(Bloomberg Opinion) --
The book was published on St. Nicholas Day, 1809. A year later, the fledgling New-York Historical Society, of which Irving was a member, held its first St. Nicholas Day dinner. Historical Society recording secretary and driving force John Pintard, the descendant of French Huguenots, arranged for the publication of a St. Nicholas print (on display through Feb. 25 at the society) with a Dutch poem about “Sancte Claus, goed heylig man” (good holy man) and drawings of an emaciated saint with a beard but no headgear beyond a halo, stockings hung by the chimney and one child delighted with her gifts and another crying about receiving only a switch (a small branch used for swatting naughty children).
Also, that “goed heylig man” poem presented at the New-York Historical Society dinner in 1810, which did mention gifts, was not in 1810. Pintard told his daughter in 1828 that it had been “procured” by Historical Society President Egbert Benson the Judge Santa-Claus from a few paragraphs back, who was of mostly Dutch heritage and could read Dutch “from Mrs Hardenbrook, an ancient lady 87 years of age. Several, g[ran]dma Brasher & others knew some lines, but none except Mrs H. remember[ed] the whole.” It seems to have been making the rounds, then, in early to mid-1700s New York.
changed from a figured whispered about by children to one written about by adults — that he would have ceased to be thought of as Black.
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(1) To be specific, I encountered dozens of runaway notices from 1741 to 1806 for what appeared to be four different Clauses, plus a Closs and a Claas — although Claas, who escaped from Ballston near Saratoga Springs in 1800, sounded as if he might be the Claus discussed in the main text ("plays the fiddle very well, and is fond of frolicking"). There was also a Black man named Claus tried and convicted of the murder of a Black man named Joe in Hackensack, New Jersey, in 1805, and an apparently Black cook named Claus who delivers the punchline of a joke that I encountered in newspapers in 1791 and 1818: "I no gentleman—I nothing but a l-a-w-y-e-r!" A couple of much-reprinted stories from the late 1700s used the name Claus to denote a generic Dutchman, and in 1809 of course references to Santa Claus started to pop up. There were also a few appearances of White men with the first name Claus, and a lot of White men whose families probably called them Claus but preferred to go by Nicholas in public.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”
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