The Santa Claus we “know” has been tamed down from the earlier versions. Our Santa is not associated with anything unpleasant. Not true of the earlier version of Santa, St. Nicholas Consider this medieval story [1]about St. Nicholas from a play by Henri Gheon [2] called “The Sausage Maker’s Interlude.” A butcher makes a sausage-making-machine, but runs out of pigs while using the machine at a fair. The devil
convinces the butcher to find a quick substitute to convert into sausage. He argues that the wheels of machinery must never stop but must ever grind onward. Such, after all, is progress! Even the butcher’s wife is at risk. However, when three juicy young boys happen by, the butcher quickly interests them in the inner workings of the machine. He urges them to check out the groaning and grinding cavernous mouth of the funnel and then stuffs them in, when, who should happen by, in the “Nick of time,” but the good bishop of this community, just back from the council of Nicea. He feels that he has lost control of his flock in his absence, and has a dread intuition of what is going on here at the fair. He asks the butcher to explain this machine. But the converted boys are already emerging as sausages out the other end. On a holy hunch, Nicholas grabs the wheels of progress and turns them in the opposite direction. The string of sausages is retracted and out of the feed tub emerge three bewildered little boys who think that they have just had a very bad dream.
In other versions of the story, the boys were about to be killed by pickling them in a vat, but they were saved by St. Nicholas. I recently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I saw a sculpture illustrating this pickling version of the Medieval story of the heroic St. Nicholas.
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