Santa Claus, Thor and a 'whiff of sulphur'

Seen up at the farm today in Don Wooten's Christmas Eve column in The Rock Island Argus ... this take, typically thoughtful, on Santa Claus and his Christian, and not-so-Christian, antecedents:

Santa Claus is coming to town.

Tonight the jolly old elf will tour the world in his sleigh and personally distribute presents to children everywhere -- at least, everywhere in what might be called the Christian dispensation.

That's because Santa is a curious distillation of Christian traditions which were overlaid on ancient, pagan customs. Most of what people know of this familiar figure dates from only about 200 years. The precise origins of Santa's journey have been lost in time.

Wooten, who I believe was a seminarian at St. Ambrose in Davenport before he got into politics and radio, tells the story of St. Nicholas of Myra and adds a couple of wrinkles about he came to be the "patron saint of unmarried girls, children, and sailors," as well as pawnbrokers, perfumers, druggists and sailors, that I didn't know before ...

And he adds this, which came as a complete surprise:

It's fairly obvious that part of Santa resides in the pagan past. One of the reasons why many fundamentalists want to downgrade the man in the red suit is precisely because of the whiff of sulphur associated with this image of Christmas.

Some see traces of the Roman god Saturn in Santa. This was the god who devoured his own children and dolls given out at the old Roman Saturnalia hint at this. Other scholars find dark associations with the Carthaginian god Baal-Hammon to whom children were sacrificed.

If we look further north, we find the Norse god Thor, a likeable, if rather loutish divinity, who wore a red suit and drove through the skies in a sled pulled by two goats, Cracker and Gnasher. He visited early hearths by coming down to earth in one of his elements, smoke.

Note to self. Wooten also has a book out. It's called "And Another Thing," and it can be ordered on line from the Argus and The Moline Dispatch. It's described as "... .. a personal narrative shaped from 21 years of columns in the Dispatch/Argus. Wooten draws on a lifetime spent in the Quad-Cities radio and television, with side trips into politics, education, classical theatre and journalism."