I Believe in Santa Claus: Do You?

Do you believe in Santa Claus?

I do. But continue to read to the end before you decide.

To answer this question, there are some key points in history we must examine, and determine, who or perhaps what Santa might be, especially today.

Saint Nicholas of Myra was a 4th-century Greek Christian bishop of Myra in Lycia, a province of the Byzantine Empire, now in Turkey. Nicholas was famous for his generous gifts to the poor, in particular presenting the three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian with dowries so that they would not have to become prostitutes. He was very religious from an early age and devoted his life entirely to Christianity. In continental Europe, he is usually portrayed as a bearded bishop in canonical robes.

Father Christmas dates back as far as 16th century in England during the reign of Henry VIII, when he was pictured as a large man in green or scarlet robes lined with fur. He typified the spirit of good cheer at Christmas, bringing peace, joy, good food and wine and revelry. As England no longer kept the feast day of Saint Nicholas on 6 December, the Father Christmas celebration was moved to 25 December to coincide with Christmas Day.

Pre-modern representations of the gift-giver from Church history and folklore, notably St Nicholas (known in Dutch as Sinterklaas), merged with the English character Father Christmas to create the character known to Americans and the rest of the English-speaking world as "Santa Claus.”

In the English and later British colonies of North America, and later in the United States, British and Dutch versions of the gift-giver merged further.

L. Frank Baum's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, a 1902 children's book, further popularized Santa Claus. Much of Santa Claus's mythos was not set in stone at the time, leaving Baum to give his "Neclaus" a wide variety of immortal support, a home in the Laughing Valley of Hohaho, and ten reindeer—who could not fly, but leapt in enormous, flight-like bounds.

Images of Santa Claus were further popularized through Haddon Sundblom's depiction of him for The Coca-Cola Company's Christmas advertising in the 1930s. The popularity of the image spawned urban legends that Santa Claus was invented by The Coca-Cola Company or that Santa wears red and white because they are the colors used to promote the Coca-Cola brand. This is an over simplification, as much of the correlation was already inherent in the character.

Now that we’ve examined the history of the jolly gift giving apparition of Christmas past, it might be easy to relegate the character to a quaint history of the holiday season. But there is more to consider.

Christmas itself has come in many incarnations. Beginning with the Roman Festival of Saturnalia.

One theory to explain the choice of December 25 for the celebration of the birth of Jesus is that the purpose was to Christianize the pagan festival in Rome of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, meaning "the birthday of the Unconquered Sun", a festival inaugurated by the Roman emperor Aurelian, to celebrate the sun god and celebrated at the winter solstice, December 25. According to this theory, during the reign of the emperor Constantine, Christian writers assimilated this feast as the birthday of Jesus, associating him with the "sun of righteousness"

Prior to Christianization, the Germanic peoples (including the English) celebrated a midwinter event called Yule. With the Christianization of Germanic Europe, numerous traditions were absorbed from Yuletide celebrations into modern Christmas. During this period, supernatural and ghostly occurrences were said to increase in frequency, such as the Wild Hunt, a ghostly procession through the sky. The leader of the wild hunt is frequently attested as the god Odin and he bears the Old Norse names Jólnir, meaning "yule figure" and the name Langbarðr, meaning "long-beard," another incarnation of Santa Claus, perhaps.

With the advent of Christianity dominance of European life, the festivals were assimilated into the celebration the birth of Jesus Christ.

But of all the miracles that Jesus is said to have performed, the greatest of which may be his resurrection from the grave, why is his mere birth celebrated as one of the most significant holidays on the modern calendar? And, what does that have to do with Santa Claus?

The answer to the first question is found perhaps most innocently in the famed Christmas song/carol, “Mary Did You Know?”

The song poses the question to a young virgin bride, as to how much she knew about the import of her new born son, and reminds us all of the unknown potential of a new born child. In fact, in apocalyptic end of times stories, often the last sign of the end of times is the birth of a soulless child, more specifically a generation of still born children, denoting the end of human potential.

So, if Christmas speaks to western culture by celebrating the unknown hope of a new generation by celebrating the birth of the messianic Jesus Christ, and hope is best represented in the face of the innocent children, it is perhaps fitting the beneficiaries of our best wishes and of our famed Santa Claus’s generosity is the children.

In fact, that brings us to the crux of this matter. Over centuries, the character of Santa Claus has become synonymous with generosity. He has brought the the spirit of the holiday and delivered a multitude of gifts for those he visits. These gifts of course must, today at least, come from somewhere. Where?

Whether from a parent or charitable organization, or from a relative or friend, the spirit of giving and the truest generosity demand no exchange for them.

Typically, almost all acts of giving yield a kind of psychological exchange. One gives a gift or makes a donation, and one is given an outward symbol of gratitude. Recipients recite a familiar, “Thank You.” This makes the initial act of giving an exchange, and not the truest act of generosity.

Enter Santa Claus. Santa Claus is credited with the anonymous giving of thousands of gifts to hundreds of thousands of children around the world. He is the absent patron of giving, and allows us to give freely without the expectation of outward gratitude or any exchange real or inferred, beside that feeling one gets when seeing another happy.

When a gift brings joy to a child or loved one, and it is truly given in the anonymous name of Santa Claus, it reminds us of the hope for a happy and prosperous future for humanity and is a true celebration of all that is good in the coming generation, and is a fitting part of any Christmas celebration.

So, YES! I do believe in Santa Claus!

Do you believe that the joy of seeing someone special revel in receiving that perfect gift is more important than the praise you might receive for having selected it? Do you find in the selection of such a gift a rewarding feeling that washes over you filling you with joy, not at your selection, but rather at the knowledge that you have paid attention and truly know those with whom you spend your time? Do you feel the overwhelming satisfaction of watching a child or loved one fill up with wonder and the whole light of happiness in accepting all the love that accompanies such a gift. Is, in fact, your joy found in the giving of such love?

Do you believe in the anonymity that allows these tokens to be truly reveled in, without the expectation that conditioned responses of gratitude must accompany every gesture of good will? Can you find the truest gratitude in the flickers of happiness behind a loved one's smile?

If you were to close your eyes and conjure an image to personify these beliefs, what might you see?

After a day toiling to reap the harvest, can you step aside and give unto the rain and the sky and God's good earth the credit for the bounty?

Yes! I believe in Santa Claus!

If you answered yes to these questions, at any age, from any station, then you too believe in Santa Claus! So when you are asked, answer proudly:

I believe!

The History of a New World (Framing a Horror Fantasy)

Author and journalist G.W. Pomichter is at it again, and he is creating and reimagining a whole new world in which to populate with bastardizations of some of speculative fiction's most beloved beasts. Below is a glimpse of the world that Pomichter is creating. Leave comments and tell us what you think of this "new mythology."

In The Beginning

Five millennia ago, when human beings were building the first megalithic structures and settling some of histories’ earliest cities, power was scarcely held by mortal men. Most of these early civilizations were ruled by the immortals. Pharaohs, Kings and Emperors, Immortals all, directed men for millennia to band together and erect cities, monuments and temples in lamenting remnant to a lost paradise.

It has been said that these were the children of the fallen angels of heaven’s war. No one really knows. It has been said they met the first men who walked upright out of Africa — out of Eden and out of grace. No one can know for certain.

They were powerful magical creatures and the early men worshiped them as on to God himself.

But men would not be tamed, and they grew in numbers and they took from their masters the want and love and lust for power. They drove the immortals from their thrones and into the shadows beyond firelight, beyond the fringe of civilization and into legend, lore and whispered antiquity.

Soon men ruled in the name of their once proud gods, until time and dust and ruin left the immortals forgotten, their names bastardized and relegated to myth.

But they did not end. They survived in the dark woods and deep hollows between the cities of mankind and they thrived in secret. The most feared and powerful of these forgotten deities were three races most blessed with longest life, singularly primal and predatory instincts and having hoarded unto themselves in the dark all that was left in the world of magic and mystery.

Umpyr, known throughout time as the Vampyre, was blessed with life so long that mortal men would birth and bury 25 generations in their lifespan. Stronger than a man by ten times, fierce of temperament and shrewd and calculating, these were among the most feared and dangerous of the trinity. But it was not their intellect or their power that men had feared. It was their blood lust. Ancient rumor and folklore tied their origins to a pact between the prince of the fallen angels and an ancient, long forgotten tribe of humans pledged to serve in his war against heaven. The angel, Lucifer, promised the men and women of the tribe immortality in exchange for their help, but providence and defeat denied the gift, rendering them and all their progeny to live and die in a hunger to match their ambitions. For this reason, as much as any that history has forgotten, the vampyre’s thirst for blood was unquenchable. When they ruled beside their immortal brethren, humanity bled and poured its precious life force out upon altars and into jeweled chalices to escape their wrath. Some say, it was the cruelty of the vampire that led to men’s revolt. None now live, mortal or immortal, that would know for certain, and like all of the angelic fallen, Lucifer himself, long isolated, has been relegated to legend and having fathered such has become infamous in abstentia.

The second pillar in the sacred trinity of immortals was a race rumored to have been bred when those first fallen of heaven, resentful of mankind, took to wed the beasts of field and forest — the shape shifters.

The strongest, most ferocious and revered of these — and perhaps last to roam the world, were the descendants of the angel Lycenia. Known as the Lycan — the wolves of night walked in the daylight as men. They were vicious on the hunt or in battle. They were compelled by the most basic animal predatory instincts. They possessed unwavering loyalty to whatever master they pledged themselves and not only capable, but inherently bound to coordinated pack behavior. Long after the realms of men had driven their mythical masters from power, it was said that no mortal king would deny the wolves a place in their armies. Conquerors coveted the pledge of the pack to their sides, until, long ago, the last of the Lycan seemed to vanish. They lived on only in the mystical shrouded lore of the drifting and shiftless Romani tribes.

The strong base of the trinity rested on one of the most treacherous immortals — the covens. The covens were a race of witches that legend says were once hunted by heaven, itself. In ancient times, it is said, they were bred of the marriage of angels to mortal women. The ancients called them Nephilym. Men have called them by many names. They lived nearly as long as the vampires, but they do not share that creature’s need for blood. They lived and prospered in plain sight, as no man could know their difference. They looked and lived in every way as humanity, save for but the power in their blood. They wielded the energies of a living universe with ease, and born of mortals, were ruthless in their pursuits of power. They rose to prominence in cultures throughout mortal dominion until the tides of time turned and the one God came to replace the many in the hearts of humanity, and men drove them from the daylight, into the shadows. But there they waited. Still infused with understanding and magic, their power, it is said, will not be denied.

In the year 325 A.D., in a city called Nicaea in the mortal kingdom of Bithynia the Roman Emperor Constantine convened a special assembly known by his subjects as the first ecumenical council, which was believed to be the first effort to formally establish the Christian church. Among the Christian bishops, though, from around the world, Hebrew rabbi’s, pagan priests, and desert mystics came. At the summit, while publicly laying the scaffold of a new world religion, representatives in secret debated the future of the immortals still walking among humanity. A representative of a European tribe of nomads, rumored to have descended from the earliest Egyptians, called Gypsies, who hailed from the far reaches of India, brought the most ancient texts and histories containing the most complete record of their time since the dawn of human kind. Fierce military warriors and dedicated to the study of the ancients, they called themselves Romani, a name the emperor, himself, was said to have given, and pledged themselves to an eternal mission to watch and keep the magic and mysteries of the immortals apart from men and their dominion over the earth. When the council had been concluded, the newly formed Romani were sent as emissary to immortals. It took 78 years and nearly three generations to discover and bring representatives from each of the factions together in 403 A.D. in the Roman city of Verona.

With emissaries of all of the tribes of immortals gathered in one place, a rogue band of humans, steeped in the legends of their once oppressors, brought an army to bear on them. The Army was led by a man named Alaric, who might have been Lycan, himself, and whose attack may have been a ploy to establish the superiority of the wolves. It was only with the help of a Roman general, secret leader of the Romani, Stilicho, that the band was defeated definitively, and history largely ignored the role of the immortals. Far away, the newly appointed Roman Emperor of the West, Honorius, as tribute for his Romani warriors assistance, was allowed by the Trifectual Conclave of Immortal Elders to establish a new Western Empire capital in the once immortal stronghold of Ravenna. Honorius, as a reward for his faithful Romani general, took Stilicho’s daughter to wed, and history would never question their secret alliances.

To show his ongoing gratitude to the immortals’ conclave, Honorius granted them secret sanctuary in the Carpathians far to the Eastern frontiers of his empire bordering his brothers Eastern Empire and that of the Goths. Honorius himself, was said to have received the transubstantiation ritual to become immortal, but it was never proven, and most dismiss it as a rumor started by his brother, Emperor in the East, Arcadius, who was jealous of his brother’s alliance with the once powerful gods of old. It was often disputed that the sanctuary city of Carnuntum was not Honrius’s to give, but rather belonged to the powerful Goths. It matters very little, as generations of mortals would live and die and rulers would come and go, all in but a moment of a single immortal life. They fled further and further, deep into the east, into the treacherous and mountainous Carpathians to a region known in antiquity by their Romani guardians as Wallachia, to live far from the cities of men. The immortals stayed deep in caverns, roamed the wild mountain forests and lived invisibly beside humans in small villages throughout the region.

Later, this sanctuary wilderness would be plundered of its rich folklore, and under the dominion of lesser princes, the existence of the immortals would again be dismissed as legend and rumor. But their guardian Romani never forgot their mission, claiming the mountain range and plains and fields around it as Romania. Though the Romani people were often believed to be subjugated to their immortal companions and even enslaved to mortal principalities, their traditions and their ancient knowledge survived and the truce remained. It would be a thousand years, until a mortal ruler would break the truce with the immortals by bargaining with a Vampire faction to secure his own power against an enemy. It ended badly.

In 1477, the ruler was killed by one of his own soldiers, and his elite Vampyric guard, known as the Moldavians were slaughtered at the hands of the wolves and witches. The body of infamous Vlad Tepesh was destroyed by the Conclave and to prove their alliances with men, his severed head was sent in a jar of honey to his enemies.

The legends claim that the leader of the Vampires conspired with a Nephilym, and a Lycan, and that Tepesh underwent the ritual transubstantiation to become an immortal, himself. It is whispered that the unholy trouple hoped to create a mythical immortal known as the Eterius, or one who saves in the ancient Sumerian, who was prophesied in antiquity, and was said to bear all of the strengths of the immortals and none of their weaknesses. It was written that the Eterius would unite the clans in Duranki, a bond between heaven and earth, and restore them to dominion over mortal men. It has been speculated that the Eterius was, from mortality, the one restored to heaven’s grace who would ascend with the fallen back to heaven, and lay humanity forever in servitude to their own immortal children.

The brutal Vlad, as it turned out, was not this messianic hero.

After the discovery and subsequent disruption of the plot, and fearing that humans might learn of the prophesy and the conspiracy, the Trifectual Conclave of Immortal Elders gathered and agreed upon the adoption of the Trilateral Covenant — three fundamental laws under which all immortals would be governed, and the violation of which would render the life of an immortal forfeit.

1. No immortal shall betray or reveal the existence or history of their existence to the mortal world.

2. The factious tribes would sever their communities, and no immortal of one tribe would walk among the others. Umpyr, Lycan and Nephilym communities would forever exist separately and apart.

3. No mortal shall undergo the unstable and dangerous ritual of transubstantiation for any cause, that it might give one faction advantage over the others and over human kind.

The history of mankind from these days until the present is littered with secret and lost alliances with the ancient and powerful. But, under the sacred laws passed down for the past 1000 years — barely 4 generations for immortals — excepting rare, unintended glimpses, immortals seemed to vanish into the depth and dark of mankind’s imagination.


Comment: What would you do with this universe?
Comment: Could you build a story in this universe?

Finding Folklore

What is folklore?  When most think of folklore or folk tales they conjure unto themselves images from Grimm fairy tales or Hans Christian Anderson stories.  These certainly do, in fact, constitute the most recognizable of folk stories.  But, do modern novels or films meet the standard?  Are your stories folklore?

When the brothers Grimm traversed Europe they gathered local tales from communities and villages throughout.  They compiled these into a collection that has entertained and even frightened generations.  These European stories of valiant princes and noble heroines, heroic underdogs and monstrous villains have long been staples of what most consider folklore.  But this is not the measure of a folk tale.

Almost by definition, folklore is a story or collection of stories unique to the people, or folk, of a specific geographic region.  Folklore speaks to the hopes, fears and traditions of an area and helps to form a geographic identity.  In this way, the western world and even the United States has it’s own folklore, and these might include many modern stories.

In colonial and post colonial America, in the North East stories like Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Rip Van Winkle or the fictionalization of the life and times of John Chapman, known to posterity as Johnny Appleseed, are examples of early American folklore. 

As settlers moved across the plains   From their observations and their shared experiences western tales of Cowboys, Pecos Bill being one such example, became dime store fodder.  Often depicting the Native American culture inaccurately and even vilifying them as well as sometimes glorifying renegade outlaws like Billy the Kid, western stories became some of the most successful folktales in the world.  These stories were even sold and told in the “old world” and came to solidify a world image of America and it’s people as fiercely independent. 

of the Western U.S., they created their own folklore based on the harsh untamed lands they settled, and the pioneer attitudes that often accompanied such an exodus.

Soon and into the 20^th century, America’s West Coast was settled, and like other regions before, they began to shape a geo-specific cultural identity.  Among the many genres that have come from this region, one of the most prominent is the detective mystery noir.  In Chandler stories or others, the American West Coast is as prominent a character as the protagonist or the antagonist.  Hard-boiled private eyes, defiant of traditional law enforcement, the iconic femme fatale and the stark city-after-dark descriptions unique to this region rapidly skyrocketed the genre. 

Since the inception of these staples of the American story, they have pushed and stretched the boundaries of folklore beyond the fantastical and into the almost surreal.

A new phenomenon in folk tales has emerged in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.  The geo-specific nature of folklore has been challenged.  The emergence of cinema and the worldwide web has helped shape a new kind of collective community.  This time, instead of geographic commonality, members of this community tend to be distinguished by age, experiences or other social standards.  In this way, subcultures have formed making stories of nearly all genres folksy by virtue of their distribution or popularity among a specific global social segment.

With all of the story components of traditional folklore, heavy drama, unlikely heroic characters, damsels or innocence in distress and the rise of underdogs to defeat sometime terrifying and melodramatic villains, as well as their proliferation of society’s pop-culture, it is arguable that the Harry Potter stories or Star Wars could be considered a kind of non-geo-specific generational folklore.

With this understanding of classic and modern folklore, do your favorite stories qualify as folklore?  

Do you write folklore? 

Don’t we all?

G.W. Pomichter's Lot 28 on iBooks

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/lot-28-a-lucky-marks-mystery/id1019799220?mt=11

G.W. Pomichter on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Garrett-Pomichter/e/B00J8GRM2Q