St. Nicholas or Santa Claus is a very carelessly Christened composite of several beings who had to do with the Yule season and whose functions were 80 similar in character that their identity was readily lost. Celts and Teutons have Kept alive the vague memory of both male and female lesser deities who appeared at the time of the mid-winter festival to spy out delinquencies in each household, to punish careless women and lazy men and to enrich their favorites. Most of them came and went by the chimney. The Irish banshee was originally such a household goddess and the German Bertha, or Berehte, still moved through Christian communities in all the Teutonic countries in the middle ages about Christmas time, dispensing favours or punishment and, strangely enough, with a following of sad little sprites who were the souls of un-baptised children.
There is more of the hearth god in St. Nicholas, however, than of any other mythical figure and, a8 such, he is one fof the most ancient and widely revered Indo-European doites. He is both household god and fire god, sent into the home during the twelve of the Yuletide to take the place of the sun, on his vacation during thie period, and to play the sun's part in the ordering of men's affairs. His highway is the chimney, his place in the house is the hearth, oven or kitchen, and in all tradition he is a very genial and merry person dressed in red and invariably wearing a red cap. He is in fact a personification of the household fire to which the Vedic, invaders of India paid such lavish tribute, the kitchen god of the Chinese, the fire of the ancient Persians, worshipped particularly during the month within which the winter solstice follo, the month called in their most ancient literature Ataryadiya, which simply means "fire worship." He is the hearth god of our ancestors to whom they told all their petty woes and confided all their secret desires and upon whose small wooden statues, which stood in a niche by the hearth or oven, they painted the red cap which Santa Claus still wears. Just as the Chinese believe that their kitchen deity, who also enjoys a place by the fire which he personifies, knows all the secrets of, every heart and as they smear: his mouth at New Year with sweets, yo thet he may not make evil reports of them, trusting that he will bestow favours apex all and calamity to none, so did our cesters tremble at Yeletide at the thought that the red-capped one knew all their Werets "aid "TiighE punish their nedghtiness, but trust nevertheless' that and the importation of alien tradition have obscured the significance of many Chinese holiday rites and perhaps no one but an indefatigable Chinese, willing to spend @ lifetime burrowing into old books and collecting colloquial tradition as a few students of folk lore have done in the Occident, could assemble enough material to define clearly the origin and meaning of China's most ancient festivals. The writer certainly is not qualified for such a task, but the most casual resident in this country must observe from tint to time Chinese customs, and hear of popular traditions which suggest that they are closely allied with the most hoary traditions of his own race.
There seems to be a theory, slowly developing among students of China's past, that the Po-hsing who, in the Chinese classics, are invariably distinguished from and contrasted with the "black-haired common folk," were an Aryan people, bland and blue-eyed, who came out, of Central Asia, set up the original Chinese state in the Yellow River valley, eventually discarded their language in favour of a pidgin suited to intercourse with the aboriginal hordea about them and were lost, except to tradition, by amalgamation with these black-haired subject races, a very long time before China had developed a really useful system of writing records.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.