Santa Lady Hooked On St. Nick Replicas

At Madeline Melito’s Otis Orchards home, it’s Christmas all year round. Every available surface - table tops, counters, book shelves - is graced with ceramic Santa figures, works of art Melito began making and collecting in 1987.

“I don’t have any that are really old, but they’re all replicas of Santas from other countries,” Melito said.

There’s one in the Canadian style, with a goose underneath his arm. Perched inside a bookcase that has been converted into a “Santa case,” sits a post-czarist Russian figure in a blue robe known as Grandfather Frost.

Melito’s husband, who passed away a couple of years ago, was a career Air Force man. The family lived all over the world - including two stays in Morocco and six or so years in Spain - but it was at Spokane’s Fairchild Air Force Base that Melito got hooked on the ceramics hobby.

That was back in 1956 during a class on the base. She has made a variety of Christmas figurines ever since: nativity sets, angels, and the like.

It wasn’t until 1987, when she fell in love with a Victorian English Santa Claus in a Coeur d’Alene pottery shop, that she decided to make her own.

Some 300 Santas later, she admits that she just got “hooked.”

Walking to the back of her mobile home to show off the kiln where she fires the clay figures - she buys them unfinished from ceramics shops - she recounts from memory tales of Christmas around the world.

The St. Nicholas legend, she says, started in Turkey following the birth of Christ. Ol’ Nick, the son of a wealthy merchant, overheard a father lamenting to his three daughters that he didn’t have enough money to pay for a decent dowry.

“Nicholas threw gold coins in their window, enough for dowries for all three, and they landed in stockings that the girls had hung out to dry,” Melito says. “That’s why we hang out stockings today.”

Another version of the story is that Nicholas left three bags of gold for the girls and spawned our gift-giving tradition.

Last year, Melito displayed three of her Santa figurines at the Otis Orchards Library. This December, 20 of her treasures are at the library, along with books about Christmas traditions in France, Italy, medival Europe, Spain, Germany, and Austria that she has collected over the years.

Not every country has a Santa Claus. But most have some sort of a mythical figure that brings children gifts.

In Austria, it’s a child, called the Christkindl, who slips into homes silently to leave presents. But if there were a Santa Claus there, he might look like the one Melito calls her Austrian Santa, who has a wooden yoke, perfect for navigating the snowy Alpine forests.

The one Melito calls her Mexican Santa has a donkey to carry the load of toys. Italy’s Santa, Melito said, is a good witch named Bofana who speeds from the Toscana to the Adriatic on a broom, throwing goodies down into the houses below.

“Everybody’s Santa is different, but the funny thing is nearly every culture has one,” she said. “The children need it. He’s everybody’s, and he represents good in every country.”