2023 Santa Claus Peace Prize Awarded to the World Council for Health
The WCH team is proud to be among the group of ordinary yet extraordinary and inspiring nominees and past award recipients from around the world.
Written by Francesca Havens, WCH Translations Coordinator and member of the County Councils development team
It has been the most extraordinary experience to go to collect the Santa Claus Peace Prize from the eponymous thirty-three-year-old Turkish foundation.
More than thirty years ago, I read a book about the advertising industry and their use of psychology in post-war America, so I was always rather allergic to the notion of our heavily manipulated ‘Christmas’ and ‘Santa Claus’. Since the 1950s it has been a pseudo-religious family celebration around the birth of an important historical figure (call him yesteryear’s ‘truther’)—who possibly was not born in December at all—with a roly-poly bearded man in a red and white outfit tacked on.
Much to my surprise, thirty-odd years later I found myself, on behalf of the World Council for Health, heavily involved with Santa Claus in a majority-Muslim country on the confines of the Levant, Turkey.
The name ‘Santa Claus’, according to historical records comes from the Dutch ‘Sinterklaas’, an abridged version of Saint Nicholas. Saint Nicholas is a popular Christian saint, patron of children and seafarers, among others, hence the popularity in a seafaring nation like the Netherlands. He was born and died in Anatolia, Turkey, in the third century AC, and was bishop of Myra in the times of the Roman Emperor Constantin. The church erected in his name a couple of centuries after his death, and which guarded his tomb, was elaborated on and expanded over the centuries until it was buried in mud and earth after a severe earthquake in the area in the 12th century AC. Tsar Nicholas I sent funds to have his patron saint’s last resting place excavated and restored in the 1860s, and in the late 20th century the Turkish state carried out further work. The church is hence about 6m below ground level in modern-day Demre, and still holds Saint Nicholas’ sarcophagus, although rather damaged, as Italian sailors pinched the bones and took them to Bari in the 10th century AC.
Not for nothing is the modern-day interpretation, Santa Claus, a kindly old man who listens to children and rewards them once a year for their good and thoughtful deeds as small human beings. Whatever the garb, whether a monk’s or bishop’s robes, or an eye-catching and rather more commercial red and white outfit, Santa Claus is based on the story of a real historical figure who made it his business to help vulnerable people, children, women and others as his mission in life and part of his understanding of the inspired counter-hierarchical teachings of a man who overturned the money-lenders tables outside a temple in Jerusalem a couple of thousand years ago.
The link between the two men makes the appearance of the latter-day Sinterklaas a rather interesting development, and the revival of the historically decent man in this guise as an emblem of peace in a Muslim country even more so. What really struck me is that in so many countries around the world, there are incredible initiatives by humans, ordinary men and women, who are doing no more than remembering their humanity. Why do I say this? Throughout history, we have needed these men and women to remember our humanity, our human hearts and the power of love to defend us against the perpetual tide of manipulation, deceit and extraction waged against us by successive waves of interbred manipulators.
Muammer Karabulut, current President of the Santa Claus Peace Foundation council, which comprises 40-odd member countries, is one such man. A lifelong peace activist, adhering to the respect among many modern Turks of the game-changing modernisation and secularisation of the Turkish state, he still to this very day promotes peace and understanding among all religions and cultures. For the World Council for Health to have been chosen in this manner for our shared values of health, integrity and well-being for all sovereign beings, and the planet we live on, is truly an honour. A feature of this singular focus on peace and understanding are the other nominees who appeared in Demre for the 2023 peace prize.
This included Haneum World Arts Company, a South Korean traditional dance and music group, under the patronage of Seoul University Professor of Politics and Diplomacy, Chul Hee Nam, and led by one of his former students, the delightful Mrs Hee Young Kim; Dzvoni Tripilya, a Ukrainian choir that has been singing for peace and non-factionalism in Ukraine since 2016, a couple of years after the onset of the infamous war there; and finally the whole wonderful mix of Turks, Koreans and Ukrainians was accompanied by Mikoláus, or Szent Miklós, a Hungarian Santa Claus and Hungarian members of the peace foundation representing their country. The Hungarian group notably has a hotline charity for children, under the auspices of Santa Claus, to help distressed, vulnerable and suicidal children in Hungary.
If anyone is to be judged by the company they keep, I say this: who would not want to be seen amongst a group of ordinary yet extraordinary men and women from around the world, from very sensitive geomanipulative hotspots? Their countries border Syria, Iran, Ukraine and North Korea, and they are acutely aware of the suffering of ordinary men, women and children whose bodies are too often found under the rubble and in the concentration camps of the despotic minority that envisage their New World Order.
Do we want more long-premeditated wars, destruction, murder, enslavement and wealth extraction, or do we want to revive fundamental, heart-felt human and natural values, and understand in this story yet another example of the 180-degree inversion of real values practised on an unsuspecting global public with the figure of Sinterklaas?
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This is delightful! Thank you and CONGRATULATIONS!!!
Congratulations on the award, that's excellent, and thank you Francesca for an Inspiring Article. Here's to a HAPPIER New Year to ALL!