What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The Real History of Santa Claus

It’s Christmas time, so I’m taking a look at myths related to the holiday. Last week, I focused on myths about Jesus. This week I’m taking a look at that other beloved Christmas icon: Santa Claus, the central figure in the secular holiday mascot pantheon, who is so mysterious, we can’t even agree on his real name. 

I’m sure he’s innocent of any crimes, but Santa has many aliases. Among many other sobriquets and honorifics, the guy who brings presents in December goes by Jolly Old St. Nicholas, Kris Kringle, Père Noël, and Father Christmas. That’s a lot of fake identities, but what is his real name? And who invented him? 

Did Coca-Cola invent Santa Claus?

There is an often repeated myths that the modern image of Santa Claus—red clothes, white beard, fat—was created by the Coca Cola company in the 1930s to sell soda. But nah. While it’s true that Coke blanketed popular publications with ads featuring Haddon Sundblom’s illustrations of a red-clad hefty boy drinking Coke, Sundblom’s was drawing on existing depictions of Santa, particularly the 1822 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas," commonly called "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."

Did Clement Clark Moore invent Santa Claus? 

"A Visit from St. Nicholas" was written by Clement Clark Moore's and the poem did create some Santa details that have been nearly universally adopted. The chubbiness, the twinkly eyes, the jollyness, and the rosy cheeks are pure Moore. Also the sleigh and reindeer, the reindeer’s names, and Santa coming down the chimney were invented by Moore. But Moore didn’t invent Santa, because Moore thought St. Nick was a wee baby man. 

Santa Claus is not a wee baby man

While Twas the Night Before Christmas offers no specific height for St. Nicholas, Moore describes St. Nick as “an elf,” and “a little old driver,” who pilots a “miniature sleigh” towed by “eight tiny reindeer.” He is said to fit up the chimney with ease, even though he has a belly like a bowlful of jelly. The preponderance of clues from Moore’s poem suggest St. Nick is around two feet tall.

Moore’s poem isn’t even about Santa Claus. It’s about St. Nick, and much of Moore’s inspiration was based on centuries-old traditions, and those were based on folk myths drawn from Catholic hagiographies. But if you trace Santa Claus mythologies all the way back to the year 300, during the Roman Empire, you will actually land on a historically verified person who lived on earth. So Santa Claus is real—kind of.

Jolly Old St. Nicholas: original Christmas badass

Credit: Public Domain

Above is a depiction of St. Nicholas painted between 1503 and 1508. You may be wondering why St. Nick is pictured gesturing to three miniature, naked men standing in a wooden barrel—like what kind of Christmas parties did they have back then?? I’m going to get to it, believe me, but first—the facts.

Saint Nicholas of Myra, also known as Nicholas the Wonderworker, was a Catholic bishop who lived in Turkey during the Roman Empire and (probably) attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325. He died on Dec. 6 sometime around 343. That’s all we know for sure about St. Nick—the earliest accounts of his life and deeds were hagiographies written centuries after his death, so, according to leading St. Nick historian Jona Lendering and common sense, can't be relied upon. But still, a cult formed around St. Nick, people built churches to him, and we still talk about him today as a good guy who brings kids presents, so he must have done something right. Here are only some of the good deeds and miracles attributed to St. Nicholas:

• As an infant, refused to suckle his mother’s breast on Fridays

• Rescued three girls from prostitution by giving their father gold to pay their dowries

• Calmed a storm at sea

• Saved three soldiers from wrongful execution

• Remained chaste

• Chopped down a tree possessed by a demon

• Slapped the heretic Arius at the Council of Nicaea for suggesting God created Jesus

All those are good deeds, but one tale of St. Nick is a great deed that stands head and shoulders above the others; St. Nicholas, it is said, resurrected three children who had been murdered, chopped up, and and pickled in brine by an evil butcher planning to sell them as pork during a famine. 

As you’d probably expect, the story of St. Nicholas confronting an evil butcher and bringing pickled children back from the grave caught on with people in a bigger way than the one about him slapping a heretic. Some variations had him enslaving the evil butcher and bringing him around on his yearly rounds to beat naughty children with a stick.

All of which brings us back to the homunculi:

They're wearing goose suits. Credit: Public Domain

The story of the resurrected children so enthralled people that artists started depicting St. Nick with three little buff boys in a vat (they only look like old men because painters in the early medieval period sucked at drawing children). “St. Nick with naked children” was seen so much that even people who hadn’t heard the story of the butcher associated the saint with children and he became known as the Saint who liked children (but not in a gross way). The legend and cult of St. Nicholas spread far and wide, and when it made it to the Netherlands, they called him “Sinterklaas" which eventually became Santa Claus.

The religious rivalry of Kris Kringle and St. Nicholas

Kris Kringle and St. Nick were once bitter enemies, products of warring religious dogmas, but Christmas magic and American religious tolerance melded them into a single holiday entity.

By the 17th century, a jolly old saint named Nicholas bringing children presents on Dec. 6 was the tradition all over Europe. But Protestant reformer Martin Luther did not want no Catholic saint giving presents to no Protestant kids. So Luther replaced St. Nick with Jesus himself, creating and popularizing a tradition where Baby J gives children presents on Dec. 25, the anniversary of the day He was born, rather than St. Nick giving them presents on Dec. 6, the anniversary of his own death.

The gift giver was called Christkindl, the Christ Child and was often depicted with wings. Said to hide mischievously when delivering gifts, Christkindl was to grown-up Jesus as The Muppet Babies are to The Muppets—not quite canonical, but fun for kids. He was also St. Nick's enemy, sent to erase the jolly old saint from the Protestant imagination, and the operation was partially successful. Christkindl is still the default seasonal gift bringer in some parts of the world. But the joke was ultimately on Martin Luther.

Christkindl came to the U.S. with German immigrants in the 1800s. Germans met the Dutch settlers who were already here and devoted to St. Nicholas. Presumably because both St. Nicholas and Christkindle are myths told to children, there was no bitter, bloody religious war. Not a single heretic was slapped. Instead, they compromised: America gradually settled on presents being delivered on Dec. 25 instead of Dec. 6, but Santa Claus brought the gifts instead of Christkindl, whose name eventually morphed into “Kris Kringle,” another name for Santa/St. Nick.

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