Santa Claus
A Biography
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An entertaining, often surprising look at the life of the world’s most influential fictional character.
He is the embodiment of charity and generosity, a creation of mythology, a tool of clever capitalists. The very idea of him is enduring and powerful.
Santa Claus was born in early-nineteenth-century America, but his family tree goes back seven hundred years to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children. Intervening generations were shaggy and strange — whip-wielding menaces to naughty boys and girls. Yet as the raucous, outdoor, alcohol-fuelled holiday gave way to a more domestic, sentimental model, a new kind of gift-bringer was called for — a loveable elf, still judgmental but far less threatening.
In this engaging social and cultural history, Gerry Bowler examines the place of Santa Claus in history, literature, advertising, and art. He traces his metamorphosis from a beardless youth into a red-suited peddler. He reveals the lesser-known aspects of the gift-bringer’s life — Santa’s involvement with social and political causes of all stripes (he enlisted on the Union side in the American Civil War), his starring role in the movies and as adman for gun-makers and insurance companies. And he demolishes the myths surrounding Santa Claus and Coca-Cola.
Santa Claus: A Biography will stand as the classic work on the long-lived and multifarious Mr. Claus.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This story of the "all-seeing agent of didactic forces and an ally of strict parenting" is dense with history yet told with the same delight and rapt fascination as Clement Clark Moore's "Twas' the night before Christmas." Offering the definitive chronology of hope and imagination, Bowler follows the Santa myth from its origins to the jolly man's appearance on the big screen. The lore of St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra and patron saint of maidens, fruitful marriages, students and children, has morphed with the various cultures that have adopted him as a symbol of Christmas spirit: he has inspired both charity and greed, and has been known to answer to generals during wartime. Bowler demonstrates how Santa Claus has flourished with the help of imaginative writers and artists and has endured despite the forces of advertising, politics and Hollywood. "The future of Santa Claus is not up to children," writes Bowler, "his life rests in the hands of parents," and their "acts of loving folly" such as half-eaten cookies and letters from the North Pole. Filled with humor and warmth, this "biography" should be kept among the other tales of Christmas to be read the moment holiday cynicism begins to gather.
