Saint Mikuláš (like Santa if he went to jail first)

First, imagine Santa if he stopped eating all those cookies and chose skim over whole milk, wore a red bishop hat and robes, walked with a staff and hung out with an angel and the devil.

Now imagine, his job instead of flying around in a magical little sleigh judging children was to instead rock up in person at said children's houses and schools, with much graver consequences to a not so good year than a couple lumps of coal, like say, being put in a bag and taken to Hell with the devil. Wait. What?

I present to you, Saint Mikuláš (pronounced Mikulaash), the beloved saint celebrated on December 5th.

Now, according to a few of my Czech friends, in their parent's era Mikuláš did in fact pass off the bad kids to his buddy the devil who promptly put them in a bag and pretended he was going to take them to hell or mildly beat them.

Well, I don't know about you but I know that would have been a way more efficient bedtime story for me as a child than the whole Santa Claus bit. 'Be good or some old man will leave you coal in the living room' versus 'Be good or we'll let the devil take you without ransom'. Ours is clearly lacking the fear element.

But alas things have progressed, and with the prospect of putting children in bags to be carted off to Hell being looked down on as a somewhat cruel practice, the devil now only gives you a stern talking to and shakes his chains. Slightly anti-climactic if you ask me, though still more fear inducing than Santa.

The Czechs aren't the only ones who let people cart off their children, apparently the Dutch Sinterklaas had a somewhat similar gig although your final destination was Spain as a slave as opposed to Hell. And Sinterklaas comes with reinforcement, Zwarte Pieten, a group of black men, now called 'helpers' but formerly referred to as 'slaves', a tradition that is only now starting to be questioned with concerns about the racist content.

So if this all happens at the beginning of December, then who brings the gifts on Christmas? Surely not your parents. I found the answer to this question last year from a conversation with one of the 5 year olds at the kindergarten, Tomáš, he was playing with a new toy and I had asked him passingly who had given it to him, mum? Dad? Grandparents, maybe?

None of the above.

'Ježíšek.' Translate: Baby Jesus.

Come again?

The absurdity of this is not even that a baby somehow navigates his way around the world dropping off gifts (which clearly an old man in a flying sled led by migratory mammals could reasonably achieve), but that the good people of the Czech Republic are getting gifts from a religious icon that they don't believe in. They proudly boast to anyone who will listen that they are the least religious country in Europe.

So are they duplicitous or are they simply being advantageous?

The picture above was taken at the kindergarten during last year's Mikuláš celebration (2010).