Hi Penny, welcome! It's nice to meet you! Please feel free to comment or ask questions anytime!
Linus, that's a great question! I don't have kids--maybe a couple others will talk about that--but I can tell you that Santa is the strongest memory we have of an indigenous Northern Shaman. Red, black, and white are the colors of the Goddess in all the most ancient cultures, because they are the colors of Life itself. In those far northern cultures, reindeer (caribou, on this side of the pond)were sacred, the givers of life.
These days Shamans talk about the drumbeat being the "horse" they ride to do their work, but back in the mists of time, horses were unknown to the Northern peoples; their Shamans rode the flying reindeer in the drumbeat.
Evidently there was a strong tradition of the Shaman visiting villages at Midwinter, telling stories, singing songs, wrapped in his sacred furs and bringing his sacred reindeer with him. I don't know if gifts were part of the celebrations, but certainly they have been part of many other cultures' Midwinter feasts, so they might have been---and the tie between Santa and gifts DOES go back several hundred years if not a thousand, so who knows? Maybe that was an integral part of "Scandiwhovian" Midwinters also. It might also very well be that the Shamans were also traders, bringing trade goods to the villages at Midwinter, and that the "gift" tradition is a dim memory of that.
Hope this gives you a starting place!
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