One of the lesser known American writers is largely responsible for one of our culture’s most well-known and beloved characters.
I am speaking, of course, of Washington Irving and Santa Claus.
Irving’s first name was bestowed on him at his birth in 1783, the year the Treaty of Paris ended our revolution. That he took that name seriously is attested to by the fact that toward the end of his life he wrote and published a massive biography of his namesake.
As he grew up, he abandoned his first career choice of becoming an attorney and decided instead to support himself as a writer. To succeed in that vocation, he sought an untrodden path. He would become an American writer, a choice for which there was no American culture within which to create an American literature. Our culture after the Revolution was obviously still British even if we had divorced ourselves politically.
Irving’s remedy was brilliant. He modeled his prose style on the best British models, for he knew his career would need the support of the British literary establishment. To this end, his prose would pass muster as though it had been produced by the most accomplished British practitioners, But his other problem of there not being an American culture was not so easily solved until he hit upon the idea of setting his stories in the Dutch period in New Amsterdam before it became British New York.
And that brings us to his well-known stories of Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “Rip Van Winkle,” of course, but also to Santa. Irving featured the first two characters in short stories set in upstate New York when it was populated by Dutch settlers. This was Irving’s first stroke of genius. Although Dutch New York did not last long and contributed little to our emerging American identity, if it was not yet American, it most certainly was not British. Irving had it both ways. His polished prose style could appeal to the necessary British critics without risking offending them
Both Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle are ridiculous characters. Crane’s firmly held belief in the supernatural world made him an easy victim to Brom Bones in their competition for the lovely Katrina von Tassel. Brom’s masquerading as a headless horseman chasing the timorous Ichabod easily disposes of his romantic competitor. Rip sleeps through the American Revolution, awakening unimpressed by that event, a touch the Brits would no doubt have applauded. Instead, Rip is happy to learn that his wife has died freeing him from an unhappy marriage. As a side biographical note, Irving himself never married
There was no “American” culture when Irving began to write, but there was a Dutch one in New York, and it gave Irving material that wasn’t distinctly “American” but at least not British. In short, he became an American writer using Dutch material.
That material, of course, brings us to Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas as he appears in Irving’s 1818 “History of New York,” which he published under the pseudonym of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the latter a pants style term associated with the Dutch. In it he introduced Saint Nichols or Dutch Sinterklass, a character who became Santa Claus, iincluding references to riding through the sky to deliver presents to children.
In 1826, eight years after Irving’s book came out, Clement Moore ‘s “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” gave us our Santa Claus Christmas story. Without Irving there likely would be no Santa Claus.
On a personal level, Irving’s popularizing our thin Dutch antecedents gave me my hometown designation of Dutch Breukelen, now Brooklyn, and lest we forget, my New York Knick(erboker)s.