The Folklore of Discworld

account of apersonified Christmas Spirit who embodies the joys of food and drink, in his A Christmas Carol (1843). He told how Scrooge came face to face with a ‘jolly Giant, glorious to see’, in a room thickly hung with holly, ivy and mistletoe, and piled high with food:
    Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkey, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.
    This Spirit looks like a younger version of Father Christmas, or indeed of the Hogfather. Like them, he wears a long simple robe, trimmed with white fur, but in his case it is green , not red, and has no hood; he has long curly brown hair, and is wearing a wreath of holly set with icicles. And though he takes Scrooge on a visionary journey through the night, wandering invisibly from house to house to watch the celebrations, he does not bring presents for the kiddies.
    Even so, the idea of Father Christmas as a gift-bringer started infiltrating Victorian Britain, probably from Germany. He became quite a familiar figure – an old man, bearded, trudging through the snow with his sack of presents, dressed in a long hooded gown which was often, but by no means always, red. He did not have a companion to beat or threaten naughty children, as his Continental kinsmen had.
    Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, something quite extraordinary had been happening. The Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (later renamed New York) had kept up the tradition that St Nicholas would come in the night of 5/6 December to pop presents in the shoes or stockings of sleeping children, just as he did in their old homeland. In 1809 the very popular writer Washington Irving drew attention to this, but transferred the idea to Christmas Eve.And then in 1822, suddenly, inexplicably, inspiration gripped a clergyman and professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages called Clement Clark Moore, and he wrote a little poem for his children. He called it ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’, but most people now think of the first line, not the title:
    ’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house …
    Moore probably disapproved of saints, and even bishops, since his Nicholas is not a bishop in full regalia on a white horse, but a fat little gnome, hurtling through the sky in a miniature sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer. (Why reindeer? Nobody knows. There are no reindeer in Holland.) He comes and goes by way of the chimney. He carries a sack of presents. As for his appearance:
    He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
    And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot …
    His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
    And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
    The stump of his pipe he held hard in his teeth,
    And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
    He had a broad face and a little round belly,
    That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.
    Before too long, the folk imagination got to work. Bishops were forgotten, and the gift-bringer’s name was shortened to Santa Claus. In the 1860s the artist Thomas Nash began drawing him. Nash dropped the furs, preferring the typical Dutch costume of a belted jacket, blue breeches, and a flat sailor’s cap. But by the end of the nineteenth century red became the standard colour (with or without white trimmings), and the cap became a red one, long and floppy. In the twentieth, Santa Claus acquired a team of elves as little helpers, and a home near the North Pole.
    This American Santa Claus arrived in England in 1854, by wayof a fictional story by Susan and Ann Warner, ‘The Christmas Stocking’. Little by little he became popular, and he and the native Father Christmas blended together, sometimes using one name, sometimes the other; sometimes in a long robe, sometimes in a jacket. And now the combined figure is spreading all over the world.
    This extraordinary history shows beyond doubt that a truly powerful idea bounces to and fro across space and time, from mind to mind and from one universe to another. In a way, both Santa and the Hogfather are communal ‘Shakespearean’ creations. As we point out elsewhere, Will would happily drag some fragments of myth and folklore together and weld them into