CHAPTER XVII
SAINT NICHOLAS IN AMERICA.
Just as the Christmas tree was brought over to this country by early German immigrants so Saint Nicholas, or Santa Klaus, came here in the train of the Dutch settlers of New York. He established himself first in the little island of Manhattan and then gradually spread all over the country, being greatly assisted by the fact that he was no stranger to the German settlers everywhere. But his Dutch origin is shown by the very name Santa Klaus, which is common alike to Holland and America, though it is elsewhere unknown.
At first he was honored on his own day with the same observances that marked the festival in the Fatherland.
Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, St. Nicholas’s day had been all but forgotten in New Amsterdam (the Dutch name for New York) and we find that New Year’s eve was the occasion when he made his rounds as a gift bearer to the children. Later he transferred his activities to Christmas.
New Year’s gifts in a French workingman’s family.
Drawing by Gavarni.
I reproduce from an old New York magazine, dated January, 1844, a print which shows Santa Klaus on the point of remounting a chimney after filling the stockings of the children of the household. The text expressly says that the time is New Year’s eve.
To go further back, we know that even in the eighteenth century, when New York was still to a great extent Dutch in blood and in feeling, the little children of the Knickerbockers would gather expectant around the great hearth in the parlor on the eve of New Year and not on the eve of Saint Nicholas’s feast. It was to Saint Nicholas, however, that they addressed the childish hymns and songs which their forefathers had brought over from Holland.
Here are two specimen verses:
Santa Klaus, good holy man!