Santa Claus

• 1. Introduction

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  Santa Claus carries the bones of a real man. Inside the Basilica di San Nicola in the Italian city of Bari, the skeleton of a 4th-century bishop named Nicholas lies enshrined, more than a thousand years after sailors smuggled his remains out of what is now Turkey. The bishop never wore a red coat or drove a reindeer sleigh. He gave dowries to three poor daughters so they would not be sold into prostitution. And yet from that one act of secret generosity, a figure grew who now receives more than a million letters a year in France alone, has been granted Canadian citizenship, and has a postal code of H0H 0H0. How a Greek bishop from the Roman Empire became the white-bearded man on a billion Christmas cards is a story that crosses continents, centuries, and competing faiths. It involves a Dutch sailor's folktale, an anonymous poem published in a New York newspaper in 1823, a political cartoonist who dressed Santa in an American flag during the Civil War, and a soft drink company whose advertising campaigns still generate urban legends today. What exactly is Santa Claus? Where did he come from? And why does he look, sound, and behave exactly the way he does?

• 2. The Bishop of Myra

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  Nicholas was a bishop of the city of Myra, in the Roman province of Lycia, in what is now Turkey. He gave his personal wealth to the poor, and the story of the three dowries became the defining legend of his character: he secretly threw bags of gold through a window at night so that three daughters of a ruined Christian family would have the means to marry rather than be trafficked. He was so associated with children and secret generosity that by the Middle Ages, European families were giving gifts to children on the evening before his feast day, the 6th of December.

  In 1087, a group of merchants from Bari arrived in Myra while the city was under the control of the Seljuq dynasty. They removed the major bones of Nicholas's skeleton from his sarcophagus over the protests of the local monks, and sailed them back to Italy. Venetian sailors arrived later during the First Crusade and collected the remaining bone fragments, which were installed in a church on the San Nicolò al Lido in Venice. Scientific investigations confirmed that the relics in Bari and Venice belong to the same skeleton. The vandalised sarcophagus can still be seen in the Church of Saint Nicholas in Myra.

  The date of Nicholas's gift-giving gradually shifted. Martin Luther, trying to redirect children's devotion from saints to Christ, proposed the Christkind as a replacement gift-bringer, moving the celebration to the 25th of December. The custom found a foothold in parts of the German-speaking world, but Nicholas never disappeared from popular tradition. The tension between the two dates, the two figures, and two visions of the holiday persisted for centuries.

• 3. Father Christmas and Odin

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  Father Christmas took shape in 16th-century England during the reign of Henry VIII, appearing as a large man in green or scarlet robes lined with fur. He was not a gift-bringer in the same focused way as Nicholas; he stood for feasting, warmth, and general good cheer. When Christmas celebrations were suppressed under the Puritans, his absence was noticed. After the Restoration, the ban was satirised in Josiah King's pamphlet The Examination and Tryal of Old Father Christmas; Together with his Clearing by the Jury, published in 1686.

  The Victorian revival of Christmas reintroduced Father Christmas as the presiding spirit of the season. John Leech's illustration of the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, showed him as a great genial man in a green fur-lined coat moving through the streets of London. The image was close enough to what the figure was becoming that it stuck.

  The folklorist Margaret Baker traced another tributary into the same figure: the Norse god Odin, who rode the midwinter sky on his eight-footed horse Sleipnir, bearing the Old Norse names Jólnir, meaning Yule man, and Langbarðr, meaning long-beard. Baker wrote that Father Christmas and then Santa Claus owed much to this older blue-hooded, white-bearded gift-bringer of the north. In northern Europe, the Yule goat was an even earlier bearer of gifts; the Finnish figure of Joulupukki preserves a trace of that tradition into the present.

• 4. The Poem That Fixed the Image

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  On the 23rd of December 1823, the Troy, New York Sentinel published an anonymous poem that named eight reindeer, described a miniature sleigh, and gave the world the phrase "a right jolly old elf" with "a little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly." The poem was A Visit from St. Nicholas, now better known as The Night Before Christmas. Moore later claimed authorship, though scholars have argued the actual author was Henry Livingston Jr., who died nine years before Moore's claim.

  The poem did not arrive without a precedent. In 1821, a New York publication called A New-year's present, to the little ones from five to twelve included an anonymous poem about Santeclaus arriving on a reindeer sleigh. But the 1823 poem was the one that lodged in culture. It named the reindeer: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder and Blixem. Those last two names came from the Dutch words for thunder and lightning; they were later modified to the German-sounding Donner and Blitzen.

  The poem alone did not fix the visual image. For that, an immigrant cartoonist named Thomas Nast took up the task. Nast was German-born, inspired by the Belsnickel figure of southwestern Germany where he grew up. His illustration for the 3rd of January 1863 issue of Harper's Weekly showed Santa dressed in an American flag, holding a puppet with the name Jeff written on it, a reference to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. By the 29th of December 1866 issue, Nast had produced a collage titled Santa Claus and His Works, which included the caption Santa Claussville, N.P. A colour collection of his pictures published in 1869 included a poem by George P. Webster placing Santa's home near the North Pole, in the ice and snow.

• 5. Coca-Cola and the Red Coat

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  By the 1930s the modern visual Santa was already well established, but an advertising campaign for The Coca-Cola Company carried him into every household in America. An artist named Haddon Sundblom produced a series of paintings depicting Santa for the company's Christmas advertising. The campaign was so effective that it generated urban legends claiming Coca-Cola had invented Santa Claus, or that he wore red because those were the company's colours.

  The historical record disagrees. White Rock Beverages had used a Santa figure in monochrome advertisements for mineral water in 1915, and ran colour images of Santa in adverts for drink mixers from 1923 to 1925. Before either of those campaigns, Santa had appeared dressed in red and white on several covers of Puck magazine in the early years of the 20th century. Coca-Cola did not invent the look; Sundblom made it canonical.

  Pepsi-Cola ran its own Santa paintings in the 1940s and 1950s. In Brazil, the soft drink brand Dolly went further, commissioning a Santa in green clothes to match the colours of the Brazilian flag, pairing him with their mascot Dollynho since the 2000s as a deliberate rival to Coca-Cola. In 2024, a sculpture of a green-and-yellow Santa installed in Balneário Camboriú in Santa Catarina generated controversy when critics accused it of echoing the colours associated with protests by supporters of Jair Bolsonaro.

  Charity organisations, particularly the Salvation Army, also reinforced the image of Santa as a figure of giving. Volunteers dressed as Santa became part of fundraising drives for needy families, lending the character a philanthropic weight that advertising alone could not have provided.

• 6. Letters, Tracking, and the Postal Code H0H 0H0

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  France received 1,220,000 letters addressed to Santa Claus or Père Noël in 2006, sent from 126 countries. Canada Post replies in more than 30 languages, including Braille. Brazil received 964,315 letters in 2012. The United States Postal Service runs a programme called USPS Operation Santa, which began in 1912 at the James Farley Post Office in New York and allows volunteers to adopt and answer letters. From 2002 to 2014, Canada Post replied to approximately one million letters or more each year, totalling more than 24.7 million.

  On the 23rd of December 2008, Jason Kenney, Canada's Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, formally awarded Canadian citizenship to Santa Claus, noting that as a citizen he had the right to re-enter Canada after his Christmas Eve journey. Canada Post assigns him the postal code H0H 0H0, a reference to his signature laugh. In Latin America, children sometimes tie their letters to balloons instead of mailing them.

  NORAD Tracks Santa, the most prominent tracking programme, started by accident. In 1955, a Sears-Roebuck advertisement incorrectly printed a phone number for their Santa hotline, and calls intended for Sears reached the Continental Air Defense Command instead. The programme was transferred to NORAD when the organisation was jointly founded by the United States and Canada in 1958. When a boy from Colorado wrote to the children's magazine The Nursery in late 1874, he said that if he did not live so far from the North Pole, he would ask Santa for a donkey. More than 150 years later, that address receives real mail.

• 7. What Children Believe

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  Psychology professor Jacqueline Woolley studied how children reason about Santa Claus and found that their belief is not simple credulity. Children use logic, evidence, and comparative reasoning, but they are surrounded by what Woolley called hard evidence: half-eaten cookies and empty milk glasses. Belief in Santa is high at age five and declines sharply when children are seven or eight years old. In 1978-85% of American five-year-olds believed Santa was real; only 25% of eight-year-olds still did.

  Philosopher David Kyle Johnson argued that the deception degrades parental trustworthiness, encourages credulity, and amounts to bribing children for good behaviour. Some children, on discovering the truth, have rejected their family's religious beliefs on the grounds that if parents lied about Santa, they might lie about God as well. A small fraction feel betrayed.

  Psychologist John Condry found that the most common response when children learn the truth is that they feel older and more mature. They now know something the younger children do not. Psychologist Tamar Murachver argued that because the belief is cultural rather than strictly parental, it does not usually undermine trust in the parents themselves. The New Zealand Skeptics' spokesperson Vicki Hyde put the case simply: saving concern for things that exploit the vulnerable is more worthwhile than objecting to the innocent joys of a shared cultural tradition. The debate has been running since at least 1897, when Francis Pharcellus Church wrote the editorial in The New York Sun that produced the most reprinted reply in that paper's history: "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."