The History of Father Christmas

Christmas returned after the Restoration of 1660, and Father Christmas went on to appear in stage plays and folk drama over the next 200 years. But, as Ronald Hutton says in Stations of the Sun, he remained far removed from our understanding of the man:

‘He was essentially concerned with the adult world, personifying feasting and games, he had no connection with presents, and he was not treated with much respect, being generally a burlesque figure of fun.’

Father Christmas enjoyed a mini-renaissance in the first half of the 19th century. In illustrations he was sometimes shown as a winter sprite with garlands of holly on his head, surrounded by food and drink, and he featured in many folk plays of the era. He also closely resembles the Ghost of Christmas Present from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

But Christmas was changing. With the Victorian focus on family life and children, it would no longer be just a time for drinking, feasting and making merry. And this new kind of Christmas needed a new kind of old man to represent it.

Here Comes Santa Claus

It’s not entirely clear how Sinterklaas made his way across the Atlantic to North America to become Santa Claus. It's possible that his story made its way to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, which later became New York.

In 1773 the Rivington’s Gazetteer in New York reported that the anniversary of St Nicholas, ‘otherwise called St a Claus’, had recently been marked by ‘a great number of Sons of that ancient Saint’.

In 1809 Washington Irvine’s history of New York claimed that old Dutch families still told tales of Sinterklaas on St Nicholas's Day. He was said to fly over the city in a wagon and climb down chimneys to deliver presents. Whether or not Irvine was using poetic licence is unclear, but the idea stuck, and the legend grew, with a poem featuring 'Sancte Claus' published in the New York Spectator a year later.

Some historians think that Irving and other New Yorkers were inventing new traditions to create a gentler, family-oriented kind of Christmas tradition in the city, which had begun to suffer from unpleasant bouts of drunken mob violence in the days around 25 December.

In 1821 an anonymous illustrated poem called ‘Old Santeclaus with Much Delight’ introduced Santa’s red coat, reindeer and sleigh, and put his arrival on Christmas Eve rather than St Nicholas’s Day. Two years later Clement Clark Moore, a professor of Hebrew in the city, embellished the legend in his poem 'A Visit from St Nicholas' (better known to us as 'The Night Before Christmas’.)

In it, 'St Nick' got his bushy beard and a whole herd of magical flying reindeer. His appearance was decidedly not that of a Dutch bishop – instead he was ‘a right jolly old elf’ with ‘clothes all tarnished with ashes and soot’, twinkling eyes, merry dimples and a beard ‘as white as snow’.

Other writers and artists added new layers to the legend, and gradually ‘Santa Claus’ took over from ‘St Nicholas’. For several decades of the 19th century he took a variety of forms – tall and short, fat and thin, his robes a rainbow of colours. In 1863 a cartoonist, Thomas Nast, depicted him dressed in the stars and stripes, speaking to Union troops during the American Civil War.

Nast eventually did more than any other artist to set the standard for Santa’s classic look. By 1881 Nast had perfected his vision of Santa, as seen in his ‘Merry Old Santa Claus’. His illustrations for ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’ were hugely popular, and he introduced the world to Santa’s workshop, as well as the notion that his base of operations could be found at the North Pole.

While we’re here, it’s worth pointing out that the idea that Coca-Cola invented Santa is a myth. The fizzy-pop-pushers didn’t start using him in their adverts until the 1930s.