Why and when did Santa Claus get to be such a big fat guy? I'm watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Santa who brought up the rear couldn't have flown through the night sky pulled by eight super-sonic Budweiser Clydesdales.
In his "A Visit From St. Nicholas" written in 1823 (renamed "Twas the NIght Before Christmas"), Clement Moore described Santa as a "little old driver" in a "miniature sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer." In other words, he was an elf; small enough to get down the chimney! Now a raccoon can get down my chimney, and has, but certainly not the behemoths currently scaring the hell out of kids in shopping malls across the nation. As a kid, we didn't have a chimney, except to the furnace, and my mother answered my obvious questions with the response that Santa had a big set of skeleton keys and came in through the back door, breaking and entering like a cat burglar. Today, this would get him shot in most southern states.
Santa didn't stay small for very long. Cursory research tells me that the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a fat Santa for the cover of Harpers Weekly in 1862. Maybe Nast was influenced by the girth of Boss Tweed, who knows, (Actually Tweed wasn't that fat, but corpulence stood for corruption in those days, gluttony being one of the seven sins, fat cats, and all) but the public definitely preferred the new XXXL-sized Santa -- capable of swinging around a much larger pack on his back -- to a night-creeping gnome. (As in the horror movie "The People Under the Stairs".) Earlier European versions of St. Nick had him riding a scrawny goat to your house. Now that's a guy in need of branding and an image makeover. Moore came a long way by inventing the "reindeer" angle.
As a people I don't think we're too crazy about elves; they're tricky and you can't trust them. Hell, even the Munchkins kind of weirded us out, me anyway. So, in just forty years Santa put on several feet in height, gained about two hundred and fifty pounds, got some skeleton keys, and we all felt better about him. He was just so damned jolly.
Now after a hundred and fifty years of a satisfying and productive relationship with the tubby man in red, these modern times are too much with us for they have brought forth the notion that fat people are not so happy after all, or jolly as it were. It's not easy being fat, so here comes the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (true group) taking up Santa's cause, so to speak, and today's with-it, sensitive story tellers seem to have no recourse but to inform us of Santa's serious bouts of depression (No sun at the North Pole.) and his angst under all that, well, unfair, responsibility.
So we now must pay the price for the bigger Santa we wanted, with our concomitant greed -- hell, we don't want sugar plums. We want Bose sound systems for our giant TV's -- but Santa is depressed and on medication under the pressure of his constant dieting (high blood pressure and potentially diabetes) and our increasing demands, and so it is that we feel no joy from his annual visit just terribly guilty about the poor guy's existential wail at his fate.
See? We got what we deserve. We got greedy. An elf might have brought us a turnip or a rutabaga for Christmas, but elves don't have angst and depression. Or, if they do, we don't care about it because it's probably tiny little angst. B.O.
