{"id":258348,"date":"2024-01-11T02:32:21","date_gmt":"2024-01-11T07:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258348"},"modified":"2024-01-25T13:56:36","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T18:56:36","slug":"of-santa-claus-and-baxbakwalanuxsiwae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2024\/01\/11\/of-santa-claus-and-baxbakwalanuxsiwae\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Santa Claus and Baxbakwalanuxsiwae"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Sam Kriss has a great newsletter called Numb At The Lodge, and in a recent edition he wrote about Santa Claus<\/a> \u2014 but also so much more: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There are two named individuals known to live at the North Pole. The first is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae, He-Who-First-Ate-Man-At-The-North-End-Of-The-World. In the mythology of the Kwakiutl people of what\u2019s now British Colombia, Baxbakwalanuxsiwae is a primordial cannibal. His skin is grey, and every inch of it is covered in ravenous, gnashing, blood-stained mouths with razor-sharp yellow teeth. When those mouths aren\u2019t crushing human bones or tearing human flesh, they cry h\u0101p! h\u0101p! h\u0101p!<\/em> which means eat! eat! eat!<\/em> He goes naked in the snow. He lives in a lodge at the furthest northern edge of the world, with blood-red smoke rising from its chimney. He shares this lodge with his wife, Qominaga, who dresses in strips of red-and-white cedar bark; the two of them sometimes take the form of monstrous black birds and fly south to steal people away and eat them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second inhabitant of the Pole is called Santa Claus. According to the conventional account, Santa Claus descends from a (probably) real historical person: Saint Nicholas, Defender of Orthodoxy, Wonderworker, Holy Hierarch, and Bishop of Myra, who (probably) lived in Asia Minor in the third and fourth centuries AD. Something\u2019s off<\/em> about this story. The Santa Claus we\u2019ve ended up with is a weird guy, and there are a lot of things about him that seem to have no obvious precedent in the Anglo-Dutch tradition. For instance: his practice of going into houses via the chimney<\/em>. Why? Or his team of flying reindeer. Or Mrs Claus, who is not the sort of companion a Catholic bishop should have. Also, Santa lives at the North Pole<\/em>. A barren, freezing wilderness, where Santa\u2019s only neighbour is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae of the chomping mouths.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Kriss has a great newsletter called Numb At The Lodge, and in a recent edition he wrote about Santa Claus \u2014 but also so much more: “There are two named individuals known to live at the North Pole. The first is Baxbakwalanuxsiwae, He-Who-First-Ate-Man-At-The-North-End-Of-The-World. In the mythology of the Kwakiutl people of what\u2019s now British … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Of Santa Claus and Baxbakwalanuxsiwae”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258561,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258348\/revisions\/258561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}