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Description
Ho ho hell yeah it's December bitches! Yeah I know this time of year should really fill me with dread as a retail worker and… okay yeah, it does (please be responsible with your shopping habits, folks), but I can't help it. I love the holiday season. I'm that asshole who actually likes the Christmas songs on repeat everywhere. I often lean into the cynical bitch routine in these blurbs, but that's entirely for the bit. In reality, I'm a complete and utter sap who cries over puppy TikToks, and there's nothing sappier than Christmas. So whether you celebrate Yule, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just another Monday, it doesn't matter! I hope y'all have a safe, warm, and happy holiday season, from the bottom of my heart. If no one else has told you yet: you matter, you made it another year, and you deserve a second chance. If you have been told that, go tell someone else. You never know when they'll need it.

I wanted to take the opportunity to draft up some designs for the classic holiday characters, and who better to start with than the jolly old elf himself? He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he'll snog your mom and hit-and-run your grandma, so be good for goodness sake. It's my main man Santa Claus! I struggle to conceive of a corner of the globe that hasn't at least heard of Santa Claus, but you'll not find me leaving future archeologists begging for missing context, so let's go over the basics anyways: There's a magic fat man who lives at the North Pole, who prepares for Christmas Eve all year round by tallying a list of which children have been naughty and which have been nice. For the nice children, he has his sweatshop full of elves tinker up the perfect toys, while the naughty children just get a lump of coal in their stocking. Every night before Christmas, when the children are fast asleep, Santa loads up his magic sleigh pulled by eight flying reindeer and rockets around the world delivering these gifts by smuggling his fat ass up and down the chimney. The kids wake up to find presents under their tree, the milk and cookies they left out overnight completely devoured, and if they're extra good and the night is especially magical, they might even catch the fleeting sound of jingle bells and a hearty “ho-ho-ho” flying away into the night. So that's all a bit silly, weirdly specific, and just a tiny bit creepy, so how did we end up with this omniscient gift-giver judging us all from the top of the world in the first place?

I feel I should start by dispelling one myth around the origins of Santa Claus: Santa isn't the Norse god Odin. I honestly don't know where this claim got started, but you often see it pop up in buzz word articles and popular fantasy settings around this time of year. I guess I could see where these two overlap if like… you squint really hard and stick your fingers in your ears. Aside from the big white beard, there's pretty much nothing that the characters have in common with one another. Odin is a crotchety old necromancer who will 100% screw over everyone and anyone even if it just amounts to getting a little more mustard on his sandwich than the guy to his left. Santa Claus, meanwhile, is a jolly representation of generosity and the importance of love and family during the most trying and cold time of the year. Santa may be a bit of a trickster at times, but his mischief is almost always revealed to have been a way to teach the protagonist the true meaning of Christmas by the end of the story. The strongest claim people usually point to in order to draw a line between Odin and Santa is to invoke the Wild Hunt, a winter-time procession of dead spirits through the sky looking for new souls to abduct into their ghostly ranks. To me, that seems about as different from Santa's Christmas Eve run as chalk and cheese, but sure, I guess I can see how someone might make the connection. Odin is said to be the leader of this hunt sometimes, but not always, or even most of the time. That's not even to mention that there's an entire flame war to be started over whether or not there even was a Wild Hunt, or if it was just a figment of Jacob Grimm's imagination. Me personally, I'm in the skeptical camp, I think Grimm just got caught in a mythological mirage and the Wild Hunt was a much later invention.

I honestly think trying to turn Santa into Odin is an overcorrection born out of this idea that Christmas is actually pagan holiday, or worse it's a stolen pagan holiday which… I really see no reason to subscribe to. Yes, modern Christmas has a lot of elements which originated in pagan festivals, but let's be real with ourselves: staying indoors where its warm, putting up festive decorations, telling mythical stories, and getting absolutely shitfaced with friends and family were never exactly destined to be a strictly “pagan” tradition, now were they? Our modern Christmas has been a very Christian holiday for a very long time, and I think that's perfectly okay. I say all this as a Heathen myself, I literally just gave offerings to the goddesses Frigg and Freyja the day before writing this, don't @ me. Honestly, if you really wanted to connect Santa to a Norse god, wouldn't it make more sense to link him to Thor? Thor's a bearded absolute unit who can't resist a good festivity, a protective champion of the less fortunate, and rides through the sky on a chariot pulled by magical flying ungulates. Hell, two of Santa's reindeer are even named Donner and Blitzen, the Dutch words for “thunder” and “lightning” respectively. Coincidence?? Yes, yes probably.

Okay, all that housecleaning out of the way, we can instead find the actual origins of Santa Claus deeply embedded in Catholic tradition. We start with a man named Saint Nicholas, who possibly did exist, but he's one of those figures whose biography has just been so overridden with myth and legend over the centuries that we probably have no hope of reconstructing his real history. Tradition has it that he was a Greco-Roman citizen born in the coastal Anatolian city of Patara, sometime in the 3rd century CE, and he was raised by his uncle, whom he'd eventually succeed as Bishop of Myra. The historical Saint Nick is a whole character in his own right which I'd like to cover separately some other day, as his life is full of all sorts of nutty adventures which, while entertaining, aren't really relevant to the Santa Claus myth. For our purposes today, Saint Nick is primarily venerated as a protector of children, the poor, and the less fortunate. The most famous legend which may have influenced the modern mythos has it that Saint Nick snuck into a poor man's house in the middle of the night to gift him the dowry he'd need to keep his daughters out of slavery. A less relevant legend put Saint Nicholas at Constantine's famous Council of Nicaea, presiding over the trial of the Arian Heresy. As the story goes, Saint Nick got so pissed off at the tribble spewing out of Arius's mouth that he got out of his seat, strode across the room, and socked the heretic right in the nose. I bring this up because A: the juxtaposition of Santa clocking a guy's lights out is just really fucking funny to me, and B: it means that Santa is canonically ready, willing, and able to thoroughly deck someone's halls.

Tradition has it that Saint Nick died on December 6, which is why his feast day is celebrated on that date. In the Netherlands, an old tradition on Saint Nicholas Day is for children to leave shoes out in hopes of getting some kind of present or treat left for them when “Sinterklaas” comes to visit. I'm sure you can see how this eventually morphed into our modern Christmas stockings. Sinterklaas festivals are still a staple in the Netherlands today, featuring parades, merriment, feasting, and basically everything else that Martin Luther absolutely despised. See, to early Protestants, Christmas was an evil Catholic holiday which just served as an excuse to party and get drunk. You know, cause life isn't about such wastes of time as “social interaction” and “fun” no no, life is clearly about spending as much time as possible locked in a dusty old church praising Jesus like a broken record! I mean come on, if God wanted us to celebrate Christmas, then why isn't it in the Bible, hmmmm? Checkmate, papists. On paper, the veneration of saints was also a big no no to early Protestants… but when venerating a saint comes with lavish feasts and baller parties like Saint Nick, it turns out it's kind of hard to convince people to give that up. In response, Martin Luther decided to slap together an OC, the Christkindl (Christ Child), a baby Jesus who would replace Sinterklaas as the holiday gift-giver in order to redirect the praise. As you can probably guess from its cognate “Kris Kringle” being a common alternative name for Santa, this plan massively backfired as people just started seeing the kid as a variant of Saint Nick anyways. Fuck you, Martin Luther.

The Dutch first brought the Sinterklaas tradition to their American colony of New Amsterdam in 1642. The British, of course, would assume control of the city in 1664, renaming it “New York”. Why they changed it, I can't say (people just liked it better that way), but Sinterklaas underwent a similar rebranding the more British things got, shifting into our most recognizable “Santa Claus” by the 19th century. At this point, it was early American poetry which really accelerated the evolution into our modern idea of Santa Claus. Washington Irving proudly touted this old Dutch custom in his 1809 book Knickerbocker's History of New York, incorporating the image of a flying gift-giver with his advocacy to return to the Christmas customs of old England and all their festive glory. So what if we all get drunk and beat the shit out of one another in the snowy streets? We'd just won our independence and that's the American way goddammit! By far though, the poem A Visit From St. Nicholas has had the biggest impact on the Santa motif. Also known as The Night Before Christmas, it was first published in the the Troy Sentinel newspaper in 1823. Clement Clarke Moore is usually cited as the author, though there's some debate as originally it was published anonymously. Regardless, this poem sets up our classic Santa tropes: his fat jiggly belly, the names of his eight reindeer, coming down the chimney to stuff stockings and leave gifts, etc. Honestly the only thing we're missing here is his sweatshop full of elves, which is a history I'd like to cover in its own blurb some other day.

There's certainly much more I could go into regarding Santa's adoption by American culture over the course of the late 19th century onwards. Political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a famous poster of Santa in 1881 as a way to garner support for the military, and the fat man has long since been invoked in wartime propaganda as a shared American icon which all manner of patriots could unite around. Coca-Cola meanwhile has famously used Santa as a winter mascot since at least 1930, which has led to the urban myth that Coke's artist Haddon Sundblom invented Santa's outfit as a marketing scheme. Not to deny that the originally charitable Saint Nick has absolutely become a grubby symbol of America's dirty consumerism, but the truth is that our modern image of Santa does in fact predate Coke's iconography. Like all things in America, its use in advertising has just made it more popular than it ever was before. I prefer to leave my cynic hat at the door on Christmas, though. So I'll leave it at that, and we'll keep these things light. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Design notes, coming immediately off the heels of that last paragraph, we all have a pretty standard silhouette of what Santa and his get-up looks like ingrained in our heads. The real challenge, therefore, was coming up with something unique yet recognizable. I knew I wanted to keep some of his more “saintly” aspects but that turned out to be more generic than I figured. I gave him a pallium based on an icon painted by Jaroslav Čermák (which was also the inspiration for his jewelry here) with layering supplemented by a 18th century design from a monastery on Kizhi Island. His arms and the overall pattern work on his coat fabric was primarily inspired by a 1294 icon painted for the Lipno Church. Turning to more “Santa” references, I primarily looked at some postcards which sadly I wasn't able to provenance beyond vaguely WW1-ish. Googling “Santa postcards” unsurprisingly doesn't help narrow it down, thanks Guardian. I struggled with his hair and beard for a while, but ultimately I decided to turn it into a mix of the Nast drawing and typical Sinterklaas costumes. That squarish beard ended up cooperating with me much more than the typical ice cream swirl sort of style. I'm honestly quite happy with this. There's certainly room for touch ups and minor changes here and there, but I'd be comfortable enough putting this in a little Christmas picture book, and I think that’s more than enough to keep me a distance away from Arius's spot on the naughty list.

Description
Ho ho hell yeah it's December bitches! Yeah I know this time of year should really fill me with dread as a retail worker and… okay yeah, it does (please be responsible with your shopping habits, folks), but I can't help it. I love the holiday season. I'm that asshole who actually likes the Christmas songs on repeat everywhere. I often lean into the cynical bitch routine in these blurbs, but that's entirely for the bit. In reality, I'm a complete and utter sap who cries over puppy TikToks, and there's nothing sappier than Christmas. So whether you celebrate Yule, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or just another Monday, it doesn't matter! I hope y'all have a safe, warm, and happy holiday season, from the bottom of my heart. If no one else has told you yet: you matter, you made it another year, and you deserve a second chance. If you have been told that, go tell someone else. You never know when they'll need it.

I wanted to take the opportunity to draft up some designs for the classic holiday characters, and who better to start with than the jolly old elf himself? He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he'll snog your mom and hit-and-run your grandma, so be good for goodness sake. It's my main man Santa Claus! I struggle to conceive of a corner of the globe that hasn't at least heard of Santa Claus, but you'll not find me leaving future archeologists begging for missing context, so let's go over the basics anyways: There's a magic fat man who lives at the North Pole, who prepares for Christmas Eve all year round by tallying a list of which children have been naughty and which have been nice. For the nice children, he has his sweatshop full of elves tinker up the perfect toys, while the naughty children just get a lump of coal in their stocking. Every night before Christmas, when the children are fast asleep, Santa loads up his magic sleigh pulled by eight flying reindeer and rockets around the world delivering these gifts by smuggling his fat ass up and down the chimney. The kids wake up to find presents under their tree, the milk and cookies they left out overnight completely devoured, and if they're extra good and the night is especially magical, they might even catch the fleeting sound of jingle bells and a hearty “ho-ho-ho” flying away into the night. So that's all a bit silly, weirdly specific, and just a tiny bit creepy, so how did we end up with this omniscient gift-giver judging us all from the top of the world in the first place?

I feel I should start by dispelling one myth around the origins of Santa Claus: Santa isn't the Norse god Odin. I honestly don't know where this claim got started, but you often see it pop up in buzz word articles and popular fantasy settings around this time of year. I guess I could see where these two overlap if like… you squint really hard and stick your fingers in your ears. Aside from the big white beard, there's pretty much nothing that the characters have in common with one another. Odin is a crotchety old necromancer who will 100% screw over everyone and anyone even if it just amounts to getting a little more mustard on his sandwich than the guy to his left. Santa Claus, meanwhile, is a jolly representation of generosity and the importance of love and family during the most trying and cold time of the year. Santa may be a bit of a trickster at times, but his mischief is almost always revealed to have been a way to teach the protagonist the true meaning of Christmas by the end of the story. The strongest claim people usually point to in order to draw a line between Odin and Santa is to invoke the Wild Hunt, a winter-time procession of dead spirits through the sky looking for new souls to abduct into their ghostly ranks. To me, that seems about as different from Santa's Christmas Eve run as chalk and cheese, but sure, I guess I can see how someone might make the connection. Odin is said to be the leader of this hunt sometimes, but not always, or even most of the time. That's not even to mention that there's an entire flame war to be started over whether or not there even was a Wild Hunt, or if it was just a figment of Jacob Grimm's imagination. Me personally, I'm in the skeptical camp, I think Grimm just got caught in a mythological mirage and the Wild Hunt was a much later invention.

I honestly think trying to turn Santa into Odin is an overcorrection born out of this idea that Christmas is actually pagan holiday, or worse it's a stolen pagan holiday which… I really see no reason to subscribe to. Yes, modern Christmas has a lot of elements which originated in pagan festivals, but let's be real with ourselves: staying indoors where its warm, putting up festive decorations, telling mythical stories, and getting absolutely shitfaced with friends and family were never exactly destined to be a strictly “pagan” tradition, now were they? Our modern Christmas has been a very Christian holiday for a very long time, and I think that's perfectly okay. I say all this as a Heathen myself, I literally just gave offerings to the goddesses Frigg and Freyja the day before writing this, don't @ me. Honestly, if you really wanted to connect Santa to a Norse god, wouldn't it make more sense to link him to Thor? Thor's a bearded absolute unit who can't resist a good festivity, a protective champion of the less fortunate, and rides through the sky on a chariot pulled by magical flying ungulates. Hell, two of Santa's reindeer are even named Donner and Blitzen, the Dutch words for “thunder” and “lightning” respectively. Coincidence?? Yes, yes probably.

Okay, all that housecleaning out of the way, we can instead find the actual origins of Santa Claus deeply embedded in Catholic tradition. We start with a man named Saint Nicholas, who possibly did exist, but he's one of those figures whose biography has just been so overridden with myth and legend over the centuries that we probably have no hope of reconstructing his real history. Tradition has it that he was a Greco-Roman citizen born in the coastal Anatolian city of Patara, sometime in the 3rd century CE, and he was raised by his uncle, whom he'd eventually succeed as Bishop of Myra. The historical Saint Nick is a whole character in his own right which I'd like to cover separately some other day, as his life is full of all sorts of nutty adventures which, while entertaining, aren't really relevant to the Santa Claus myth. For our purposes today, Saint Nick is primarily venerated as a protector of children, the poor, and the less fortunate. The most famous legend which may have influenced the modern mythos has it that Saint Nick snuck into a poor man's house in the middle of the night to gift him the dowry he'd need to keep his daughters out of slavery. A less relevant legend put Saint Nicholas at Constantine's famous Council of Nicaea, presiding over the trial of the Arian Heresy. As the story goes, Saint Nick got so pissed off at the tribble spewing out of Arius's mouth that he got out of his seat, strode across the room, and socked the heretic right in the nose. I bring this up because A: the juxtaposition of Santa clocking a guy's lights out is just really fucking funny to me, and B: it means that Santa is canonically ready, willing, and able to thoroughly deck someone's halls.

Tradition has it that Saint Nick died on December 6, which is why his feast day is celebrated on that date. In the Netherlands, an old tradition on Saint Nicholas Day is for children to leave shoes out in hopes of getting some kind of present or treat left for them when “Sinterklaas” comes to visit. I'm sure you can see how this eventually morphed into our modern Christmas stockings. Sinterklaas festivals are still a staple in the Netherlands today, featuring parades, merriment, feasting, and basically everything else that Martin Luther absolutely despised. See, to early Protestants, Christmas was an evil Catholic holiday which just served as an excuse to party and get drunk. You know, cause life isn't about such wastes of time as “social interaction” and “fun” no no, life is clearly about spending as much time as possible locked in a dusty old church praising Jesus like a broken record! I mean come on, if God wanted us to celebrate Christmas, then why isn't it in the Bible, hmmmm? Checkmate, papists. On paper, the veneration of saints was also a big no no to early Protestants… but when venerating a saint comes with lavish feasts and baller parties like Saint Nick, it turns out it's kind of hard to convince people to give that up. In response, Martin Luther decided to slap together an OC, the Christkindl (Christ Child), a baby Jesus who would replace Sinterklaas as the holiday gift-giver in order to redirect the praise. As you can probably guess from its cognate “Kris Kringle” being a common alternative name for Santa, this plan massively backfired as people just started seeing the kid as a variant of Saint Nick anyways. Fuck you, Martin Luther.

The Dutch first brought the Sinterklaas tradition to their American colony of New Amsterdam in 1642. The British, of course, would assume control of the city in 1664, renaming it “New York”. Why they changed it, I can't say (people just liked it better that way), but Sinterklaas underwent a similar rebranding the more British things got, shifting into our most recognizable “Santa Claus” by the 19th century. At this point, it was early American poetry which really accelerated the evolution into our modern idea of Santa Claus. Washington Irving proudly touted this old Dutch custom in his 1809 book Knickerbocker's History of New York, incorporating the image of a flying gift-giver with his advocacy to return to the Christmas customs of old England and all their festive glory. So what if we all get drunk and beat the shit out of one another in the snowy streets? We'd just won our independence and that's the American way goddammit! By far though, the poem A Visit From St. Nicholas has had the biggest impact on the Santa motif. Also known as The Night Before Christmas, it was first published in the the Troy Sentinel newspaper in 1823. Clement Clarke Moore is usually cited as the author, though there's some debate as originally it was published anonymously. Regardless, this poem sets up our classic Santa tropes: his fat jiggly belly, the names of his eight reindeer, coming down the chimney to stuff stockings and leave gifts, etc. Honestly the only thing we're missing here is his sweatshop full of elves, which is a history I'd like to cover in its own blurb some other day.

There's certainly much more I could go into regarding Santa's adoption by American culture over the course of the late 19th century onwards. Political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a famous poster of Santa in 1881 as a way to garner support for the military, and the fat man has long since been invoked in wartime propaganda as a shared American icon which all manner of patriots could unite around. Coca-Cola meanwhile has famously used Santa as a winter mascot since at least 1930, which has led to the urban myth that Coke's artist Haddon Sundblom invented Santa's outfit as a marketing scheme. Not to deny that the originally charitable Saint Nick has absolutely become a grubby symbol of America's dirty consumerism, but the truth is that our modern image of Santa does in fact predate Coke's iconography. Like all things in America, its use in advertising has just made it more popular than it ever was before. I prefer to leave my cynic hat at the door on Christmas, though. So I'll leave it at that, and we'll keep these things light. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Design notes, coming immediately off the heels of that last paragraph, we all have a pretty standard silhouette of what Santa and his get-up looks like ingrained in our heads. The real challenge, therefore, was coming up with something unique yet recognizable. I knew I wanted to keep some of his more “saintly” aspects but that turned out to be more generic than I figured. I gave him a pallium based on an icon painted by Jaroslav Čermák (which was also the inspiration for his jewelry here) with layering supplemented by a 18th century design from a monastery on Kizhi Island. His arms and the overall pattern work on his coat fabric was primarily inspired by a 1294 icon painted for the Lipno Church. Turning to more “Santa” references, I primarily looked at some postcards which sadly I wasn't able to provenance beyond vaguely WW1-ish. Googling “Santa postcards” unsurprisingly doesn't help narrow it down, thanks Guardian. I struggled with his hair and beard for a while, but ultimately I decided to turn it into a mix of the Nast drawing and typical Sinterklaas costumes. That squarish beard ended up cooperating with me much more than the typical ice cream swirl sort of style. I'm honestly quite happy with this. There's certainly room for touch ups and minor changes here and there, but I'd be comfortable enough putting this in a little Christmas picture book, and I think that’s more than enough to keep me a distance away from Arius's spot on the naughty list.