FACTORALY - CHRISTMAS: DAY 2 - SANTA

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

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Merry Christmas, Simon. Merry Christmas, Bruce. Welcome to Factorial, everyone. Yes, hello, everyone. This is a special because we are going to be giving you 12 in 12 days, because there are 12 days of Christmas. Indeed, instead of the usual one a week, you get one every single day for the whole 12 days of Christmas. But because it's one a day, they're obviously not as long as they normally are. Indeed. So these are going to be relatively short, relatively punchy, quick little snippets of festive Christmassy informative fun.

Yeah, of course we're going to take a subject every day. Yes. But the subjects will be Christmas relevant. Indeed. So that's the plot. Let's get on with it. Off we go. So Simon, what's today's special Christmas subject? Today's episode we are going to be talking about Santa Claus. Sinterklaas.

Father Christmas. Him. That fella. The big guy in red. Why is he a big guy in red? Well, because he's big and he's a guy and he wears red. Are you sure? Wasn't there a poem or something that described him? Yeah, quite possibly. So there's, with quite a lot of these Christmas traditions, it's an amalgamation of different things from different eras that have come together to form a thing. Right.

I should say right from the start, just in case there are any children listening to these wonderful podcasts, we believe in Father Christmas, as the song says. Absolutely. He's totally real. He's completely real. What we're about to say is for those non-believing people who think that he's made up. He's not. Well, St. Nicholas isn't made up.

No, he's not. St. Nicholas was a real nice person. Yes, he was. The name Santa Claus was originally, as you said, Sinterklaas, which was a Dutch name for St. Nicholas. Oh, right. So the one is directly a rip-off of the other. What do you know about St. Nicholas? I don't know much about St. Nicholas.

I know that he was very generous. Yeah. So St. Nicholas was a 4th century bishop from Greece. And he was just a good charitable fella. He had various miracles and good works credited to his name. There was one particular tale in which it was said that there was a local man who was rather down on his luck. He was going to sell his daughters into slavery, essentially. Oh, wow.

And under the cover of darkness, St. Nicholas chucked a couple of bags of gold coins into the chimney of this house. And they fell down the chimney and landed in the stockings of the young ladies in question, which were hanging by the chimney to dry. Hey. And so that sort of brings us this this whole idea of coming down the

chimney presents in stockings etc etc etc that makes some kind of sense some sort of sense yeah i read somewhere that santa was basically wearing green until coca- put him in red. Is that true? It's not. No, I heard that as well. I believed that for many, many years. Santa has been depicted in green because a lot of Christmas traditions are around greenery. You know, the trees and the holly and the ivy and the mistletoe and so on. He was actually first depicted in red during the 1800s okay um so you know before coca-cola

came around but um so you have saint nicholas you also have father christmas who up until a certain point were very very different characters so saint nicholas was the sort of the religious gift-giving person and father christmas at least in the in in england was sort of um not even a mythological person he was sort of a spirit of christmas he represented christmasness is this like there's sort of like the the sort of gods of the woods you know people wearing antlers and you know the green is it called the green man i think the The Green Man in various parts of Scandinavia and Germany where they celebrated Yuletide. There was a character called Yule.

Yeah. Had a big beard and wore holly on his head. Did he keep a log? He did keep a log, yeah. But yeah, various sort of books and poems and stories and songs and things have come along over the years that talk about this chap, this spirit of Christmas, who just started off as a young fella,

and then another story portrayed him as old, and then another story portrayed him as having a beard, another story portrayed him as being a bit on the large side. Once again, just like with The Reindeer, it was Clement Seymour's poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, or Towards the Night Before Christmas, that really gave the first written-down, absolutely recognisable description of Santa Claus, you know, being a jolly old elf. He was dressed in red. He had a, you know, his belly shook like a bowl full of jelly and all

that sort of stuff. So it was at that point, and that was in 1823. So it was at that point that the idea was really cemented that he looked how he looks as we know him now. Going back a bit actually to St. Nicholas, I think I read that there was a thing called the Council of either Nicaea or Nicaea. Right. Let's assume it's Nicaea. Sure. Back in 325 AD when St. Nicholas was the bishop. Right. And that was the council that fixed the date of Christmas as the 25th of December. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So I remember reading that St. Nicholas Day is the 24th of December.

And that's why I guess a lot of Europeans celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve. Yes, yes, that makes sense. Yes. Oh, very good. See, it all comes together, doesn't it? Well, thank you for listening to this Christmas special. Indeed, thank you very much for coming along. We hope you'll join us again next time for another fun-filled episode of Factorily. Bye-bye. Au revoir.