Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello, and welcome to the show! It's just back at today with a tiny little minicast about one of the most

undersigned characters that's around during this time of year. Today, I'm going to give you the history of Mrs. Claus.

Santa's mostly patient, certainly tolerant wife, of somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 years or so.

A note to listeners with young children in the room do preview the content, you know, just in case I say something of a revealing nature about shall we say the

Charlie Old Elf himself. So on we go. Once upon a time, Santa Claus was a bachelor, not only a bachelor, but a bishop, Nicholas of Maira, in modern-day Turkey, who was born in the year 270.

He used to pay the dowries of poor girls on the sly and leave treats for the children of his town, theoretically anonymously, but the word went out. If you leave your shoes out on the steps and someone happens to be passing by, well, you just never know.

The legend began with a real man, and was kept alive by the Dutch tradition of Santa Claus. Santa Claus.

That's what happens when you say the words, St. Nicholas, over time, with an accent and another language, sort of like when you play the telephone game, the words just change. Still, with the gifts and the shoes, but now only on one day, December 5th, and Santa Claus was brought to the New World. New Amsterdam, now of course New York, with the Dutch settlers.

St. Nicholas became the modern words, Santa Claus, somewhere around the American Revolution. Even at the time of, towards the night before Christmas, and all through the house, etc. Santa is still a single man. He got the reindeer with this poem in 1823, but no mention of a life until 1849, and that was only in a morality tale by an author named James Reese, about a family who was kind to two old strangers, and in the morning,

they were revealed to be, quote, not Santa Claus and his wife, but in fact the daughter they'd thrown out of the house for having a boyfriend who comes back married and with money. So perhaps not yet the Mrs. Claus we've grown to expect. But the casualness with which they mentioned not Santa Claus and his wife kind of implies that a wife, for Mr. North Pole, was sort of common knowledge that was just now making it into print.

She remained a shadowy figure, and not much was known about her, where did they meet? What was she like? How did she look? Harper's magazine in 1862 gave her a dozen red pedicotes. This was the time of the Balmoral pedicotes. Queen Victoria and family made them very famous. Red flannel, worn with a slightly shorter skirt for country walking and physical activity or ice skating, but a dozen.

Other than their insulating properties, I just do not know, I hope her rocking chair was a giant one. Mrs. Claus, not yet named, had her first truly prominent role in, Lill's Travels in Santa Claus Land, in 1879. Here's a quote from that story. There was a lady sitting by a golden desk, writing in a large book, and Santa Claus was looking through a great telescope, and every once in a while he stopped and put his ear to a large speaking tube. While I was resting, he went on with his observations.

Presently, he said to the lady, put down a good mark for Sarah Buttermilk. I see she's trying to conquer her quick temper.

So Mrs. Claus is now the keeper of the Nadia Nice List. Tradesman's wives often did the books, this seemed to be more of the same. But author Catherine Lee Bates gave her an attitude, in Goody Santa Claus on a sleigh ride in 1889, in which Mrs. Santa lays it out there.

Why should you have all the glory of the joyous Christmas story, and poor little Goody Santa Claus have nothing but the work?

Now the pack is fairly rifled, and poor Santa's well-nice stifled, yet you would not let your Goody Phyllis single baby sock.

Yes, I know the task takes brain deer, I can only hold the reindeer, and to see me climb down chimney it would give your nerves a shock.

Any final lets her go down, and fill a stalking.

Merry Christmas little people, joy bells ringing every steeple, and Goody's gladdest of the glad I've had my own sweet will.

At last, Mrs. Claus has a taste of the fame.

Incidentally, Catherine Lee Bates was a professor at Wellesley, wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, and then later, give us the lyrics to America, the beautiful, which in my opinion would have made a far better anthem for this country than the one we have.

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