Sankt Nikolaus im Kindergarten

By Rolf Dumke

As another Christmas approaches, I want to share three of my own, very personal experiences of Sankt Nikolaus. The title refers to the third of them.

My first experience was in 1947, in the big kitchen of a farm house where my family lived in Windshausen, a hamlet on the right bank of the Inn River valley, a remote border village in Bavaria.
    The name “Windshausen,” place where winds dwell, is apt. The valley between the last mountains of the Alps narrows strongly, providing a Bernoulli effect on the winds that pass down the valley, speeding them up. Windshausen was – and probably still is – a very backward and traditional Catholic village in its views of the world.

    When I lived there as a child, local superstitions claimed that the nights were teeming with devils. In the evenings, after playing with other children at the customs station, I raced home to the farm as fast as possible. First, I had to elude the grasping hands of devils from below the bridge across the Enzenauer creek. Then I had to run past a small intersection marked by a tall sculpture of Christ nailed on the cross, a “Wegkreuz” that can often be found in rural Bavaria. At road crossings, lurking satans assembled, despite the presence of Christ.
    In the late fall, a Catholic priest and two altar boys appeared at the farm to exorcise the evil spirits and satans from each room with prayers and a swinging container of burning incense, starting with the stalls and the barn, to ban accidents and illness. This ceremony was also performed in all the other farm houses in the village.

    By December, dark nights prevailed and fears of the devil rose. Consequently, it was wonderful to see the holy Sankt Nikolaus visit our farmer’s big kitchen on the evening of the 5th, introducing hope and lightning the spirits of assembled mothers and children. But Nikolaus was also accompanied by the dark Krampus with a huge jute bag, clanking his rusty chains! Sankt Nikolaus asked my mother if I had been a good boy, obedient and helpful during the past year, or not. And at the words, “or not,” Krampus growled, rattled his chains and threatened to stuff me into his big bag and take me to the dense pine forest in Windshausen to throw me down a big hole that went straight to hell!
    To my great relief and eternal gratitude, my mother said that I had been a good boy and saved me from hell. Nikolaus gave me a wrapped present (nuts, cookies, apples) from his bag, with good cheer. All the other mothers also reported a good performance, with only minor faults, of their own boys and girls, to the howling Krampus’s disgust. All this was a scary disciplinary exercise, with numerous other howling Krampuses outside scaring the children in the village that night.

    Apparently, a nativist, heathen ceremony had been wedded with the Christian story of a good, sharing Bishop in a dark winter night. This wedding of customs is thought to have occurred during the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
    [For more images of the Holy Nikolaus and regional variants of the Krampus in Berchtesgaden, see this Wikipedia article.]

The second experience of Nikolaus/Santa Claus was in December 1953, in May’s Department Store in Cleveland, when I was growing up in America. It seemed to my parents to involve a curious practice: parents buying tickets from a big department store to allow their child, or children, to sit on Santa Claus’s lap, hear his jolly ho-ho-ho laugh, and get from him a wrapped present, whose size depended on how much the parents had paid. I was puzzled, but realized that this Santa Claus and the ceremony were not the real thing.
    The department store Santa Claus was a commercial event with only faint memories of the doubly removed, European original, but, nevertheless, it was part of a happy Christmas with a strange Sankt Nikolaus bearing gifts.
    In Germany, Nikolaus presents small gifts only on the evening of the 5th of December. On Christmas eve, the 24th of December, Christkind, the Christ-child, brings the big presents, not St. Nick. Usually the presents are put under the decorated Christmas tree when the family is attending an early mass or church service. The father must run back early from church to arrange everything and then ring a bell when the family comes back. A real hassle. But attendance at early mass on Christmas eve is very popular. In America, having St. Nick deliver gifts on the night before Christmas day, the 25th, is much more convenient. America had taken over the English view of Christmas, with a decorated Christmas tree from Prince Albert’s German celebration of Christmas in Queen Victoria’s family in Windsor Castle.
    Christmas in Germany was a curious ceremony, too, having wed a heathen celebration of the year’s darkest night with the birth of the Christian God on Christmas eve. The religious event of Christmas and the disciplinary duo of Sankt Nikolaus and Krampus (in Bavaria; in the rest of Germany, it was Knecht Ruprecht) is almost completely absent in the States.

My third experience of Sankt Nikolaus occurred earlier this month, in the town in Bavaria where my wife and I live (about 25 kilometers from Windshausen). I myself performed as Sankt Nikolaus before three different classes of very young children of the Happinger Kindergarten in Rosenheim.
    My participation came about because I was asked to substitute when neighbors with a son in the school informed me that their regular Nikolaus was sick. For the assignment, I was dressed in an intimidating bishop’s uniform with a tall mitre on my head, a big white beard, and a big staff in my hand.

  My Sankt Nikolaus was my own version of the traditional local ceremony, which I jollified, a la America. I excised the stern disciplinary overtones of the Bavarian original in this bright, big kindergarten of cheerful children in nice, orderly rooms, surrounded by a sprawling garden with swings and slides and sand boxes and happily carousing kids. They were between three and four and a half years old and curious about what and who Sankt Nikolaus was.
    I entered the rooms with ceremony, slowly, and with big steps, clanging my big staff on the floor at each step, to gain initial appreciation as the important Sankt Nikolaus. After the formal initial greeting by teachers and the children as a group, they sang a St. Nikolaus song or recited a poem for me. I thanked them profusely and plopped down into a small chair in their circle. Feigning to be tired from my work of carrying presents to so many children in many Bavarian towns, I gained their sympathy. But I instantly gained their affection when I told them that I had left behind the growling Krampus in Windshausen, where he was busy with tedious stuff, still sacking bad boys and girls. This, I said, was clearly unnecessary in this fine Kindergarten where all the kids looked like good children.
    When I sat down, I passed my staff to a nearby boy or girl, and started to call the names of about four children at a time to approach me as a group. I began to read from my big, white “holy book,” written by angels, about each child’s behavior, learning, and participation activities during the last year in kindergarden. The reports had been written by the teachers, who gently chided some robust boys for being too rough in the garden, or inattentive or inactive in class, and praised every child for whatever tasks they attempted – reading, doing handicrafts, playing with Lego stones or puzzles, learning German, being helpful and cleaning up after tasks, being friendly.
    I began to realize that this was important to all the children. They listened with attention and read my face on how I interpreted the reports. Chiding boys’ rambunctiousness and asocial activities was important, and, because I was the only man who did such chiding during their year in kindergarden, they took it seriously. Interestingly, the young girls were far more advanced in understanding the importance of good social interactions in school and bloomed when they were praised.
    A number of children were immigrants from the Balkans and Africa. Others were children of Turkish immigrants, presumably in the second generation. For all of them I found words of praise in the holy book for learning to express themselves well in German, a crucial step in successful integration. One tall African girl stood before me with her finely braided hair wearing a red dress with a big heart in front. She was highly articulate, beaming and happy to hear my praise and what the angels had written in the holy book. She was completely immersed in this peculiar Bavarian ceremony and looked perfectly integrated already. In contrast, a disconcerted small black boy, a newcomer, cried and escaped to the hall, where I saw him later happily cruising around the corridors alone with a teacher. It was clear that this kindergarden attempted a gentle integration process, using Sankt Nikolaus and a lot of staff.
    After reading the angels’ reports of every child in each class, I broke rank and became a jolly St. Nick, distributing small gifts from my bag and making jokes. I chided a teacher who was strumming a guitar to accompany the singing children at the end of my appearance. I said sternly, “your guitar is out of tune. If you haven’t tuned it by next year, the Krampus will take you away!” The threat was met with great glee and laughter.
    Once I had broken the ice, a number of little girls gained confidence to chide me for putting too small gifts into their boots, which had been put out for Nikolaus to fill at home. One small boy complained about a gift and chimed in, “My little penguin broke!” They wanted me to shape up and give them good presents. Ha! I was surprised at the turned table. And to make sure that I held my word on the next morning, the 6th, they offered a rush of invitations into their homes. But I argued, strongly supported by three teachers, that there were many other children waiting for me and that I might not be able to come.
    Being a jolly St. Nick was good, but raised interesting new demands.
    Everyone, including the teachers, seemed to love my performance and reported my rapport with the children to the head of the Kindergarten, a lady who was concerned that the happy element dominate, rather than the traditional disciplinary ceremony.
    For me, the experience showed good and epochal changes of customs over a half century in Bavaria.
    Our neighbors’ son, Felix, didn’t seem to recognize me beneath my bishop’s huge mitre, with my huge white beard, my red dress over an embroidered white gown, and my big staff, which were all quite different from what he was used to seeing me wear. I had also removed my glasses, which hid my transformation.
    But I’m not sure. Even though I believed in Sankt Nikolaus and feared the Krampus in 1947, when I was 6 years old, I knew that they were neighborhood teenagers in costume.
    Maybe it’s harder to convince boys than to convince girls to believe in costumed persons.
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[Added January 4:]

• An interesting comparison, in the NY Times, of Santa with traditional Italian Christmas customs: “Beware, Italy. Santa the Invader Is Coming.”
• A story in the Toronto Star tells “How a German mercenary in Sorel, Que., lit up Canada’s first Christmas tree in 1781.” The German General Friedrich von Riedesel and his wife, Baroness Friederike Charlotte von Riedesel, celebrated Christmas under a first German Christmas tree, with burning candles and decorated with tinsel and shiny balls.

Copyright © 2017 by Rolf Dumke