Swiss Christmas Customs 2005

Santa Claus in Fribourg and Grittibänz

The Advent, Christmas and New Year period has a wealth of customs. Beside the ones widely known throughout Europe, there are some regional - and even purely local - traditions. Swiss Post is therefore launching its new four-year "Christmas Customs" series with the special stamps "Santa Claus in Fribourg" and "Grittibänz".

Santa Claus

In the Christian churches, there are few saints as important as the Holy Bishop Nicholas of Myra. The starting point for his veneration is Myra. That was where, sometime around 300, a pious and charitable Bishop lived about whom many legends started to grow over the next few centuries. Although his fame had already reached Western and Northern Europe by the year 1000, it was not until 1087 that widespread veneration of him began, when merchants from Bari in Southern Italy stole his bones and brought them to their hometown where a basilica was then erected in his honor. A Lorraine crusader's deed was hardly less illegal. He brought a bone from St. Nicholas's finger to the market town later known as St. Nicolas-de-Port (near Nancy in France), and this town developed into a major place of pilgrimage, especially as the Holy Bishop was chosen as the patron saint of Lorraine.

An ecumenical Saint

St. Nicholas is also the patron saint of Russia and Greece as well as of the City and Canton of Fribourg - a clear indication of the great importance attached to him both in the Eastern and in the Western Church. So he not only survived the 1054 Schism of the Church but also the Reformation, which made him an ecumenical Saint.

Profane tradition

The Feast of St. Nicholas is celebrated on 6 December, but profane tradition rather than religious ceremony mark this day, as customs involving masks and noise, which originally had nothing to do with the Saint coexist with the advent of the Bishop who distributes gifts. The latter is explained by the legends, which made St. Nicholas the patron saint of children and students in the Middle Ages. And it is from those days that St. Nicholas's entrance into Fribourg in the flesh dates: a schoolboy, dressed as a Bishop, rides into the city on the evening of the Feast acting as if he were an ecclesiastical dignitary. The "la Saint-Nicolas" was banned in 1784, and the custom was quickly forgotten until 1906 when the Fribourg Collège St-Michel revived the school children's procession, which will be performed for the hundredth time this year.

Stamps in detail

Stamp issue: 23 November 2005
Print: offset by Cartor Security Printing
Stamp sizes: 28 x 33 mm
Stamp perforation: 13,75 x 13,5
Stamp design: Michèle Haas, Basel

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