Where Santa Claus came from

The Santa Claus of a Christmas Eve journey to a northern house in England traces back, in the end, to a bishop who lived and died in Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. Saint Nicholas of Myra was bishop of the coastal town of Myra, near modern Demre, and is generally said to have died around 343 AD. His feast day, 6 December, became the day on which much of the gift-giving tradition first attached itself to him, centuries before anyone in America was drawing him in a red suit.

What is recorded and what is tradition

Very little about Nicholas comes from his own lifetime. Most of what is told about him, including the story that made him famous, was written down long after he died. That story has a bishop secretly leaving gold for three sisters whose father could not afford their dowries, thrown through a window or dropped down a chimney depending on which version is told, so that they would not be sold into servitude. Whether the man ever attended the Council of Nicaea in 325, as some accounts claim, is itself disputed among historians. What can be said with more confidence is that a cult grew around him early, and that he became one of the most widely venerated saints in Christendom, claimed as patron by sailors, merchants, and children alike.

How the veneration travelled north

The saint's relics were moved from Myra to Bari, in southern Italy, in 1087, and his feast spread from there through European Christendom over the following centuries. It took particular hold in the Low Countries, where 6 December became a day of gift-giving in its own right, and where the bishop's mitre and red cloak of Saint Nicholas were carried, largely unchanged, into a figure called Sinterklaas. That Dutch figure, arriving each year by boat, is the direct ancestor of the Santa Claus this site's stories draw on, and the route he took from the Netherlands to America is covered in the next part of this page.

Sinterklaas before he crossed the ocean

In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas arrives each year by boat from Spain, dressed as a bishop in a red cape and a tall white mitre, carrying a book said to list which children have behaved well. He is a folk elaboration of Saint Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century bishop from what is now Turkey, and the Dutch keep his feast on 5 and 6 December. That is the figure Dutch settlers carried with them when they founded New Amsterdam, the colony that later became New York.

How he became a New York figure

The clearest trace of that journey runs through two New Yorkers. Washington Irving's satirical A History of New York, published in 1809 under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker, pictured Sinterklaas flying over rooftops in a wagon and dropping gifts down chimneys. John Pintard, who founded the New York Historical Society in 1804, promoted Saint Nicholas around the same years as a patron figure for the city, useful to a New York keen to claim a history older than its English name.

What changed, and what stayed

The name stayed, more or less: Sinterklaas in Dutch mouths became Santa Claus in English ones. Almost everything else moved. The bishop's robe and mitre gave way, over the decades that followed, to fur and a hood; the boat from Spain gave way to a sleigh; and the feast itself shifted from 5 and 6 December to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, folding a Dutch saint's day into the American Christmas calendar. (Christmas Eve customs still vary a good deal from country to country: see How Christmas Eve happens around the world.) What Irving and Pintard fixed was not a costume but an idea: that New York had its own gift-bringing saint, standing apart from the English Christmas its former colony had inherited. The poems and pictures of the decades after would do the rest.

The modern picture of Santa Claus, the red suit, the sleigh landing on a rooftop, the workshop somewhere far to the north, was not inherited whole from Saint Nicholas or from the Dutch Sinterklaas. It was built in the United States over roughly sixty years, mostly by two pieces of work: a poem published in 1823 and a set of magazine illustrations drawn across the decades that followed.

The poem that set the scene

"A Visit from St. Nicholas", better known by its opening line "'Twas the night before Christmas", appeared in a New York newspaper in December 1823. It gives Santa Claus a sleigh, eight named reindeer, and an entrance down the chimney, all details that had not appeared together before. It does not describe a red suit. The figure is "dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot", which left the colour open for illustrators to decide later.

Whether Clement Clarke Moore actually wrote the poem is still disputed. Moore is the name most commonly attached to it, but a rival claim, made on behalf of a New York farmer and poet named Henry Livingston Jr., has never been fully settled either way. The poem itself is public domain, so the words are not in question, only who first set them down.

Thomas Nast draws him into shape

The look most people now picture came from illustrations Thomas Nast drew for Harper's Weekly between the 1860s and the 1880s. Nast gave Santa the red suit that stuck, and in an 1866 drawing placed his workshop at the North Pole, an idea the poem never mentions. Across dozens of illustrations over two decades, Nast was effectively deciding, one picture at a time, what a reader would now recognise instantly.

Nothing about this happened in a single year or from a single hand. The poem supplied the sleigh, the reindeer and the chimney; Nast's drawings supplied the suit and the workshop. Later American commercial illustration, particularly from the 1930s onwards, added further details that this site treats separately, because they belong to a different, copyrighted tradition.

The reindeer named in the 1823 poem, and how a ninth one joined them more than a century later from a different source entirely, are covered on The Reindeer and the Sleigh.

Two centuries of poems, magazine drawings and advertising have all gone into the picture most people carry of Santa Claus: a man in a red suit, a sleigh pulled by reindeer, a workshop at the North Pole. Most of that picture was fixed in American writing and illustration between the 1820s and the 1880s. A smaller part of it, including some details many people assume are original, was added later by businesses selling something. The nineteenth-century material is public domain, free for anyone to read, retell or illustrate. The later commercial additions belong to the companies that made them, and this site does not treat them as part of the older tradition.

The sleigh, the chimney and the reindeer

The image of Saint Nicholas arriving by sleigh and coming down the chimney comes from an American poem usually dated to 1823. Whether Clement Clarke Moore wrote it is still disputed, but the poem itself is settled: it is where the sleigh and chimney enter the story, and it is where the reindeer are first named, all eight of them. The red suit is not in the poem at all. It became fixed a few decades later, through magazine illustrations, and those same illustrations gave the figure his workshop and his list of children.

What came afterwards

A ninth reindeer, the one with the red nose, comes from a commercial story published in 1939. It sits outside the nineteenth-century tradition this site draws on, along with other characters and details that advertising and merchandising added across the twentieth century. None of that makes the later additions false or unwelcome, only separate: a different layer, added for a different reason, by people who owned what they made.

The reindeer and the sleigh covers the 1823 naming in full, reindeer by reindeer.

The nineteenth-century originals are still there to be read and seen, if you know where to look, and none of them require anything more than a library card or a browser.

The poem itself

A Visit from St Nicholas, the poem that fixed the reindeer, the sleigh and the chimney into a single scene, first appeared unsigned in the Troy Sentinel on 23 December 1823. Because it entered print before modern copyright law existed, the text is in the public domain, and it survives in full in digitised newspaper archives and in general public-domain text collections online. Reading the original wording is worth doing once, because later retellings have smoothed some of its odder phrases away.

Thomas Nast's drawings

The visual Santa Claus, the rounder figure in fur that replaced the poem's elfin sprite, came from a series of illustrations Thomas Nast drew for Harper's Weekly beginning in 1863 and continuing over the following two decades. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division holds copies of these Harper's Weekly issues, and its online catalogue is the most direct way to see Nast's Santa develop drawing by drawing.

Reading further on this site

The reindeer named in the 1823 poem, and the ninth that was added more than a century later by a commercial writer, are covered on their own on The Reindeer and the Sleigh. Anyone reading this history to a child may find For Grown-Ups: Reading Aloud Well useful alongside it.