Santa: a life
Jeremy Seal Picador, 291pp, £7.99
ISBN 0330419374
Neither sailors nor girls on the brink of becoming prostitutes are to be found among Santa Claus’s coterie of elves and reindeer. Jeremy Seal argues that, without the girls and sailors, Santa Claus
(a modern incarnation of third-century St Nicholas) might not exist. The question he asks is: how did this ascetic, generous saint become the commodity-driven brand of today?
During his life, Bishop Nicholas was renowned for his charity, saving three sisters from prostitution with gifts of gold. After his death, St Nicholas became the protector of sailors, and his influence spread from his native Byzantium, throughout Catholic Europe, to Protestant Holland, before arriving in the US.
There he made the transformation to Santa Claus by the early 20th century, thanks to the poetic licence of writers such as Washington Irving and the endorsement of Coca-Cola.
I expected a frothy Christmas trifle, but Santa: a life provides a solid description of Byzantine and European history. But the book is not without flaws: in the last 50 pages, Seal tries to excuse the wild consumerism that today’s Santa represents.
Part biography, part travelogue, Seal takes his subject seriously, and the overall result is an honest, informative page-turner.
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