The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Mary Cowles Clark
So here we are, reading Little Wizard Stories of Oz in the run-up to Christmas, and out of nowhere my son turns to me and says, "Is there an Oz book about Christmas?"
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| Originally published: 1902 Read aloud: December 2021 |
Well, as a matter of fact... kind of! As I said when writing up Little Wizard Stories, I kind of harbored ambitions of reading Baum's Oz-adjacent fantasies to him, but never did I imagine he would give me such an opening! In 1902, after The Wizard of Oz but before the Oz books became a regular thing with The Marvelous Land of Oz, Baum wrote The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. The book features the Forest of Burzee, also mentioned in Queen Zixi of Ix and which appears on the Oz map that first appeared in the Tik-Tok of Oz end papers; the Nome King, who would later of course appear in Ozma of Oz and many others has a small appearance; and this version of Santa reappeared in The Road to Oz. So though, no, there was no Oz in this book, the book took place near to Oz, and connected to Oz, I established at great pains, even showing my son an Oz map and pointing out where Burzee was.
He was game for it. I did look into upgrading my copy, but though there is a Puffin edition out there that is probably nicer than my undated (but probably from 1986) New American Library edition, it didn't seem like it would be so much nicer that it would be worth the outlay.
Baum has a different style here than he does in the Oz books: less straightforward, more consciously old-fashioned. While most of the Oz books are what Farah Mendlesohn would call portal/quest fantasies, this one is more of an immersive fantasy. (Or if it is a portal/quest fantasy, it's about someone from the magical world going on a quest in our world.) This means we don't have a viewpoint character like Dorothy or Trot or even Tip or Ojo who doesn't understand the magical world; I wasn't always sure how much my son was getting out of it, though I did my best to slow down and explain things. He was very into it; we raced through chapters while traveling back to Ohio for Christmas.
The book seeks to explain the cultural mythos around Santa: why does he travel the world giving out toys, why does he have reindeer, why can he live forever, how can he go so fast, where do Christmas trees come from, why does he go down chimneys, why do we hang stockings. Baum isn't interested in real history; he clearly takes the current version of Santa and extrapolate backwards. So we learn that in fact Santa invented the concept of the toy! It's a little goofy but I liked it, and book takes place in a sort of non-place, a vaguely European pre-modern environment. (In the Tik-Tok map, the Forest of Burzee is right across the Deadly Desert from Oz, but that is an awkward fit with what we hear here, where it is clearly surrounded by nonmagical lands.) Like Baum was very consciously aiming to do with Wonderful Wizard, it's a fairy tale for the twentieth century, but in a very different way.
It does read a bit off to the modern reader, though, because some elements of the Santa Claus mythos were not yet codified in 1902; Thomas Nast placed Santa at the North Pole in the late nineteenth century, but that must not have been a given yet as of 1902, because Baum's Santa lives in the Laughing Valley of Hohaho. This bothered my son, but he ended up deciding that Santa must move to the North Pole later. Similarly, though Baum uses the idea from Clement C. Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" that Santa's sleigh was drawn by a team of reindeer, he uses a different set, with ten: Flossie and Glossie, Racer and Pacer, Reckless and Speckless, Fearless and Peerless, and Ready and Steady.
The Nome King is a much friendlier fellow than the one from the Oz books. This is easy enough to explain (he would have been perfectly nice to the Oz characters if they hadn't wanted to rescue the Royal Family of Ev from him), but what is less easy to explain is that he has children! The Oz wiki suggests that this Nome King is the father of Roquat, the Nome King from the Oz novels.
It was fun to revisit the book; it has a certain charm. But it has less dialogue than Oz novels, with lots of exposition about Santa's life, and was thus less enjoyable to read aloud, especially to a three-year-old. But hey, having now established the precedent than an Oz book didn't actually have to have any Oz in it, my plans to expand our reading would be easier to implement... but more on that in a future installment...
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