Contents:
Of all his strong opinions, none matched his hatred of paganism. According to legend, Nick then personally oversaw the violent destruction of the Temple of Artemis. And as luck would have it, there were people who actually lived in the temple! So what happened when the now-homeless priests ran up to Nicholas and begged for mercy? You decapitate like a goddamn sissy. Nick's done more for the wee ones of the world than to simply command his elven hive to build Tonka trucks. According to one fable, Nicholas met an innkeeper who butchered three kids and pickled them during a famine so he could try to pass them off as ham.
After God's cosmic prodding led Nicholas to their corpses, he prayed to divinely stitch their little salty dismembered bodies back together.
Metropolitan Museum of Art "From this day forth, you will be known as 'The Pickle Triplets' and possess all the powers of sodium. We're not saying that you should build a trio of barfy gherkin golems on Christmas Eve instead of gingerbread men And if you won't do that, at least don some Vlasic-soaked rags and dress up as St. Nick's jaunty archnemesis "The Cannibal Hotelier" to spook the neighborhood carolers with some briny pranks. Santa Claus doesn't live in the North Pole. No, he lives all across Europe, in many different countries, a little bit here, a little there.
You see, in , Italian sailors stole St. Nicholas' remains from Turkey in a harrowing heist that involved hoodwinking some monks and escaping an angry mob of villagers. His holly-jolly bones were laid to rest in Bari, Italy, where they currently reside, much to the chagrin of Turkish Santaphiles. To make matters more confusing, an abbey in Ireland claims to possess his body , and a bunch of random body parts said to belong to St. Surly are strewn all over the globe as relics.
This is the untold truth of Santa Claus, and how he turned into the jolly, red- cloaked, chubby fellow we know today. An illustrated meditation on who Santa really is. Want more comics? Follow me @Oatmeal on Twitter @TheOatmeal on Instagram I'll send comics to your inbox.
So if Santa doesn't get you what you want for Christmas this year, try writing to his tooth in Germany the next. Berolinensis "Dear molar, I want an Xbox.
He's currently working on a wildly uncelebrated free e-book called "A Chris Christmas Carol. Please type the following code. Don't make me do this again. Sign in with Facebook. Despite all the obvious lifestyle barriers between Santa and pretty much anyone he wanted to ask out, in the first reference to a Mrs. Claus finally appeared in a short story entitled "A Christmas Legend," which featured a young couple who disguised themselves as Mr. That was evidently enough to get the snowball rolling, and today Mrs. Claus appears in a lot of popular stories, although she's never really evolved beyond the s housewife stereotype, urging her man to eat more so he'll be properly jolly on Christmas Eve.
Hey storytellers, let's have a feminist Santa please — can we have her wearing a power suit, arranging toy deliveries, and firing slacker elves? That would be cool. Most of the various Santa Claus incarnations have worn some version of the red suit he wears today, from a long bishop's robe to a fur-trimmed coat. But at some point Santa's garb became standardized, and it was mostly thanks to the popularity of printed magazines like Harper's Weekly.
Incidentally, Nast was also the guy responsible for popularizing the idea of a Santa-led North Pole workshop. It's pretty easy to see why — the North Pole was always cold and snowy, and Christmas was associated with cold, snowy temperatures. The North Pole was also kind of romanticized since it was remote and there were lots of explorers who fantasized about being the first to reach it.
Keep the dream alive. Modern advertising is so despised by all that companies have invented devices that can fast-forward through ads, which is such an effective strategy that those same companies then have to figure out how to advertise because everyone is always fast-forwarding through their commercials. But try as we do, we have not been able to completely exorcise advertising from our lives and we're all pretty annoyed about it.
However, it's worth remembering that much of our culture has been shaped by advertising, and even some of our beloved traditions would not exist in their current incarnations if multimillion-dollar companies had not deemed it so. According to Business Insider , in the s Coca-Cola was feeling annoyed because no one thought that an ice-cold Coke sounded good in subzero temperatures.
So instead of inventing Hot Coca-Cola, which kind of would have made more sense though it does sound horrifically disgusting , they decided to start aggressively marketing Coke as something that you could enjoy during the holidays.
They hired an illustrator to create a Santa Claus with a jolly face and a lovable demeanor to help counter some of the still-lingering stalker versions of Santa Claus. And then for some reason they featured him doing questionable things like stealing Coke out of people's refrigerators, which really is not modeling good behavior for little kids, but whatever. The jolly, friendly version of Santa persisted, and that's mostly how we still imagine him today. Nicholas and then in researchers used the measurements of his skull to forensically reconstruct his face.
We're all pretty universally certain that Santa's a jolly, chubby guy with a long white beard and rosy cheeks, so why mess with a good thing? Because science, that's why. Researchers painstakingly reconstructed St. Nicholas's face and discovered, shockingly, that he'd looked pretty much exactly like he did in his ancient portraits and less like his modern Coca-Cola ones. But hey, it's not like all the money that was spent on that particular project could have been used for stuff that is actually useful to know and also does not have the potential to confuse millions of children, right?
Much has been said about Santa's strange ability to achieve the superhuman feat of visiting every child in the world in a single night. According to ABC News , there are around 2.
That leaves million kids, and if you assume that each house has approximately 2. If Santa flies in the right direction and works only after dark, he's got around 31 hours to complete every delivery. That works out to around 1, homes per second. There's also the weight of Santa's sleigh to consider — assuming he's only delivering one toy per child which would cause an awful lot of spoiled kids to lose their minds on Christmas morning, by the way, but let's continue , his sleigh would have to weigh million pounds, and he'd need , reindeer to pull it.
What's more, those reindeer would have to be traveling at 7, times the speed of sound. That's a lot of calculations, mathematicians. Well done, but there's really a much more logical explanation for Santa's annual achievement, so let's just stick with that one: Just in case all that stuff about Santa and his , reindeer totally messed you up in the head, here's some more science for you.
Because things that move at those speeds don't get any older, the theory of relativity also explains why Santa is still around more than a thousand years after he was born. So ultimately what this really says is that science doesn't always have to spoil everyone's fun. Looking at you, facial reconstruction people. Santa Claus's favorite mode of transportation is obviously the sled, which is pretty handy for getting him out of the ice-clogged North Pole.
But not everywhere on the planet is blanketed with snow during the holidays — in Australia, for example, Christmas is a summer holiday, and a reindeer-pulled sled wouldn't really be very practical. As it turns out, Santa trades in his sled for a different mode of transportation quite often during his Christmas Eve journey. According to the Huffington Post , in the Netherlands where he's still known as Sinterklaas , he arrives by steamboat. In Australia he trades the reindeer for white kangaroos, also called "boomers. Whatever the tradition, Santa is still pretty much Santa, even when he appears as 13 " Yule Lads ," who come down from the mountains to either give kids presents or rotten potatoes the Icelandic version of coal.
Regardless of what he looks like, what mode of transportation he uses, or how fat and jolly he is, the legend of Santa is still magic for millions of kids, with a cool history that makes his tradition especially sweet. The untold truth of Santa Claus. The real Saint Nicholas. Santa has Norse genetics Shutterstock. Early stories and poems Wikipedia. The Night Before Christmas.
Stalin banned Santa Claus in Russia Shutterstock. Santa didn't have a wife until Shutterstock. The real face of Santa revealed.
Because science, that's why. Nicholas was mostly a Dutch thing. Still, kids would leave their boots next to the fire and then cower in terrified anticipation, and if Odin was feeling generous he would fill their boots with candy and toys. Incidentally, in order to get a gift you were expected to leave some treats out for the horse, which explains why Sinterklaas hadn't yet reached traditional Santa Claus rotundity. I agree to the Terms of Service. Please type the following code. However, it's worth remembering that much of our culture has been shaped by advertising, and even some of our beloved traditions would not exist in their current incarnations if multimillion-dollar companies had not deemed it so.
Santa and the theory of relativity. Sleds aren't practical everywhere.