Santa Claus riding in a sleigh driven by reindeer, making toys at his workshop in the North pole with the assistance of mythical people as he descends back to the fireplace to give blessings to kids is a 500 hundred years old legend in history which we are yet to discover. But why did he opt for a difficult method similar to the entryway to stack his presents?
In his 1809 book Knickerbocker’s History of New York, the U.S. author and antiquarian depicts Saint Nicholas as a man who is seen “riding jollily among the treetops, or over the tops of the houses, once in a while drawing forward brilliant presents from his breeches pockets, and letting them fall down the smokestacks of his top picks.”
It was that period of time when fireplaces began to take structure, especially in the nineteenth century. Ideally, at that period of time, Irving didn’t get the plan that Santa would toss presents down the fireplaces out of nowhere. This idea sprung up when animals entered homes through fireplaces, and it was also believed that the witches could go through strong items to enter any living arrangement, as indicated by Jeffrey Burton Russell, writer of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages.
In 1486, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger composed Malleus Maleficarum, which is viewed as one of the most exhaustive books on black magic. To help facilitate the public’s tension, Kramer and Sprenger realized that witches rather went into houses through smokestacks or windows. From that point forward, the stack has become a typical image inside European fables, connecting the natural world with the powerful.
In Scottish legend, the brownie is an animal that enters through the smokestack and helps in family unit tasks while families are resting.
In Irish legend, there’s a bodach which believes that an insidious animal slips in through the stack to hijack kids. Furthermore, in Italian legends, there’s La Befana, who rides on a broomstick to convey candy to great kids.
These stories were disregarded with the progression of centuries. But then it got normal for legendary animals to enter homes through the stack—so Irving’s choice to remember Santa for the insignificant rundown of smokestack wasn’t so strange.
What’s more, it didn’t take long for Irving’s legend to stick—particularly with the assistance of Clement C. Moore’s 1822 sonnet “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (all the more usually known as” ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), which was inspired by Irving’s book.
Skip to content