The making of a merry myth

Santa can still be a useful adjunct to the winter solstice. If there is a child whom you especially dislike, just ask it quietly what it hopes will be coming down the chimney and the little beast will cringe away, and stay away, in embarrassment. Otherwise Santa’s time is up. He cannot even safely go home to the United States, where liberals would like him banned for breaching the constitutional divide between church and state, while neo-conservatives find he offends their religious beliefs. Devout Christians may hope that, when the fat old chap in the red rompers quits the scene, he will make room for the Child whose festival it was once supposed to be.

Jeremy Seal had the good idea of telling us how Santa took over. His best aides were his daughters, Anna and Lizzie, although he had better keep their schoolmates away from his book in case they condemn the little girls for credulity and soppiness. His mistake was to go searching for the old boy’s progenitor, the fourth-century bishop of Myra (now Demre), whose name was rendered into ‘the Americanised form of Sinterklaas, the common Dutch agglutination of Sint Nicolaas’. An eponymous saint, three centuries later, was assimilated to explain Nicholas’s skill in assisting pre-compass navigators.

The quest for Nicholas of Myra involved the author in fossicking around the eastern Mediterranean, in places where the saint’s memory, wiped away by Islam, is being uncertainly restored by the promoters of Turkish tourism. Nicholas was not there, having been thoroughly dismembered 1,000 years ago by various crusaders and Italian marauders. Bits of him, in the form of dodgy relics, are claimed by churches from Antalya to Aarhus and a dozen intermediate places under both Catholic and Orthodox jurisdiction (there are, it seems, ten St Nicholas churches in Yaroslavl).