How Saint Nicholas Became Santa Claus in America

Saint Nicholas became Santa Claus in America mostly in New York, over about a century. Writers turned the fourth century bishop of Myra into a jolly gift bringer: Washington Irving in 1809, an 1821 picture book that gave him a sleigh and reindeer, the 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas," and Thomas Nast's Civil War era drawings.

At a Glance

• Nicholas was a real Christian bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey, remembered for generosity to the poor and secret gift giving. His feast day is December 6.
• Historians disagree about how much the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam kept St. Nicholas customs. The best documented push came from New York writers in the early 1800s.
• Washington Irving's satirical "Knickerbocker's History of New York," published on St. Nicholas Day in 1809, pictured the saint flying over the treetops in a wagon of presents.
• An 1821 picture book, "The Children's Friend," gave "Sante Claus" a sleigh and a flying reindeer and moved his visit to Christmas Eve.
• "A Visit from St. Nicholas" appeared anonymously in 1823. It is usually credited to Clement Clarke Moore, though a long running case is made for Henry Livingston Jr.
• Thomas Nast drew Santa for Harper's Weekly from 1863 to 1886. Coca-Cola's Haddon Sundblom ads, starting in 1931, made a warm, human Santa familiar nationwide, but Santa wore red long before Coke.

Who Was the Real Saint Nicholas?

Before there was a Santa Claus, there was a pastor. According to the St. Nicholas Center, Nicholas was born in the third century in the village of Patara in Asia Minor and was made Bishop of Myra while still a young man. Under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who persecuted Christians, he suffered for his faith and was exiled and imprisoned. Tradition holds that he died on December 6, AD 343, and that date became his feast day. In 1087, sailors from Bari carried his relics to Italy, where they remain.

Few details of his life are documented with the certainty historians would like, and much of what Christians remember about him comes through centuries of story. The best known is the legend of the three daughters. A poor father could not afford dowries for them, and on three occasions a bag of gold mysteriously appeared in the home, tossed through an open window. In some tellings the gold landed in stockings or shoes left out to dry. That story is the seed of almost everything that followed: a giver who comes at night, gives in secret, and asks for no credit.

Nicholas became the patron saint of children, sailors, and the poor. Catholic, Orthodox, and many Protestant Christians in Europe kept his feast, and our Feast of St. Nicholas guide covers how the day is observed, from shoes set out on the evening of December 5 to his place in the Catholic and Orthodox calendars.

Did the Dutch Bring Sinterklaas to New Amsterdam?

This is the most debated part of the story, and the honest answer is that historians are not sure how much.

The popular version says Dutch settlers brought their beloved Sinterklaas to New Amsterdam, the colony that became New York, and that Santa Claus grew from that custom. Some writers still tell it that way. In a 2015 Commonweal interview republished by the St. Nicholas Center, Gerry Bowler says that when the Dutch colonized North America in the 1600s, they brought St. Nicholas with them to New Amsterdam and the Hudson River Valley.

Other scholars find little to support it. The St. Nicholas Center's own history of the origin of Santa says that although it is almost universally believed the Dutch brought St. Nicholas to New Amsterdam, scholars find scant evidence of such traditions in Dutch New Netherland. Historian Charles W. Jones, in an essay the center reproduces on the Knickerbocker Santa Claus, went further: "There is no evidence that it existed in New Amsterdam or for a century after English occupation." Part of the reason is the Protestant Reformation, which took a dim view of saints, and the colony's official church was the Dutch Reformed Church.

There is at least one small piece of evidence on the other side. The St. Nicholas Center describes a 1675 baker's receipt from Albany that records "suntterclaesgoet," or Sinterklaas goods, bought by a family with likely Flemish Catholic roots. Even that page admits it cannot say whether the custom was widely kept or limited to that one household.

The fair summary is this. Some St. Nicholas custom may have lived on in a few Dutch families, but the Santa Claus Americans know was mostly built later, by New Yorkers looking back on a Dutch past they partly imagined.

How Did John Pintard and Washington Irving Revive St. Nicholas?

The revival began with a historical society. John Pintard, a New York patriot and antiquarian, founded the New-York Historical Society in 1804 and, in the St. Nicholas Center's words, promoted St. Nicholas as patron saint of both the society and the city. On December 6, 1810, the society held its first St. Nicholas anniversary dinner. Pintard commissioned the engraver Alexander Anderson to make a broadside for the occasion. It showed Nicholas "holding in one hand a Purse of money and in the other a Birchen Rod," beside a fireplace with children's stockings, some filled with toys and some with birch rods. Charles W. Jones later remarked that the Dutch verses printed with it showed how little true Dutch life still existed on Manhattan at the time.

Washington Irving joined the society in January 1809. On St. Nicholas Day that same year, December 6, 1809, he published "A History of New York," a satire written under the pen name Diedrich Knickerbocker. The book poked fun at self important local history, and it gave St. Nicholas a starring comic role. In one dream sequence, the good St. Nicholas came "riding over the tops of the trees, in that self-same wagon wherein he brings his yearly presents to children." Irving's Nicholas was no stately bishop. He was a pipe smoking Dutch figure, and the book includes the gesture of "laying his finger aside of his nose," a line that would turn up again in 1823.

Irving was writing comedy, not history. But his book was popular, and it fixed the idea that St. Nicholas belonged to old Dutch New York.

What Was the 1821 "Children's Friend" Poem?

The next step came from a children's book. In 1821, the publisher William B. Gilley issued "The Children's Friend," which the St. Nicholas Center calls the first lithographed book in America. Its short illustrated poem introduced several things we now take for granted:

• A sleigh and a reindeer. "Sante Claus" arrived from the North in a sleigh pulled by a flying reindeer.
• Christmas Eve. It was his first appearance on Christmas Eve rather than December 6, the saint's feast day.
• Rewards and warnings. He brought gifts to good children and left "a long, black birchen rod" for parents to use when "virtue's path his sons refuse."

The book is also a reminder that the shift to Christmas Eve happened in print, in New York, in the 1820s. In much of Europe, St. Nicholas still comes on his own feast day.

Who Really Wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas"?

On December 23, 1823, the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in Troy, New York, printed an unsigned poem called "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Most Americans know it by its first line or as "The Night Before Christmas." It was reprinted in four almanacs the next year and became one of the most popular poems in American history.

The poem gave Santa his lasting personality. He is "chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf" who drives a miniature sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer, each called by name. He lands on the roof, comes down the chimney, fills the stockings, and leaves with a wink of his eye. The poem also borrows Irving's line about "laying his finger aside of his nose."

Its authorship is still argued. According to the St. Nicholas Center's summary of who wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas":

• The case for Clement Clarke Moore. Moore was first named as the author in "The New York Book of Poetry" in 1837. He included the poem in his own book, "Poems," in 1844, and inscribed a copy that year as its author. He was also a friend and neighbor of William Gilley, who had published the 1821 Santa book.
• The case for Henry Livingston Jr. Livingston's descendants say he wrote the poem as early as 1808 and was never credited. They point to similarities with his other witty verse.
• The scholars. Don Foster's 2000 book "Author Unknown" argued for Livingston. A 2016 study by MacDonald P. Jackson also sided with Livingston, while Tom A. Jerman's 2023 work defended Moore.

There is no final verdict, and the question is likely to stay open.

How Did Thomas Nast Shape Santa's Look?

If the poem gave Santa his personality, Thomas Nast gave him a face. In 1863, during the Civil War, Nast began a series of annual black and white drawings of Santa in Harper's Weekly. He kept drawing Santa until 1886. The St. Nicholas Center says his work, based on the poem and on Irving, showed "a rotund Santa with flowing beard, fur garments, and an omnipresent clay pipe."

You can still see Nast's Santa in the Library of Congress collections:

• Santa Claus and His Works, printed in Harper's Weekly on December 29, 1866.
• The Same Old Christmas Story Over Again, published in Harper's Weekly on January 4, 1873.
• Santa Claus's Mail, from Nast's 1889 collection of Christmas drawings, which shows Santa at a desk stacked with letters about good and naughty children.

Over those decades, Nast's images helped turn the poem's miniature elf into a full sized, rotund figure who reads the mail about good and naughty children.

Did Coca-Cola Invent Santa's Red Suit?

No. This is one of the most repeated myths about Santa, and Coca-Cola itself says it is not true.

Here is what Coke did do. According to the company's own history of Haddon Sundblom and the Coca-Cola Santas, Archie Lee, an executive at the D'Arcy Advertising Agency, worked with Michigan born illustrator Haddon Sundblom to create Santa ads. Sundblom turned to Moore's 1823 poem for inspiration. His Santa debuted in 1931 in Coke ads in The Saturday Evening Post and appeared regularly there and in Ladies' Home Journal, National Geographic, and The New Yorker. He painted Santa for Coca-Cola from 1931 to 1964, at first using his friend Lou Prentiss, a retired salesman, as a model and later using himself.

The company is plain about the color: "even though it's often said that Santa wears a red coat because red is the color of Coca-Cola, Santa appeared in a red coat before Sundblom painted him." The St. Nicholas Center agrees. It notes that St. Nicholas was shown in red in an illustration from about 1836, that covers of St. Nicholas magazine from 1882 to 1918 showed Santa in red, and that by the end of the 1920s a standard American Santa, life sized in a red, fur trimmed suit, had already emerged.

What Sundblom did was make that Santa warm, human, and everywhere. Decades of national ads fixed the image in American memory, which is why so many people assume Coke invented it.

How Do Christians Keep the Saint's Focus on Giving Today?

For many Christian families, the answer is not to choose between Santa and St. Nicholas. It is to let the saint explain the Santa. The St. Nicholas Center puts the contrast simply in its comparison of Santa and St. Nicholas: "Santa Claus belongs to childhood; St. Nicholas models for all of life," and "Santa Claus isn't bad; St. Nicholas is just better."

Families and churches across traditions use a few common practices:

• Keep December 6. Some families mark the feast with a story about the bishop of Myra and small treats in shoes or stockings, which separates the saint's day from the rush of Christmas. In 2026, December 6 falls on the Second Sunday of Advent, which begins on November 29. Our guide to Advent explains the season.
• Give in secret. Nicholas's best known story is anonymous giving. Jesus taught, "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly" (Matthew 6:3 to 4, KJV). A family might leave a gift for a neighbor with no name attached.
• Give to those in need. Nicholas is remembered as a friend of the poor. Paul wrote that "God loveth a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7, KJV), and he recalled the words of the Lord Jesus, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35, KJV). Food drives, coat drives, and church giving trees fit naturally here.
• Point past the gift giver. The saint was a bishop who spent his life pointing to Christ. Telling his story is a natural way to talk with children about why Christians celebrate Christmas at all.

Why Does the Story Still Matter?

Santa Claus is an American creation, built by New York writers, illustrators, and advertisers over more than a century. But he did not come from nowhere. Under the sleigh, the reindeer, and the red suit is a fourth century pastor who gave quietly to people in trouble because he believed God had first given to him.

Knowing that history lets Christians enjoy the folk and commercial Santa without confusing him for the point of the season. The bishop of Myra would almost certainly want the attention to go somewhere else: to the Child whose birth Christmas celebrates, and to the neighbor who needs help this year.