Kris Kringle

Did you know that Kris Kringle (another name for Santa Claus in the U.S.) is actually a corrupted pronunciation and spelling of the German word Christkindl which means Christ Child? Martin Luther used ChristKindl to focus the people on the gift given to us by Jesus Christ and to explicitly discourage the imagery of St. Nicholas which was adopted in Catholic areas during the 19th century. The legend of St. Nicholas came from a surviving pagan tradition of the pagan god Olin in the Catholic church in Germany. Early depictions of St. Nicholas and Olin are a thin old man. Some traditions even have a young elfish figure as the one distributing gifts. The common fat, jolly version in a red suite came mostly through commercialization of the holiday in the U.S.