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 Myra, 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!

What'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.

Santa Claus 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 Reeves, 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 grown 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 mention 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 Valmoral 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, Lil'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.

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