Germany launches cultural battle to protect Father Christmas

BERLIN — A German museum has applied for Father Christmas to be added to the UNESCO cultural heritage list, arguing he has German origins and is in danger of being sidelined by North America’s Santa Claus.

Felicitas Hoptner, the director of the German Christmas Museum in the Bavarian city of Rothenburg, thinks Father Christmas’s German origins are “under threat.”

She said Germans no longer understood the origins of Father Christmas or the differences between him and the jolly Santa Claus.

Her museum has applied for Father Christmas and St. Nicholas, the fourth-century Greek bishop from whom he derived, to be put on UNESCO’slistof intangiblecultural heritage. Hoptner said the German Father Christmas, or “Weihnachtsmann,” was invented as a secular figure after the Reformation when Protestants spurned saint worship and sought an alternative gift-giver to the sacred Nicholas with his bishop’s mitre and crook.

The modern version of Father Christmas took shape in the mid- 19th century when a Munich magazine published a drawing of a grimlooking man in a hooded coat carrying a Christmas tree through the snow, Hoptner said.

A few decades later, Thomas Nast, a German-born cartoonist, took the tradition to the United States and modernized him in his illustrations, replacing the hood with a hat and shortening the coat.