Joe Biel

much of what happened there but there was a guy there there really was a saint nicholas well again this is hotly disputed whether or not he actually ever existed whether there was a real person or whether this was another figure that was held up to fulfill the character because

again these type of stories predated the existence of the real person depending on which culture you're drawing from and so the Christians began using st.

Nick as a way of present gift-giving obedient children you could spend weeks of your life reading our various accounts proving and disproving that he ever lived

it's like many many other things it's like the way Bigfoot has carried on in mythology for over a hundred years you know you really kind of can't answer it other than it fascinates the imagination of the people that want to tell that story and in a lot of cases and in a lot of cultures there's sort of an agenda around that you know so during the Cold War it was a way to shift

christmas to being against you know at one time we used to import a lot of presents from germany so world war ii to the relationship with the united states there was quite a negative impact on that because we suddenly didn't want to be

you know sending all all of our economic might into a country that you know we were at war with and so after world war ii we shifted christmas from focusing on adults basically having a party to the modern what i would call the coca-cola version of christmas which is

The bright red suit, you know, the the presence, the tree, the chimney, the, you know, parts of the story that had always been there, but were given additional weight in, you know, about 1950 and then, you know, the beginning of.

you know, maybe not the beginning, like Santa had been a presence in malls before that, but it became, you know, more, less about things like the Nutcracker or the Little Drummer Boy and more about, say, like, we have this ritual on Christmas morning with our family.

Well, in the United States, that became pretty normal around, you know, in New England, it would date into the 1800s.

And in the widespread United States into the, you know, about 1920, that became pretty normal.

And so, you know, I mean, and this is really not that long ago, all told.

And one of the more fascinating aspects for me was talking to people about what their family of origin did to celebrate Christmas.

But really, Christmas was supposed to always be about spending time together.

And then it didn't really see the modern commercialization until about that point in 1950, where it became a point of like,

We're going to go downtown and look in the windows and all the malls and, you know, and that was sort of a shift in another sense of, you know, how the family interfaced with it.

That and during the Cold War, we didn't want to have that sort of relationship with the Soviet Union, who, interestingly, they did not have Christmas in the earlier parts of the Soviet Union.

But then they did add it later because I think it's hard to market against, you know, something like getting presents and having time with your family.

It's hard to...

otherwise that is an American tradition because really it's a pretty wholesome thing but so because you know America had a large economic boom after World War two so we had a lot of money going into our economy and then there had been a lot of wartime rationing so I think part of it was like we can relax we can you know really celebrate this newfound wealth we can you know get gifts for everybody and

know this is kind of where we arrived at today and then things like you know coca-cola running a marketing campaign and creating the modern character alongside you know based on there were illustrations in harper's magazine you know about 70 years before that you know in the late 1890s where they essentially took aspects of this character and modernized it we know we don't know if the real saint nick ever lived