The roots of Christmas and routes of St. Nick

Though Christmas can be a highly ritualized and spiritual experience for believers, the holiday has transcended religious boundaries and become an occasion for the giving and receiving of gifts, even in cultures not entirely motivated by consumerism.

The holiday has its roots in a variety of pre-Christian midwinter solstice festivals. Ancient Mesopotamians celebrated the year-end Zagmuk festival, honoring the god Marduk. Egyptians celebrated the birth of the falcon-headed sun god Horus. For Greeks, it was the birth of Apollo, while the Celtic peoples of Gaul, Britannia, Spain and northern Italy revered the horned god Cernunnos, who was reborn every winter solstice. Northerners celebrated the birth of Wotan (Germanic) or Odin (Norse).

Even the Christian specifics of the holiday are somewhat subjective. In 313 A.D., the Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which among other things ended the outlaw status of Christianity. Church leaders then decided on Dec. 25, the winter solstice on the Julian calendar, as the day to celebrate the birth of Jesus, replacing the Jan. 6 date, which is still observed by Orthodox Christians. That choice of dates helped to mollify pagans who had long been observing midwinter rites.

The bishop who quieted storms
The origins of Santa Claus are equally antique. He also has pagan precursors, but his Christian personification stems from St. Nicholas of Myra, who was born about 280 A.D. in the coastal village of Patara, in the province of Imperial Rome that now constitutes much of Turkey.

Believed to have been elevated to bishop by the time he died some 65 years later, Nicholas was credited with quieting sea storms and bringing dead children back to life. He also had a reputation for anonymously tossing gifts into the homes of the poor and for saving three girls without dowries from being forced into prostitution. Eventually, Nicholas became a patron saint of sailors, pawnbrokers, bakers, travelers, children and old maids, not to mention numerous cities. Buried in Myra, the Nicholas bones were stolen away in 1087 by Italian sailors and taken to Bari, where they remain enshrined in the Cathedral of St. Nicola.

Over time, Nicholas' spirit was drafted into duty as the Christian world's distributor of midwinter gifts for good little children. He was pictured riding around Europe on horseback. The generous saint was secularized during the Protestant reformations of the 16th century. He was banned by Cromwell in England and transformed into the more genial Sinterklaus in Germany and the Netherlands.

St. Nicholas rode to the Americas as a bowsprit on one of the first Dutch ships that landed on Manhattan island in 1626. Germans settling in Pennsylvania in the 1680s brought stories of the Christkindl (Christ child), which their English-speaking neighbors slurred into Kris Kringle. The legend gathered steam in tellings until 1822, when Clement C. Moore allegedly wrote a poem, "A Visit from St. Nicholas," for his six children. The poem has endured since its publication the following year in the Sentinel of Troy, N.Y., and is largely responsible for Santa's right jolly old elf persona.

In 1881, Thomas Nast began to sketch annual cartoons of Moore's Claus for Harper's Weekly magazine, popularizing the image of the midnight marauder from the North Pole circling the world in a sleigh drawn by eight reindeer. That vision has been spread ever since by greeting-card companies, Hollywood and Coca-Cola Co., which hired illustrator Haddon Sundblom. His images of Santa boosted the soft-drink's weak winter sales and also went global, accompanying the Army into World War II.

From Papai Noel in Brazil to Hoteiosho in Japan and Babe Khisimusi in Swaziland, Santa goes by several dozen aliases around the world, and he has also adapted his midnight MO to accommodate local customs and building codes.

Souped-up sleigh

Of course, the spread of that Santa image has also exponentially expanded the responsibility of gift-givers' duties. His epic annual journey would tax the capabilities of FedEx and all the world's postal services combined.

Several years ago, scientists writing in the publication of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory investigated the physics implicit in Santa's long night of visiting good boys and girls around the planet.

With an estimated 2 billion children worldwide expecting Christmas packages and an average of 2.5 children per household, that works out to his having to visit something like 800 million homes. Assuming that Claus starts his route at 8 p.m., when good children go to bed, and finishes at 6 a.m., when they wake, he has a total of 34 hours to complete his mission, as that 10-hour window takes 24 hours to revolve around the planet.

The scientists calculated that visiting that many abodes would require Claus to travel about 160 million kilometers, considerably farther than the distance from Earth to the sun.

He could accomplish that task by simply traveling at something approaching 99 percent of the speed of light. The scientists figure that this would allow him to visit every home in just over 500 seconds, which would leave plenty of time for starts and stops, turning corners and chowing down on cookies and milk.

Traveling at light speed would also explain several other curious anomalies of the Santa mystery. Since time slows for objects traveling at that velocity, that accounts for why Santa never seems to age. Spatial distortions that occur around light speed would enable him and his big bag to slip through narrow chimneys (something like the phenomenon that occurs near black holes). Finally, the red color changes (Doppler shifts) of light traveling at those speeds obviously gives rise to the rosy hues of Rudolph's nose.

Of course, to move at those speeds without being incinerated by the Earth's atmosphere would require the entire Claus entourage to be encapsulated by some as-yet-undiscovered protective material that NASA would love to have.

Let's call it the spirit of Christmas.

And to all, a good night.

For the complete Fermi News report, "Santa at Nearly the Speed of Light" visit www.fnal.gov/pub/ferminews/santa/index.html. A nifty holiday guide, "The Santa Map: A Cultural Geography of the World's Most Beloved Man," is published by Hedberg Maps ($9.95). This 26.5-by-39-inch four-color map is a veritable encyclopedia of all things Claus and helped me write this column. It is available at major book sellers or via the publisher at 1-800-933-6277 or www.santamap.com.