Santa Claus

Also Known As: also Father Christmas, Saint Nick, Kris Kringle; from Dutch Sinterklaas, a contraction of Sint Nikolaas, “Saint Nicholas”
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Christian Mythology, Dutch Mythology, English Mythology, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A tireless gift-bringer who crosses the whole world in a single night, entering homes by the chimney to reward children according to their conduct.
Role in Mythos: The benevolent spirit of Christmas giving, grown from a Christian saint into the central folk figure of the modern secular holiday.
Relation to Humans: He rewards good children with gifts and, in older tellings, leaves the bad with coal or a switch. He is sustained by belief, and generations of parents keep him alive by quietly acting as his hands.

Snow lies unbroken on the roof except for one set of prints that cross to the chimney and stop. The fire below has fallen to embers, the room smells of pine and cold soot, and the stockings that hung slack at midnight now bulge against the mantel. Nobody heard the sleigh. Nobody ever does. A glass stands empty on the hearth where milk was left, and that small courtesy is the only proof anyone will ever have.

He is easy to picture and hard to pin down. The familiar shape is a broad old man gone soft in the middle, cheeks reddened by cold, a beard the white of fresh snow spilling over a red coat trimmed in fur. Black boots, a wide black belt, a cap that flops at the tip, and a sack that never seems to empty no matter how many houses he has already climbed into. He laughs from the belly. He smells of woodsmoke and cold air. The picture feels ancient and is not: almost every piece of it was fixed in place by a handful of named men within the last two centuries, and their fingerprints are still on him.

Underneath the sleigh and the reindeer stands a real person. Nicholas was a Christian bishop of Myra, a port on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, in the fourth century. The stories told of him turn on quiet, secret generosity. The most repeated one has him learn of a poor man with three daughters and no dowries to marry them, a fate that in that world would have sold the girls into something worse. Three nights running, Nicholas threw a bag of gold through the window while the family slept, and in some tellings the gold fell into stockings or shoes left drying by the fire. That detail outlived the man. He became the patron of children, sailors, and the falsely accused, his feast kept on the sixth of December, and the Orthodox world still calls him Nicholas the Wonderworker.

The saint travelled. Dutch communities kept him as Sinterklaas, a tall, solemn bishop in red robes who arrives by ship, supposedly from Spain, and rides the rooftops leaving presents in children’s shoes on the eve of his feast. When Dutch families settled New Amsterdam, later New York, they carried Sinterklaas with them, and the English colonists brought their own Father Christmas, a personification of the season’s feasting and goodwill. The two blurred together. The name itself is the seam showing: say Sinterklaas quickly in a new language and it wears down to Santa Claus.

What happened next was a work of authorship. In 1809 Washington Irving, writing a comic history of Dutch New York, sketched a jolly, pipe-smoking St Nicholas who soared over the treetops in a wagon and dropped gifts down chimneys. In 1823 a poem printed anonymously in the Troy Sentinel, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” did the rest. It gave him a sleigh and eight reindeer and named every one, sent him down the chimney with a pack on his back, and called him a right jolly old elf with a little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly. The verses are usually credited to Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed them in 1837, though a long-running rival case has been made for Henry Livingston Jr. Either way, the modern Santa was mostly written on that page.

Then he was drawn. Across the 1860s to the 1880s the cartoonist Thomas Nast filled in the rest for Harper’s Weekly, granting Santa a workshop at the North Pole, a ledger that sorted children into the good and the bad, and, more and more often, the red fur suit. The belief that Coca-Cola invented that red suit is a tidy modern myth. The company’s warm, mass-printed Santas, painted by Haddon Sundblom from 1931, standardized the image and drove it around the planet, but the red coat had been on him for decades before the first bottle was sold.

Other claims reach further back than any of this. People like to trace him to Odin, the one-eyed Norse god who rode the midwinter sky at the head of the Wild Hunt on an eight-legged horse, and to tie that eight-legged steed to the eight reindeer. It is a satisfying story and the evidence for it is thin. The honest account is plainer: Santa Claus is a recent assembly of an ancient saint, a Dutch bishop, an English holiday spirit, and the imaginations of a few nineteenth-century writers and artists.

What he can do follows from what he is. In a single night he crosses the entire world, slips down any chimney however narrow, and knows without asking which children have earned reward and which have not. His sack does not run dry, his reindeer do not tire, and he himself does not age. His limits are just as particular. He is bound to one night of the year and can work on no other. He depends on going unseen, and a child who stays awake to catch him finds only stockings and silence. Most of all he runs on belief. He exists because the story is retold each winter and because millions of adults become his hands, filling the stockings, eating the biscuit, drinking the milk. Stop telling it and he is gone. He is, in the end, a made thing, and he shifts shape in the hands of whoever draws him next.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Santa Claus?

Santa Claus is the gift-giving figure at the centre of the modern Christmas, an old man in a red fur-trimmed suit who is said to travel the world in a single night delivering presents to children. He developed from the fourth-century Christian saint Nicholas of Myra, by way of the Dutch Sinterklaas and the English Father Christmas.

Where does the name “Santa Claus” come from?

The name comes from the Dutch Sinterklaas, a contraction of Sint Nikolaas, meaning Saint Nicholas. Dutch settlers carried the figure to New York, where English speakers gradually wore the name down into “Santa Claus.”

Is Santa Claus based on a real person?

Yes. The root of the legend is Saint Nicholas of Myra, a real Christian bishop who lived in the fourth century in what is now Turkey and was famous for secret gift-giving, including throwing gold to a poor man’s three daughters for their dowries. The sleigh, reindeer, and North Pole workshop were added much later by nineteenth-century writers and illustrators.

Did Coca-Cola invent Santa’s red suit?

No. Coca-Cola’s advertisements from 1931, painted by Haddon Sundblom, popularized and standardized the red-suited Santa worldwide, but they did not create it. The cartoonist Thomas Nast had already been drawing Santa in a red fur suit in Harper’s Weekly decades earlier.

Why does Santa come down the chimney?

The chimney entrance traces back to the oldest Saint Nicholas story, in which he tossed gold through a window at night and it landed in stockings or shoes drying by the fire. Washington Irving and the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” turned that into the now-standard image of Santa descending the chimney to fill stockings on the hearth.