St Nicholas and Santa Claus

Little is known of Nicholas himself. Ott writes that “there is scarcely anything historically certain about him except that he was Bishop of Myra in the fourth century”; he died on 6 December, in 345 or 352. The rest is legend, first collected in Greek by Metaphrastes in the tenth century: that he was born at Patara, imprisoned under Diocletian and freed under Constantine. Ott doubts that he was at the Council of Nicaea, since his name is in none of the old lists of bishops there. In 1087 Italian merchants took his body from Myra to Bari.

The best-known legend explains his gifts. As John Brand gives it from Hospinian, Nicholas saved the three daughters of a poor man from prostitution by throwing a purse of money in at their father’s window at night, to give them marriage portions; in imitation, parents in many places secretly gave their children presents on the eve of his feast and told them that St Nicholas had brought them.

In New York the saint was made into Santa Claus. Washington Irving’s comic History of New York (1809) has him fly over the treetops in a wagon. Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, printed anonymously in the Troy Sentinel in 1823, gave him a sleigh, a pipe, “a little round belly” and a suit “all in fur, from his head to his foot”: “a right jolly old elf”. Moore did not claim the poem openly until 1844, and the family of Henry Livingston has long argued that he wrote it; Columbia Magazine notes that Livingston never claimed it and that no physical evidence ties him to it. Thomas Nast drew Santa Claus in Harper’s Weekly from 3 January 1863, first in a coat of stars and stripes visiting a Union army camp. His 33 Christmas drawings up to 1886 gave the first known pictures of Santa’s home at the North Pole and his toy workshop.