Better Not Pout
This evening's All Things Considered had an interesting segment on the German figure of Weihnachtsmann, or Christmas Man, which (apart from sounding like a track from an And One holiday single) has actually generated enough discontent to spawn the opposing Anti-Weihnachtsmann-Kampagne. Weihnachtsmann borrows heavily from the American version of Santa Claus, which is a strange enough concept in and of itself. Our Santa - before being revised and embellished through Clement Clarke Moore's The Night Before Christmas, Thomas Nast's illustration for Harper's, and a series of festive Coke ads - originally sprouted from Sinter Klaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas. Germany has its own Saint Nicholas - an entity separate from and competing with Wiehnachtsmann. The Anti-Weihnachtsmann folks would like to see a return to characters more symbolically and historically rich than Christmas Man. "A fat man in a red suit means nothing," proclaimed one man interviewed on the ATC segment. Saint Nicholas, according to standard Christian accounts, was a bishop who lived in the fourth century in what is now Turkey, who was known for distributing presents to poor children. I don't know that I prefer a fourth century bishop from Turkey to a fat man in a red suit from the North Pole; it's not as if the standard Christian version of things seems any more plausible than the whole reindeer and chimney thing (I am not even a little bit religious). I do remember waking up in the middle of the night hearing noise from downstairs and being completely and unquestioningly convinced that Santa was at this minute rummaging around in my kitchen cupboards.
Speaking of Christmas, The Morning News has an excellent Leslie Harpold column up on that very subject, and I'd like to mention that when I first went to grab the link for it, I typed morningnews.org and discovered a long-lost cousin of Christmas Man: none other than Domain Man.
As for my own festivities, I'm safely nestled in at the parents' for the duration. I've developed my annual Christmas cold right on schedule and am being fed large quantities of tea and soup, and I have to say that if you're going to be sick in the middle of winter, there are worse places to be sick than your Mum's house.
