Santa Claus: The Historical Origins and Evolution of the Legendary Christmas Figure
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Narrated by:
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Colin Fluxman
About this listen
Christmas is the most important holiday of the year. After the corresponding days that exalt the national pride of each country, such as Independence Day in the US, Victory Day in Russia, or Bastille Day in France, it's December 25 that articulates the life, the work, and the economy in much of the world, including many non-Christian countries. Since ancient times, the beginning of winter has been the occasion for most people to eat, drink, dance, and get together to beat the drum and take a break.
Especially since the 20th century on, the days adjacent to the holiday have become an occasion to do big business. The winter season is the most solid stimulus for the economy - more than any fiscal package - since the incomes of families, spending, credit, and consumption in all productive sectors are significantly increased. In the US alone, Christmas sales are estimated to generate three trillion dollars.
In the early 19th century, two literary works appeared and helped shape Christmas. The first was a collection of stories by Washington Irving, entitled Sketch Book, from 1819. The work "not only gave to American literature the characters of Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle, but sparked widespread interest in Christmas as a cozy domestic ritual”. Next came "A Visit from St. Nicholas", a children's poem better known as “The Night Before Christmas”, which was published anonymously in 1823 but is traditionally attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, a university professor and Biblical scholar. The poem spread quickly and helped install a definitive image of Santa Claus in the popular imagination, with his sleigh, his eight reindeer (each one with a name), his red nose, and his journeys down chimneys to fill children's stockings with toys. Supposedly, Moore got his inspiration during a shopping outing in a sleigh, and he based his Santa Claus on a Dutchman who lived in Chelsea.
Meanwhile, the turning point for old St. Nicholas, now Santa Claus, came with the December 24, 1881 edition of Harper's Weekly. Artist Thomas Nast gave him his definitive look for the Christmas issue as an old man with a huge round belly and a belt, a thick white beard, a red nose, a cap, mistletoe on his head, a miniature horse toy in one hand, a pipe between his fingers, and a child hanging from his neck.
Ever since, Santa has been known the world over for being delightfully paunchy and endlessly jolly. To most, these two descriptors alone are enough to conjure up his name and lead them to envision a round-bellied grandfather type clad in a fur-trimmed, cherry-red ensemble, armed with candy canes and a bottomless sack of presents, and blessed with a bushy, silvery white beard.
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Just before Christmas in 1843, a debt-ridden and dispirited Charles Dickens wrote a small book he hoped would keep his creditors at bay. His publisher turned it down, so Dickens used what little money he had to put out A Christmas Carol himself. He worried it might be the end of his career as a novelist. The book immediately caused a sensation. And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution.
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Beautifully Told!
- By JodyB on 12-01-17
By: Les Standiford
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Castles, Customs, and Kings
- True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors
- By: Debra Brown, M.M. Bennetts
- Narrated by: Ruth Golding
- Length: 25 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A compilation of essays from the English Historical Fiction Authors blog, this book provides a wealth of historical information from Roman Britain to early 20th-century England. Over 50 different authors share hundreds of real life stories and tantalizing tidbits discovered while doing research for their own historical novels.
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Historical Tidbits
- By Troy on 08-03-15
By: Debra Brown, and others
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The Adventures of Henry Thoreau
- A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
- By: Michael Sims
- Narrated by: David Rapkin
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Henry David Thoreau has long been an intellectual icon and folk hero. In this strikingly original profile, Michael Sims reveals how the bookish, quirky young man evolved into the patron saint of environmentalism and nonviolent activism. Working from 19th-century letters and diaries, Sims charts Henry’s course from his time at Harvard through the years he spent living in a cabin beside Walden Pond. Sims uncovers a previously hidden Thoreau - the rowdy boy reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, the sarcastic college iconoclast, the devoted son who kept imitating his beloved older brother’s choices in life.
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Pleasant surprise
- By Norman Wendth on 10-21-14
By: Michael Sims
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Life in a Medieval City
- By: Frances Gies, Joseph Gies
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Life in a Medieval City is the classic account of the year 1250 in the city of Troyes, in modern-day France. Acclaimed historians Frances and Joseph Gies focus on a high point of medieval civilization - before war and the Black Death ravaged Europe - providing a fascinating window into the sophistication of a period we too often dismiss as backward. Urban life in the Middle Ages revolved around the home, often a mixed-use dwelling for burghers with a store or workshop on the ground floor and living quarters upstairs.
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Troyes, an old town but a new city
- By Darwin8u on 04-02-18
By: Frances Gies, and others
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La Passione
- How Italy Seduced the World
- By: Dianne Hales
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Can you imagine painting without Leonardo, opera without Verdi, fashion without Armani, food without the signature tastes of pasta, gelato, and pizza? The first universities, first banks, first public libraries? All Italian. New York Times best-selling author Dianne Hales attributes these landmark achievements to la passione italiana, a primal force that stems from an insatiable hunger to discover and create; to love and live with every fiber of one's being.
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Your Italiophilia is showing
- By Jeff Griffiths on 02-28-23
By: Dianne Hales
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Rebel Souls
- Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians
- By: Justin Martin
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebel Souls is the first book ever written about the colorful group of artists - regulars at Pfaff's Saloon in Manhattan - rightly considered America's original Bohemians. Besides a young Whitman, the circle included actor Edwin Booth; trailblazing stand–up comic Artemus Ward; psychedelic drug pioneer and author Fitz Hugh Ludlow; and brazen performer Adah Menken, famous for her Naked Lady routine. Central to their times, the artists managed to forge connections with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and even Abraham Lincoln.
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A Wonderful Read with Vibrant Characters
- By A on 11-11-15
By: Justin Martin
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Alice Behind Wonderland
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 2 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation - as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature.
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Not Long Enough
- By thefrogman on 06-18-12
By: Simon Winchester
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The Last Jews of Kerala
- The Two Thousand Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community
- By: Edna Fernandes
- Narrated by: Leslie Bellair
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When a people die out, can their story survive?Two thousand years ago, trade routes and the fall of Jerusalem took Jewish settlers seeking sanctuary across Europe and Asia. One little-known group settled in Kerala, in tropical southwestern India. Eventually numbering in the thousands, with eight synagogues, they prospered. Some came to possess vast estates and plantations, and many enjoyed economic privilege and political influence.
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Interesting topic, unethical author, uninformed reader
- By Cameron Crane on 03-08-18
By: Edna Fernandes
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Iberia
- By: James A. Michener
- Narrated by: Larry McKeever
- Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Spain is an immemorial land like no other, one that James A. Michener, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and celebrated citizen of the world, came to love as his own. Iberia is Michener’s enduring nonfiction tribute to his cherished second home. In the fresh and vivid prose that is his trademark, he not only reveals the celebrated history of bullfighters and warrior kings, painters and processions, cathedrals and olive orchards, he also shares the intimate, often hidden country he came to know, where the congeniality of living souls is thrust against the dark weight of history.
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Michener's Masterpiece
- By ahusmc on 09-14-17
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The Judgment of Paris
- The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism
- By: Ross King
- Narrated by: Tristan Layton
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amid scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been, at its inception, quite so controversial.
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Try this!
- By Robert on 10-28-08
By: Ross King
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Mademoiselle
- Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History
- By: Rhonda Garelick
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Little black dresses. Fake pearls. Jersey knit. Blazers. Ballet flats. Today - and for nearly the last hundred years - we all see some version of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel every time we pass a woman on the street. But few among us realize that Chanel’s role in the events of the twentieth century was as pervasive as her influence on fashion, or how deeply she absorbed and then brilliantly reimagined the historical currents around her.
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An Unlikable Portrait
- By Sara on 09-25-16
By: Rhonda Garelick
What listeners say about Santa Claus: The Historical Origins and Evolution of the Legendary Christmas Figure
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joseph M. Brooks
- 01-24-19
Outstanding Information
For some this may not have the "magical" appeal. However the information that is shared is amazing and holds a great deal of value. As a Santa portrayal artist, more is required in this age of information and this book came through with so much more than many others.
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- theboaz@aol.com
- 09-26-22
Good Start But Suddenly Ended in the 1940's.
It started very well and it was informative. However it stioped abruptly in the 1940's. One line about Christmas sales in 2016 and ended. Why did the author skip 70 years.
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