Until a hundred years ago, Father Christmas lived in the ‘suspended’ world of fantasy, like so many other fairy tale characters. For the most part, fairy tale books described Father Christmas’s home as a large castle made of ice, set in a fairy world that the old man only left on 24 December, for a quick terrestrial foray there and back. However, some local traditions gave more concrete answers: in Holland (and in communities of Dutch immigrants to the United States) there was the bizarre belief that Santa Claus routinely lived in Spain, a curious detail that remained intact until the late 19th century. In some parts of the United States, Father Christmas was depicted as something between a toymaker and a good wizard, born ‘who knows when’ in an indeterminate north of Germany. The location at the North Pole dates back to 1886: it was Thomas Nast, the American cartoonist who most contributed to fixing the iconography of Santa Claus with a series of themed illustrations that appeared annually in Harper’s Weekly, starting in 1863. In the late 1880s, the American cartoonist was asked to paint Santa Claus inside his home, intent on his everyday life: Nast offered his audience some glimpses of Father Christmas’s home, which was located in Santaclausville, N.P. (North Pole). It should be emphasised that, at the time when Nast printed the cartoon, the Arctic Circle was still largely unexplored and no one had a clear idea of what was hiding in the middle of those icy moors: it was entirely ‘plausible’ to imagine that it was among the eternal snows that the wonderful ice palace in which many believed Father Christmas lived was located. Moreover, the North Pole was not a sovereign state and was equidistant from all the countries bordering the Arctic Circle: in short, the geographical coordinates of Father Christmas’s home had been chosen by Nast with great care, precisely to convey to the public an apolitical message of universality. A few decades later, Father Christmas was forced to move house: it was the year 1939 and in December, the Russo-Finnish war broke out. The political proximity of Finland to the Western states had long worried the Soviet Union; there were disputed territories, over which both Russia and Finland claimed sovereignty; globally, on the Soviet side, there was a marked conviction that the pro-Western ideology of Helsinki could endanger the policy pursued by the government in Moscow: the Soviet Union declared war on Finland on 30 November 1939 and the aggression aroused considerable outrage in international public opinion. It was in this context that the Christmas twist that no one would imagine took place: it was December, Christmas was only a few days away, and the Russian aggression against Finland continued violently, arousing a growing sense of outrage in international observers. One day, live on the radio from Helsinki, an American journalist working as a war correspondent at CBS opened his report by saying that he was ‘on the line from Finland, the country where the legend of Santa Claus and his reindeer originated’; in the days immediately following, other commentators joined the game. Nothing was true, in many ways: it was a total historical fallacy that Finland was ‘the country where the legend of Santa Claus originated’; furthermore, the cult of St. Nicholas had never been particularly vibrant on the Scandinavian peninsula, so that until the late 19th century, it was the Julbok, a mysterious goat-like being who brought Christmas presents to good children; at the turn of the century, his place was taken by the nisser, little goblins who were benevolent to those who honoured them properly. Santa Claus was a virtually non-existent figure in Scandinavian folklore that had begun to make itself known in the first decades of the 20th century thanks to the progressive Americanisation of those areas: it was an ‘imported product’. The only notable exception: in December 1927, while hosting a children’s radio programme, presenter Markus Rautio jokingly speculated that Father Christmas might live somewhere in Lapland, a region that he said presented the perfect habitat for him, with plenty of snow on which to run his sleigh, mosses to feed the reindeer, plenty of vodka to keep him merry on lonely nights, and long, isolated winters that are good for those who don’t like to mix with people. The presenter also thought he had found a possible location for Santa’s house: Korvatunturi, a small mountain on the eastern border of Finland. In the local language, the name of the plateau literally means ‘Mount Ear’, and Rautio had liked to imagine that, living on Mount Ear, Father Christmas would be able to hear everything the children said from afar, thus verifying their goodness of heart. But, until 1939, those words had remained an isolated case: it was US commentators who gave Santa Claus a Lappish provenance in 1939: his new residence in Finland was purely political, a propaganda move aimed at emphasising the goodness of a nation incessantly bombed by the Soviet Union. As if today anyone would start saying that poor Father Christmas actually lives in Kiev. Father Christmas never left his home in Finland: he stoically remained there throughout the duration of the Finnish-Russian conflict and then the Second World War. From the early post-war period, he even began to show himself around: every now and then, in December, a figure dressed as Father Christmas would wander around the villages of Rovaniemi and Napapiiri, on the slopes of Mount Korvatunturi, to the delight of adults and children alike. In 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, as the US delegate to the UN General Assembly, wanted to visit Finland to see how the post-war reconstruction of Lapland was progressing. The Finnish government organised the tour so that Eleanor Roosevelt could see the reconstruction of the small wooden cottage that Father Christmas had used as a post office and in which he had recently been able to start processing children’s mail from all over the world again, also thanks to the valuable and active economic cooperation of the UN. Even today, the small wooden structure of the Roosevelt Cottage still stands in Rovaniemi, unchanged despite the passing years. Today, Father Christmas Village is a real amusement park that welcomes tourists twelve months a year, in a fairy-tale atmosphere made even more magical by the twinkling lights of the northern lights. All thanks to the valuable and active collaboration of the 1940s wartime propaganda UN.
Read the original, full article on Unapennaspuntata.com
Read more on the subject:
Judith Flanders, Christmas. A History (Picador, 2018)
Nick Page, Christmas. Tradition, Truth and Total Baubles (Hodder & Stoughton, 2020)
