The Jolly Old Elf Could Be Claus for Alarm

We patriotic Americans can only hope it is not too late to convene a military tribunal to check out the suspicious character known as “Santa Claus.”

If we can catch him. He’s a slippery old coot.

“Santa” (he often uses only one name, like Carlos the Jackal) appears in the northern sky every year on Christmas Eve. The aerospace warning system NORAD invariably tracks him. But he always manages to infiltrate U.S. air space.

No one is quite sure what his nationality is. It’s unclear whether he’s an American citizen. Nobody has ever seen his passport or even an immigration-service green card.

It is believed that he lives at the North Pole, where he supervises a conspiracy of so-called elves who allegedly make “toys.” A woman known as “Mrs. Claus” lives with him. She never seems to leave the North Pole.

Santa himself visits the United States only once a year, which is suspicious in itself. Where is he on the Fourth of July?

At Christmas, he flies south in a sleigh--powered by eight reindeer! These coursers fly more rapidly than eagles. Not even the U.S. space program has managed to duplicate this method of propulsion.

He may not even be human. In the only documented sighting, he’s described as a “right jolly old elf.” Clement Moore wrote of his confrontation with Santa in an 1823 poem, “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” which seems benign but may include encoded messages to Santa’s followers. The names he calls his reindeer--Dasher, Dancer, Comet, Cupid and especially Donner and Blitzen--might require interpretation by the National Security Agency.

He has traveled under many aliases. He seems to have come first to America in the 17th century with Dutch Colonists, who knew him as San Nicolaas. He also used the suspiciously alliterative Kris Kringle among early Dutch and German settlers. Clement Moore called him St. Nick in his encoded poem.

Santa or Kris seems to have traveled widely in Europe and the Middle East and even to China, changing identities.

In Greece, he was known as Hagios Nikolaos, in Finland as Joulupukki, in France as Pere Noel, in Spain as Papa Noel, in China as Sheng Dan Laoran.

He often affects outlandish disguises. Moore says he was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot.

But no one seems to have been able to capture an image of this elusive “elf” until the political cartoonist Thomas Nast (himself, significantly, a German American immigrant) depicted him in the middle of the 19th century, perhaps relying on the description by Moore.

Nast created the definitive portrait of “Santa” as a bearded, rather pot-bellied old gent whose red nose and flushed cheeks suggest a taste for the stronger spirits of Christmas.

Nast caught him in 1863 infiltrating the Union Army in a drawing called “Santa Claus in Camp.” This so-called Claus wears a Stars and Stripes disguise.

But even with Nast’s portrait in hand, no one seems to have been able to bring him into custody for questioning about his dubious immigration status or his patriotism. He seems to distribute his “toys” equally around the world with no particular loyalty to American children. He has even been reported to stuff coal into the stockings of American kids he deems “bad.”

People began to doubt that there could really be such a person until an investigative editor confirmed his existence with an newspaper editorial titled “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.”

So America must remain in the highest state of alert. We better watch out. Santa Claus is coming to town, and it’s time to find out if he is naughty or nice. It’s time to summon him before a military tribunal, and for his own protection, we won’t tell anybody his name.

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Carl Schoettler is a writer for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.