The real Santa Claus is a very real person. No one can deny him without denying real history. He is so real that he is a historical person. He is so historical a person that he has become a legend. The result of this legend is that people have dropped history and made him in their own image and likeness. That is, they have made him a different Santa Claus, a false Santa Claus.
This false Santa Clans is known to all the shop-keepers and all the nurseries and parents of the world. Everyone knows the old gentleman with great white beard, the hale-and-hearty of generous dimensions, in flaming red coat and top boots, laden with parcels and bursting with presents lurking in all parts of his person, who comes down the chimneys (where they exist) and through other convenient apertures (where chimney!, don’t exist) and fills the waiting Christmas stockings all over the wide world.
False is false; but there is no great harm really in this false Santa Claus. If he did not exist (I mean, in his false way) it, would have been necessary to invent him. Another way of saying this is that he was found to be necessary, and someone therefore invented him. In most cases an imitation or perversion is a standing challenge and a grave annoyance to the original article. But,, I think, it is not so in the case of the false Santa Claus. Or, it is not so in the case of the true Santa Clans. From the character of the true Santa Claus (which we know from history) I think it must give him an enduring joy and a permanent satisfaction to think that there is the other, the false one, faithful to his false duty and delivering the goods every time.
On thinking more about it, I feel even confident that the real Santa Clans does not feel annoyed that a double of his should be going the round of the earth; that a rather delightful old impostor has taken it upon his shoulders to impersonate him everywhere and at every Christmas season and with such excellent success. The real Santa Claus could not be a bit jealous of the other one; cannot bring himself to ask the other to put an end to the masquerade; will not proceed against the other in a court of Canon Law to obtain a judicial mandamus to restrain or terminate the activities of the old (or, should it be, young) pretender.
False history is wicked, ‘false economics is ruinous, false philosophy is foul and detestable, and false doctrine is of the devil. But the false Santa Claus is an institution against whom no one has as yet said a word, not even the right Santa Claus. If there ever gets mooted a proposal to abolish the false Santa Claus, it is likely that the strongest objection would come from the authentic Santa Claus.
In such a case I indulge the fancy that the proper Santa Claus would draft a document and sign it on a Papal stamp to say: ‘Let it be known by these presents to the whole world that We, Santa Claus (real), do hereby empower, authorise and delegate Santa Claus (false) to carry on as before without let or hindrance, delay or disturbance’. As the fake Santa Claus has become so established and so old a diehard, there is a temptation, if not a reason, to think that the wrong one enjoys the active encouragement, confidence and full moral support of the right one.
That may be why the fictitious Santa Claus (as we can see ” from the admirable photographs available in plenty of him) is never timid or worried-looking but beaming and wreathed in smile, his rubicund face brimming over with happiness, and he himself quite sure of himself and also quite sure of his ground. He does not appear to come in like a breaker of the penal code in respect of false personation (though it is only too true that, in respect of Christmas presents, he comes in like a thief in the night) but like a free and lawful man, conscious of his rights and aware of and equal to his responsibilities.
The truth (as between the True and the False) is that, in spite of several differences, like the heathenish garb of the hypothetical and poetic Santa Claus, there is solid kinship and common ground between him and the verifiable Santa Claus of stark fact and undisputed historicity. The false Santa Claus is single; because the real one also was a celibate.
It is almost inconceivable that a man with a wife and children especially a wife, could go handing round lavish presents to all the children of the whole wide world. It is good also that Santa Claus the derivate is old: no selfish young man could have risen to his level of giving.
Santa Claus the authentic in the few pictures extent of him is old also. A personage of the fourth century, he would be in the Book of Life over a thousand six hundred years of age. He was deeply religious from early days, full of piety and charity, and when he entered religion there were no bounds to his charity. From Abbot he became Archbishop. He was an Asiatic; the See was Myra in Lycia, province of Asia Minor. He was an extraordinarily fervent lover of youth to whose welfare he devoted himself with abandon. He was so holy that he worked wonders of all ‘.sorts. Not long after his death he was canonized.
This genius Santa Claus was St. Nicholas of Myra. It is the corruption of his name (Sanctus Nicolaus) with which the other has been baptized. The saint is Patron of children; also of mariners, merchants, bakers, travellers and marriageable girls wanting dowries (the last patronage recalling the real fact that the Saint actually provided the marriage portion of girls who would otherwise have been lost). If St. Nicholas of Myra distributed corn in a famine, he did even better in fighting heresy. He was one of the three hundred and nineteen bishops at Nicea who condemned Arianism. It was well he battled for the Divinity of Christ, for that dogma, which saves everything, even saves the face of the mock Santa Claus, the champion of the Christmas stocking and the mere giver of the Christmas gift.
It is said that pious Neapolitan merchants shipwrecked in Asia Minor stole the miracle-working relics of the Saint and translated them to Bari in Italy. Thus St. Nicholas has come to be described as ‘of Myra’ or ‘of Bari’ in hagiography. The Saint’s feast falls on the sixth December: and there are nineteen days left to do the shopping and prepare the feast of the body as well as of the soul. From Santa Claus the Great and True it was easy to create Santa Claus the Less and the Spurious. One rib of the one sufficed for creating the other.