Don't Mess With Santa Claus!

It's well known that Santa Claus, "Jolly Old Saint Nick," is based on an historical figure, St. Nicholas of Myra, who lived in the early 4th century, whose Feast Day is celebrated on 6 December.  According to the most famous legend associated with this good bishop, upon learning that one of the members of his church, a poor man, had three daughters for whom he could not provide dowries and who were thus in all probability fated for spinsterhood or worse, Nicholas secretly left gifts for the girls to provide for good marriages.  Out of that story, no doubt encouraged by the timing of his feast and the easy association with the Gifts of the Magi to the Christ Child, evolved the idea of Santa Claus as the giver of Christmas gifts.

For more about St. Nicholas and how he "became" Santa Claus, I can do no better than refer you to a wonderful web site devoted to the saint both historical and fanciful, St. Nicholas Center:  Discovering the Truth About Santa Claus [link].  Included there is another somewhat lesser-known tale regarding St. Nicholas, however, that I have seen referenced more and more in recent years and which has given birth to a host of memes compiled in a humorous post by "Dan" at Rockadoodee! [link] (which I have freely mined for some of the images here), how the historical St. Nicholas "dealt with" the heretic Arius of Alexandria during the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 [link].

Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14, 2012)

By Jim Butcher

Yes, Harry Dresden was dead – or rather, mostly dead – but he's all better now, and back up to fighting trim as the new Winter Knight, thanks to the tender tough love therapy overseen by his new boss, Mab, the Winter Queen of Air and Darkness, ruler of the Unseelie Fae. Just in time for her to give him his first real assignment – kill Mab's daughter Maeve, the Winter Lady. Why would Mab put a hit on her own daughter? How do you kill an Immortal anyway? And what's Santa Claus got to do with it all?

The answer to the first question helps further the overall shift in this series away from what was originally the tales of “the only consulting wizard in the Chicago Yellow Pages,” a simple urban fantasy series, to an epic of cosmic proportions. For it seems that our Universe – which includes the world we know as well as the linked worlds of Faerie, the Nevernever, and so forth – is under siege from without. Literally from Outside. There are some definite Lovecraftian overtones here. And it seems that Maeve, along with others who have appeared from the beginning of the series with increasing frequency, has fallen prey to One called here the “the Adversary” or the “Nemesis,” and is actively working to unleash dark forces that have been imprisoned beneath “Harry's buddy-island” Demonreach in a prison forged by Merlin himself. Add in a dash of internecine rivalry within the highly dysfunctional family that is the Winter Court, complicated by the fact that these beings of Faerie are, as alien as they may be in some respects, all too human in others, and you get a conflict that is heart-rending in its climactic tragedy. One that may destroy Harry and all that he knows and loves.

For the answers to the other two questions, I'm just going to send you to read the book itself. Cold Days is a typically – increasingly – complex tale from The Dresden Files that cannot be summarized easily. I'm not even going to try. There's an extensive summary on the Wikipedia page for this book, but it would be far better to read it for yourself – with a proper grounding in the thirteen novels leading up to it. Plus a volume of short stories, although those are less integral to the overall narrative. I wrote previously of my great love for this series. Characters and situations from throughout appear or are called back to in this volume, which ends with major shifts for some of my favorite denizens of Harry's world. His “padawan,” Molly, whom we've literally watched grow up from a gawky young teenager to a powerful wizard in her own right, over the course of a dozen or so books, becomes much more by the end of this book. And there is a definite sense that by the end of this series Harry will look back on the trials of this “file” and think, “Hell's Bells!, I had it easy...!” I mean, Butcher has revealed that his plans for the series are to cap it off with what he calls “The Big Apocalyptic Trilogy”!

But I will leave you with this: Not only does Harry meet Santa Claus in this book. He kicks Jolly Old St. Nick's ass!

Cheers! – and Thanks for reading!

Yes, Harry, there IS a Santa Claus....

Image source

From Cold Days (2012), the fourteenth volume in The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher – at the Winter Court of Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, told in the first-person by Harry Dresden, one-time professional wizard of Chicago, now Winter Knight:

“I studied the man standing beside the Erlking.... He was a sharp contrast. The Erlking was huge, but there was something about him that suggested agility and grace. It was like looking at a tiger. …

“This man wasn't a tiger. He was a bear. His shoulders were so broadly proportioned that he made Herne [the Hunter, the Erlking] look positively slender by comparison. His forearms were nearly the size of his biceps, and he had the kind of thick neck that you see only in power lifters and professional thugs. There were scars all over his hands, and more on his face, all of them faded away to ancient white lines, like those you see on some lifelong bikers. He wore a coat of mail of some kind – a creature of Faerie couldn't abide the touch of iron, so it had to be made from something else.

“Over the mail he wore a long, open coat of scarlet, trimmed in white fur. It was held in with a wide black leather belt. He had such a barrel of a chest that even a modest bit of stomach was a considerable mass on his huge frame. His gloves were made of black leather trimmed with more white fur, and they were tucked through the belt, right next to the very plain and functional hilt of an unadorned broadsword. His hair was short, white, and shining clean, and his white beard fell over his chest like the white breaker of a wave. His eyes were clean, winter sky blue.

“I lost track of what Eldest Gruff was saying, because my mouth was falling open.

“The second man noticed my expression and let out a low, rumbling chuckle. It wasn't one of those ironic snickers. It was a rolling, full-throated sound of amusement, and it made his stomach shake like . . . dare I say it?

“Like a bowl full of jelly. …

“His hand engulfed mine as he continued to chortle. His fingers could have crushed my bones. 'I know who you are, Dresden,' he rumbled. 'Call me Kringle.' …

“'Dude,' I said. 'Dude. You're . . . freaking Santa Claus.'

“'Not until after Halloween,' he said.” (pp. 37, 38)