Pigweed and I had an interesting conversation about Santa the other day. We were looking into the origins of various Christmas traditions, and Pigweed thought Santa was originally portrayed as a little guy until Coca Cola had their iconic image of him full-sized. <\/p>\n
His evidence: <\/p>\n
1. He’s an elf. <\/p>\n
2. “A miniature sleigh with eight tiny reindeer, with a little old driver ….” <\/p>\n
3. He slides down the chimney. <\/p>\n
Taking them in order, it is true that there are two different traditions when it comes to elves. There are elves as little people (the Keebler elves) — somewhat like Leprechauns, I suppose — and there are elves as full-sized people (Norse Mythology, Tolkien). So that one could go either way with this. <\/p>\n
About the miniature sleigh, I had always take that to mean that it was miniature because it was far away — the way you’d see an airplane in the sky. But I have to admit that it doesn’t necessarily mean that. <\/p>\n
As to sliding down the chimney, this is a little more complicated. Chimneys come in all sizes, and this is a perpetual problem with the “large Santa” version of the story, usually resolved by magic. A small Santa might not have the same problem. (There’s still the problem of houses with no chimneys, but nobody says Santa has<\/i> to come down the Chimney.) <\/p>\n
On the whole, I prefer the “Santa was always large” interpretation for one simple reason: he’s associated with St. Nick, who was a man. That doesn’t completely answer the issue, since someone who was a man many hundreds of years ago, and is still around, certainly has some magic and trickery going on. <\/p>\n
And speaking of Santa, “Fat Man” is a decently fun rental. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pigweed and I had an interesting conversation about Santa the other day. We were looking into the origins of various Christmas traditions, and Pigweed thought Santa was originally portrayed as a little guy until Coca Cola had their iconic image of him full-sized. His evidence: 1. He’s an elf. 2. “A miniature sleigh with eight … Continue reading “When did Santa become full-sized?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":888,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions\/888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}