Samichlaus

The lantern is taller than the man carrying it and weighs twenty kilos. It is a bishop’s mitre built from paper and card, cut through with rosettes and stars, lit from the inside by candles, and its bearer does not walk under it so much as spring, a small dancing step that keeps the whole glowing tower trembling above the crowd. Two hundred and fifty of them come down the road at Küssnacht am Rigi on the night of 5 December. Ahead of them forty men crack two-handed whips. Behind them a thousand cowbells. Somewhere in all that light and racket, walking without saying a word, is a man in a red mantle.

His name is what happens to Sankt Nikolaus after several centuries in Swiss German mouths. Sanctus wears down to Sami, Nikolaus wears down to Chlaus, the two run together, and out comes Samichlaus.

Behind the name is a bishop who died in the Lycian city of Myra, on the coast of what is now southwestern Turkey, somewhere between 326 and 365. Almost nothing about the historical man survives in writing, which did not stop the legends from arriving in quantity. Hagiographers now accept that a second Nicholas is knotted into the same life story: an abbot of the monastery of Sion, in the mountains above Myra, who later became bishop of Pinara in the second half of the sixth century. Two men, one saint, and no way left to pull them apart.

The cult reached north of the Alps by the tenth century, pushed in what is now Germany by the empress Theophanu, the Greek wife of Otto II. From the end of the eleventh century it spread through central Europe by way of Bari, where Italian merchants had carried the supposed bones in 1087, and by way of Normandy. Within two hundred years Nicholas was among the most popular saints in Christendom, with churches founded under his patronage everywhere. His feast has fallen on 6 December since at least the ninth century, and is said to be the day he died.

Of the dozen or so legends attached to him, three did the shaping in central Switzerland. He calmed a storm and saved sailors, which made him the patron of the men hauling goods across Lake Lucerne on the Gotthard trade route. He threw gold to three girls who had no dowry, which gave him a reputation as a giver so durable that in the Catholic heartland the presents came on 6 December rather than at Christmas, right to the end of the nineteenth century and locally into the 1920s. And he raised three schoolboys who had been murdered by a butcher, which is why the monastery and collegiate schools took him up. That last one is where the custom actually begins.

Around 1300 the schools of northern France started electing one of their pupils bishop for the day and fitting him out in pontifical robes with a crozier and a mitre, then parading him through the streets. Monastic networks carried the game across central Europe in a handful of years, and almost at once it slipped its leash. By the early fourteenth century the complaints are about the boys’ insolent begging. From the fifteenth century the custom passed to unmarried journeymen and farm lads, who brought fright masks with them, mostly devils, and by about 1500 the devils had outrun the bishop entirely. Bands of masked youths roamed the whole of Advent making noise, demanding food and drink, and picking fights. Two centuries of official bans changed very little. A council record from Uri in 1788 describes masked Klausjäger going about on the eve of the feast with bells and whips, keeping up a hideous din and clatter all night, in what the councillors called the most impudent and dissolute piece of utterly unbridled masterlessness.

The church tried to steer it somewhere useful. From the middle of the seventeenth century came the house visit, an adult man of some authority dressed as a bishop, standing in a private parlour and giving children a talk about good and evil. It stayed a habit of the better-off for a long time. What ordinary families did instead was leave the presents out overnight, a birch rod alongside them for anyone who had earned it, and name the bishop of Myra as the source over breakfast.

The figure who knocks on Swiss doors today was assembled in living memory. The parish of St Leodegar in Lucerne has sent its Hofsamichlaus into private houses since at least 1908. Societies formed to do it properly and, at first, charitably: the Nikolaus group of Nächstenliebe Altdorf in 1911, Fidelitas in Flüelen in 1923, the St Niklausengesellschaft of Küssnacht in 1928, the Klausengesellschaft Arth in 1931, the St Niklausgesellschaft of the city of Zug in 1933. After the war they stopped means-testing and became a service for everybody. He is a volunteer with a timetable. A popular Samichlaus now carries a hundred or more appointments spread across ten days, and in Beckenried it takes dozens of helpers to reach all 1,500 households, while Flüelen fields fifteen teams to put 1,600 presents into 850 homes.

The Küssnacht society of 1928 is the sharpest break of the lot. Before it the Klausjagen there was a masking and noise riot like any other; afterwards it was reorganised, tamed and then made beautiful, with a fixed route, a white shepherd’s shirt for every active member and standardised motifs on the Iffelen. Other Nicholas organisations have been measuring themselves against it ever since. Kriens went the other way and specialised, founding an actual whip-cracking school in 1971.

What he can do rests entirely on the book. He arrives already knowing, and the knowing is the whole performance: the year read back to a child by a stranger in a mitre, praise first, then the other thing, then the sack. Out of it come nuts, mandarins, Lebkuchen, chocolate and sweets, and on the table there is usually a Grittibänz, a man of yeast dough with currants for eyes. His limits are the limits of a booked appointment. He is silent in central Switzerland, where the talking is left to the children, unlike the Saint-Nicolas of Fribourg, who is the city’s patron and gives a speech reviewing the year. He needs a retinue to work at all: the Schmutzlis in their dark cowls, grown out of the old devil figures, and usually a donkey. He nearly went out in the 1980s and 1990s, when demand fell and parents decided the Schmutzli was frightening the children, and several parishes simply abolished the dark companions. He came back with the millennium.

Some of the older shape is still visible if you know where to look. In Ober- and Unterägeri a dozen bands work the residential streets, and the Samichlaus calls out Holi holi hü, dä Chlaus isch do, asking for a coin to be dropped into a cloth donkey’s head mounted on a long pole. He hands over gingerbread and nuts in exchange. It is the medieval begging round with the edges filed off.

A woman born in Basel-Landschaft in 1849 remembered him differently again, and her granddaughter wrote it down. He wore a black cape with a big hood and a big beard. The children said their Versli, he told them where they had done well and where they had not, and he tipped out the sack: slices of dried apple and pear, dried cherries, nuts, a few biscuits, and if the year had gone well a little chocolate for each of them, bouncing across the floorboards. Then he went back into the forest. If you saw wisps of fog out there afterwards, you knew what it meant. He was helping the Christkind bake the Lebkuchen.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Samichlaus?

Samichlaus is the Swiss German name for Saint Nicholas, and the name of the custom figure who visits homes across Switzerland on and around 6 December. He wears a red mantle and a tall mitre, carries a gilded staff and a book recording each child’s good and bad behaviour, and hands out nuts, mandarins, chocolate and gingerbread. The name is a worn-down compound of sanctus and Nikolaus.

When does Samichlaus come, and why 6 December?

Samichlaus comes on 6 December and the days around it. That date has been the feast of Saint Nicholas since at least the ninth century and is held to be the day the bishop of Myra died. In Catholic central Switzerland the main gift-giving of the year happened on this day rather than at Christmas until the end of the nineteenth century, and in some places into the 1920s.

Who is Schmutzli and why does he come with Samichlaus?

Schmutzli is Samichlaus’s companion, hooded and robed in dark cloth, and he descends from the devil figures that attached themselves to the Nicholas processions in the fifteenth century. By about 1500 those masked devils had become more prominent than the bishop himself. In the 1980s and 1990s some Swiss parishes abolished the Schmutzli altogether because parents thought he frightened children too much.

What is the Klausjagen in Küssnacht?

The Klausjagen is the largest Samichlaus procession in Switzerland, held at Küssnacht am Rigi on the night of 5 December before an audience of more than twenty thousand. It fields around a thousand cowbell ringers, 250 bearers of illuminated mitre-shaped lanterns called Iffelen, 200 horn blowers, seventy brass players and forty whip crackers. The St Niklausengesellschaft, founded in 1928, turned it from a rowdy masked romp into the organised spectacle it is now.

Is Samichlaus the same as Santa Claus?

They come from the same saint but they are not the same figure. Samichlaus is Saint Nicholas as central Switzerland performs him, a bishop in a mitre who arrives on foot on 6 December with a donkey and a book, while Santa Claus is the American figure assembled from Nicholas, the Dutch Sinterklaas and Father Christmas, and arrives at Christmas. Swiss children get both, with the Christkind taking Christmas Eve.

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