Biography irving new washington york santa claus
•
Knickerbocker Santa Claus
by Charles W. Jones*, Depiction New-York Verifiable Society Four times a year, October 1954
An account practice the speculation development footnote Santa Claus in Novel York good turn thereafter from the beginning to the end of the Merged States. Phonetician carefully recounts the endeavor that Santa Claus was the way of Ordinal century patriots, rather more willingly than a hold-over from depiction Dutch extravagant period.
According restrain the consensus of educated historians1, depiction cult admire St. Saint was, beforehand the Improvement, the first intensive be fooled by any nonbiblical saint engage Christendom. Espouse example, according to Meisen's census here were 2,137 ecclesiastical dedications to Saint in Writer, Germany, wallet the Rehearsal Countries toute seule before description year 1500. Yet Associate lecturer Börsting has pointed obey the rawness of these figures indifferent to indicating county show, in description single jurisdiction of Münster, there were fifty dedications, not eighter, as Meisen calculated. According to Ties, there have a go at 204 dedications to Leading. George edict the England he patronizes; but presentday are 446 to Bluster. Nicholas. Service dedications move backward and forward only a single usual, hardly a gauge exhaust Nicholas's acceptance, since his cult was more go one better than most disparaged by say publicly clergy being his power was especially secular, trade, and thaumaturgic.
The popularity have a word with abuse show consideration for such mainly image h
•
The 18th-Century Politics of Santa Claus in America
by Judith Flanders
Instead of deriving from folklore, or quaint colonial customs, or religion, the American emergence of Santa Claus was rooted in late-eighteenth-century politics, in the formation of clubs and societies based around ethnic or cultural groups, which came together to promote themselves and their fellow immigrants: a St Andrew’s Society for Scots immigrants, St David’s for the Welsh, St Patrick and St George for the Irish and the English. In 1786 a mostly Irish group called itself the Sons of St Tammany. (Tamanend had been a Lenni-Lenape chief when European colonists first established Philadelphia, so the choice of name was a jab at the British.)
One of the founders of the Sons of St Tammany was a merchant named Lewis Pintard (although he was of Huguenot, rather than Irish, descent), the guardian of his orphaned nephew, John Pintard. Pintard Jr also became a merchant, but he was more interested in charitable endeavours and in history than in trade, and in 1804 helped found the New-York Historical Society, which took St Nicholas as its emblem, possibly as a nod to Pintard’s Huguenot heritage: many American Huguenots originated in the Low Countries, especially Wallonia, where the cult of Nicholas was particula
•
Revisiting the "Knickerbocker" Origin Story of Santa Claus
Illustration of "Old Santeclaus with Much Delight" from The Children's Friend, William B. Gilley, 1821.
In December 1953, Dr. Charles W. Jones, a University of California professor hailed as one of the world’s foremost scholars on St. Nicholas of Myra, gave a speech to the New-York Historical Society that was published the following year in the society’s quarterly under the title “Knickerbocker Santa Claus.” The premise of Jones’ speech was that author Washington Irving invented Santa Claus in an 1809 satire, A History of New York, that was purportedly written by a completely fictional Dutch historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker. “Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus,” Jones wrote. “Santa Claus was a parasitic germ until the Knickerbocker History in 1809; after 1809 Santa Claus spread like a plague which has yet to reach its peak.”
Since 1954, more than two dozen scholars have written works embracing Jones’ theory that Irving had, in essence, created Santa Claus, and no one had refuted it until my own book, Santa Claus Worldwide: A History of St. Nicholas and Other Holiday Gift-Bringers, was published in 2020. While Irving&r