Hungarian Santa Claus comes earlier - Mikulás 6th december

The US exported Santa Claus everywhere, and Coca Cola sponsored his red clothes forever. However, we in Hungary at least - and some other few countries - keep our traditions. Christmas is reserved for the Little Jesus, and our Santa Claus comes earlier in December and has no reindeers and does not live in Finland but in heaven, He is called Mikulás (from the name Miklós, Nicholas), has a big bag full with presents, and has some "evil" sidekicks, the krampusz, who deliver to the naughty children.

Every child knows this feeling in Hungary. 5th December, maybe snow is falling, and you are going to bed...

... you have polished your boots, best if they are red, and put them on the window sill, or even outside on the balcony. And your are hoping to sleep with open eyes, or somehow struggling to manage to wake up in the dawn when Mikulás sneaks around and leaves some delicious chocolate in your boots.

VIRGÁCS

I mentioned the Krampusz, the evil sidekicks, but actually they are never depicted as really scary guys... In the worst case, they bring you a virgács (a tiny broom made of twigs) so your parents can spank you :) But usually nowadays, every decent magyar gets a Mikulás chocolate and a cute gold colored virgács as well.... So Mikulás does not have to keep track of all the good and bad deeds...

The legend of St Nicholas originates back to a similarly named bishop of Myram  province of the Byzantine Anatolia, now in Turkey. He had a generous heart and helped a man's poor daughters avoid prostitution by slipping some gold under their pillows during the nights. Sadly, the tradition did not keep up the gold bit of the story :D

Of course there are other fuzzy legends and historical facts of every kind of Mikulas and Santa alter ego (for whole story read wikipedia) but sure is, that the modern Santa Claus with that fancy sledge and tipsy Rudolf are just the latest covers of the same old record.

By the way, not only children are awaiting Mikulás. A friend had this message on his facebook wall:

"Upload the photo of your boot, and I will photoshop something into it during the night"

Bakonyi Zsuzsa