WHAT WOULD Santa drink?
Listen, kids, contrary to the tales Mom and Dad told you, Father Christmas did not get that round belly and red nose from gulping down glasses of skim milk. Not to destroy your innocent visions of sugar plums and candy canes, but when it comes to treats on a long winter's night, if it's all the same to you, Santa Claus would rather have a beer.
Sacrilege, you say? The very symbol of childhood innocence guzzling alcohol? What's next, Frosty the Snowman doing Jell-O shots?
In fact, from the very beginning, Santa Claus was a man of drink.
His alter ego is Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century Turkish do-gooder who was venerated as St. Nicholas, the ancient patron of assorted riffraff, including prostitutes, lawyers and, yes, brewers.
St. Nick eventually morphed into Santa Claus, the fat, jolly, pipe-smoking elf popularized by Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Shortly after Thomas Nast illustrated Santa's image for Harpers Weekly in 1863, advertisers began using him to shill everything, from shoes to cigars to, yes, suds.
In 1900, one magazine advertisement proclaimed, "Wherever children look for Santa Claus, Schlitz beer is known as the standard." Around the same time, Consumers Brewing assured drinkers in newspaper ads that, while "Santa Claus himself is reluctant to give away our beer . . . we have plenty to go 'round."
And so it went, from the Clydesdales pulling a sleigh full of Budweiser to Spuds Mackenzie dressed in a red Santa suit.
Not surprisingly, nannies and prohibitionists condemned those who suggested that Santa (a legal adult) had a taste for intoxicants.
In the 1930s, following the Prohibition, the Women's Christian Temperance Union campaigned to outlaw the use of his red-suited image in booze ads. One leader complained before Congress that "Santa Claus, patron saint of children during the holiday season, was pictured loaded down with beer bottles, drinking cocktails, serving as bartender . . . "
Some 30 states ultimately enacted laws banning Santa from beer ads. It was those rules that the importers of Santa's Butt Winter Porter ran into a couple of years ago, when authorities in New England sought to ban sales of the bottles.
"Undignified and improper" was the way Maine state liquor officials described the cartoon of Santa dangling precariously over an open fire on the label of Warm Welcome Nut Browned Ale.
