Traditional Russian Santa Claus can be easily distinguished from American Santa Claus. Our grandfather wears only a long fur coat befitting his status as the main winter wizard, the most solid beard and always has a staff. The latter is not just a detail of the costume, but an important component of the image.
As a New Year's character, Santa Claus was finally formed only in the 1930s, when the Soviet authorities decided to return their favorite holiday to the people, completely excluding religious moments from it. To do this, the artists had to work hard, study the mythological roots of fairy tales and present their own version of the winter elder.
Our ancestors deified the forces of cold and darkness, triumphant at the peak of winter, and presented them as a mighty spirit that is able to bind the waters with ice and cover the forests with snow. So mostly ice patterns, the silver light of the moon and the deep blue of the night sky became its symbols.
Later, Morozko became a stern, but fair character in fairy tales, who was presented as a bearded old man in blue and white outfits. Based on these data, Soviet artists endowed Father Frost with a richly embroidered long-length fur coat, a hat similar to a tsar's headdress and a beautiful ice, crystal or silver staff.
The staff itself can be simply twisted or decorated with an ornament that includes images of stars and the moon, and it is crowned with a lunar, that is, the sign of the month. Most often, in fairy tales, the staff is used to freeze all living things. With its help, Frost dresses trees in snow coats, covers reservoirs with ice. Careless transformation of a person or animal to a staff immediately turns them into ice.
However, the staff also has a deeper meaning. Passing on the ground, sprinkling it with snow, Frost actually endows the soil with water for the future harvest. It is not for nothing that the staff is crowned with the moon - one of the symbols of growth and rebirth.
