Now You Know Christmas: The Little Book of Answers
By Doug Lennox
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About this ebook
From oversized socks filled with treats to firs in living rooms and strange stories and songs, Christmas makes us all scratch our heads now and then. Now You Know Christmas will help everyone make sense of the holiday season, with answers to questions like:
How fast would Santa have to travel in order to deliver toys to all the children in the world in one night?
Why are Christmas songs called "carols"?
Why did the Wise Men bring gold, frankincense and myrrh as gifts?
Doug Lennox
Doug Lennox was an internationally acclaimed broadcaster, a veteran character actor, a commercial voice artist, and a bestselling author. He has appeared in more than 60 films and television features, including X-Men, Police Academy, Lonesome Dove, and Against the Ropes, and shared screen time with Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Burt Reynolds, Holly Hunter, Eric McCormack, Gary Oldman, and a myriad of others.
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Book preview
Now You Know Christmas - Doug Lennox
Drink
Preface
Some Christmas books are fireside books. They’re written so that grownups can sit in their living rooms with their families, reading tales of holiday merriment beside a fireplace (often artificial nowadays).
This is not one of those books. While the hope is that you will enjoy Now You Know Christmas tremendously, and that it will add a little something to your holiday, it was not written to be a Christmas classic.
This book is for those who celebrate Christmas each year, and who every once in a while stop to wonder why we do some of the things we do and why we believe some of the things we believe. It is for people who wonder what lies beneath the most popular and celebrated holiday in the world.
Why, for example, do we kiss under the mistletoe? It seems like a completely illogical tradition. Why do we say Merry Christmas
instead of Happy Christmas
? Why does an obese man come down our chimneys and stuff candies and toys in a sock? (Or for that matter, why would we eat candies we found in a sock?) And why would three supposedly wise men give a baby gold, frankincense, and myrrh — gifts that a baby couldn’t possibly have any use for?
It’s a book for the curious. It’s a book for people like me. You can certainly sit in front of a fireplace — real or simulated — and read aloud directly from this book. But I have a hunch you’d much rather fill your head with some of these answers, hide the book underneath your mattress, and then entertain your friends and family at Christmas dinner with your astonishing knowledge of all things Christmas. Perhaps you can start by telling them how long you’ll be able to store that fruitcake Aunt Edna gave you as a gift.
Doug Lennox, 2007
Santa Claus, St. Nicholas & Other Gift-Bringers
Who invented Santa Claus?
Santa Claus
is a figure who developed over the years, originally taking the form of St. Nicholas. But the Santa we know today largely developed under the guidance of a group of New York writers and historians known as the Knickerbockers.
The group included Washington Irving, Clement C. Moore, and James Fennimore Cooper.
The Knickerbockers played a major role in shaping the way Americans celebrated Christmas, and in the early 1800s, they went to work telling stories of a great gift-bringer who was considerably different from the St. Nicholas people had known. They drew on the Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas, and slowly evolved that name into Santa Claus.
They also gave Santa many of the attributes we know today: the jolly demeanour, the plump belly, the fur suit. They also told us that Santa came down our chimneys and rode in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.
Some have cynically suggested that the Knickerbockers and other social elites created Santa Claus so that poor people would stop knocking on their doors looking for handouts at Christmas, and would instead stay in their own homes staring at their fireplaces in greedy anticipation. But in reality, the group was eager to change Christmas from a time of drinking and carousing into a more family-centred holiday. They also wanted to create a distinctly American — or, more accurately, non-British — holiday.
Is it true that a soft drink company created the modern image of Santa Claus?
Many have credited the Coca-Cola Company with creating the modern image of Santa Claus in his red suit with white trim and black boots. Even Coca-Cola itself celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of its creation of the image in 2006. It all stems from a series of ads featuring illustrations by Haddon Sundblom used by the company between 1931 and 1964.
In reality, the modern image of Santa Claus had been around for decades before Sundblom’s illustrations saw the light of day. Thomas Nast began illustrating Santa in the 1860s and depicted him as a jolly, rotund character in a red suit with white trim, with a big white beard. While the early Nast illustrations showed us an elf-like Santa, the figure later grew to adult size. By the early 1900s, early filmmakers were presenting a Santa looking very much like our modern Santa in both