote The Visit of St Nicholas or, as it is more commonly known, The Night Before Christmas.

It sets in stone various key aspects: reindeers called Vixen and Prancer, a sleigh, a sack of toys and a rosy-cheeked, white-bearded and round-bellied man.

But the colour of his coat is not described. Twenty-one years later, when Dickens published A Christmas Carol, the illustration of the ghost of Christmas Present was a great bear of a smiling figure, wearing a fur-trimmed green coat.

The first definitive red-suited fat man was drawn by a German-born American, Thomas Nast. He illustrated the poem in 1881 in Harper's Weekly. This is indisputably a modern Santa or Father Christmas, with gifts under his arm and a pipe in his mouth.

"Colour printing was still expensive in the 1880s, but it was starting to be used in magazines and advertising," said Connelly. "And pillar-box, fire-engine red is far more arresting than green. It was just wonderfully serendipitous that the livery of Coca-Cola is the same shade of red."

When the fizzy drinks manufacturer used a similar figure to Nast's red-suited Santa in a 1931 advert, "they gave it a final, definitive kick up the back-side. From then on, Father Christmas was red and white," said Connelly.

Höptner says her bid is so important because German children think Coca-Cola's Santa is the same as Weihnachtsmann. "They are different. And if we lose our different customs we lose our culture," she said.

But, as Connelly argues, to sneer at the jolly US version while hailing the Bavarian one is to "overstate the differences between Anglo-Saxon and American culture in the final years of the 19th century. There is a real dialogue across the Atlantic."

Santa informed Father Christmas and vice versa. They are not that different. Santa may be more sanitised, but that is true of so much post-war children's culture. And whether Höptner realises it or not, decrying the commercialisation of Father Christmas is as much of a festive tradition as arguing over the origins of Father Christmas.

George Bernard Shaw, 120 years ago, wrote: "Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages."

And bah humbug to you, too.