Here’s why Tito hated Santa Claus and who suffered for it!

It is a well known fact that Josip Broz Tito did not like Santa Claus, but also Saint Nicholas, and that he identified them. A blanket with a white beard and a red suit provoked negative reactions from the marshal. But why this was the case, the curator of the Yugoslav History Museum, Ana Panić, found out a few years ago.

It has always been known that the festivals are legitimized by the authorities and that they are there, as the commissioner pointed out, “to celebrate what is in power, that is why the New Year and other socialist festivals were there to replace the old religious festivals. like the holidays, Christmas, Easter. “.

That is why, in the early years of the FSYR, Santa Claus was condemned as a Bolshevik-clerical creation because he reminded Josip Broz Tito of Saint Nicholas, a glory that he did not like at all.

In other words, the holidays, which were used for the purpose of promoting communism and were celebrated “according to the task of the party,” blurred the boundaries between the personal and the social, and one of their main functions was integration. As the MIJ curator explained to us, the New Year, which was not a very popular holiday among Yugoslavs until World War II, should have replaced the earlier celebration of Christmas in the public life of the RFSY, but also cleverly avoided the division of the population of different religions and created a feeling. belonging to a community: the young SFRY.

Of course, when a social-political leadership has the objective of erasing religious differences, Saint Nicholas cannot agree with that story. The only question is how did Marshal connect Saint Nicholas with Santa Claus?

Etymology of the word “Santa Claus”
The history of the etymology of the word “Santa Claus” and its symbolism is interesting. She explains why Tito didn’t like the white-bearded guy in the red coat. The name Santa Claus, as we know it, is actually derived from the Russian name “Santa Claus” and in ancient Russian pagan tradition it represented the winter king who went from house to house, and people gave him gifts, like a kind of request to your cold winter passes as painlessly as possible.

And Santa Claus, as we know him from children’s movies, with a rainbow, a white beard and a red coat, has nothing to do with that ‘Santa Claus’, but with ‘Santa Claus’, which is a version of the old Dutch deity associated with Saint Nicholas. explained Ana Panić

So those are the two streams that were connected through Coca Cola.

“The cute blanket with a beard and red clothes reminds Saint Nicholas, who also has red clothes, a long beard and gives gifts to children, while the king of winter always wore a green suit and was never so fat, but presented himself as a skinny figure. with a rainbow, not even white, but a gray beard. The winter king did not give gifts, people gave him gifts in exchange for a carefree winter period, “said the curator of the Museum of Yugoslav History, adding that Santa Claus was undesirable in the early postwar years. at Tito’s New Years celebrations and among the people.

According to Ana Panić, the anti-fascist women’s front, which was in charge of affirming the New Year in Yugoslavia, was going to replace Santa Claus with a girl, because the new young state was maturing and the girl was supposed to symbolize both the state and the New Year.

That is to say, there was a whole scenario according to which a young woman meets an old woman who tells her who was good and who was not and how the previous year went. Then the young woman, as the personification of the new society, gives gifts to the children, and in that business the old supporter could have helped her. However, that scenario never came true ”, revealed the curator.

The tradition of Saint Nicholas has many parallels with Germanic mythology, especially with the god Odin. This includes a beard, hat and spear (today a stick) and a bag held by his servants to catch the mischievous children.

Saint Nicholas rode a white horse just like Odin. The letters on the candy that Black Peter gives the children are associated with Odin’s creation of runic letters. The songs recited during the celebration and the songs sung by the children are dedicated to Odin as the god of poetry.

The belief that Santa enters houses through a chimney may stem from the story of Saint Nicholas throwing money out the window and, in a more recent version of the story, throwing money down the chimney if he finds closed windows.
So, after centuries of belief and putting Santa Claus and Saint Nicholas in contact, it is no wonder that the sympathetic president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia remembered the compassionate mantle of a saint.

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