Father Christmas and Santa Claus: a brief history of two Christmas champions

Little is known of his life, but legends told after his death focus on the children, sailors and young women he helped. Nicholas’s bones were stolen from Myra by Italian merchants and moved to Bari in 1087, and his reputation soon spread throughout Europe.

Father Christmas and Odin: are they related?

They believed that the god Odin flew over their houses on his flying, eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, dropping bread for the hungry to enjoy in the cold midwinter at the feast of Jul (Odin was sometimes called the Yule-father).

Clearly, they must have seen Father Christmas’s flying reindeer and got confused.

Why are reindeer associated with Father Christmas?

What would jolly Saint Nick do without his reindeer? It was as late as 1821 that us mortals learned of his trusted sleigh-pulling friends, and this fact was committed to paper in the 1821 poem Old Santeclaus with Much Delight, though the person who did so is unknown.

Two years later, their names were jotted down in the perennial favourite The Night Before Christmas – all except Rudolph, who had to wait until 1939 for his time to shine.

When did the Yule-father become Father Christmas?

In early medieval England, the pagan Saxons honoured the Frost or Winter King, who had a lot in common with Odin. But, as Christianity became dominant, this figure became more closely associated with the festival celebrating the birth of Jesus.

By the 1400s, he was thought of as a chivalric knight called Sir Christmas, and by the Tudor era he had been charmingly renamed Captain Christmas. Rather than giving gifts to children, though, his job was to make sure everyone had fun at the lavish yuletide feasts.

This made him an enemy of Oliver Cromwell’s righteous government, which outlawed Christmas, fearing that it had become an excuse for unholy drunkenness. In response, the defenders of the tradition renamed the figure Old Father Christmas to make him sound more venerable.

When the monarchy was restored and Charles II took the throne, Father Christmas kept his new name.

• Saturnalia: the origins of the debauched Roman 'Christmas'

So who is Santa Claus?

The story of St Nicholas’s miracles and his generosity to children spread throughout medieval Europe, and in the Netherlands he became known as Sinterklaas.

The Dutch believed that, like the Norse Odin, he travelled by flying horse, but also that his assistants helped him choose the good children who deserved to be rewarded with pressies on the evening before 6 December, his holy feast day.

However, in the early 16th century, Martin Luther – the German founder of Protestantism – considered Sinterklaas too similar to pagan Odin. Instead he decreed that it was the Christkind (an angelic Christ child) who brought gifts – though he visited on 25 December, not the 6th.

• What was the Reformation?

Many Dutch became Protestants and dispensed with Sinterklaas, yet the old tradition was carried to America by Dutch settlers. In New York, a former Dutch outpost, by the early 19th century Sinterklaas had morphed into Santa Claus, who would soon be immortalised by American poets and writers.

Some confused the rival Christkind with St Nick, and he acquired the nickname Kris Kringle.

Are Father Christmas and Santa Claus the same?

By the middle of the 19th century, England’s Father Christmas was more interested in the edification of children than drunken adult parties, and merged with the America idea of Santa.

• What was Christmas like in the Victorian era?

By the end of the century, he had become a jolly man with a big white beard who, boarding his reindeer-hauled flying sleigh, delivered gifts down the chimney on 25 December.

He was also accepted by most Christians as a miraculous proxy for Jesus himself, though in 1951, a French priest burned an effigy of Le Père Noël in Dijon, claiming that he was drawing too much attention away from celebrations of the birth of Christ.

Santa Claus through the ages

Arthur Purdue looks back at the evolution of Santa, whose waistline has waxed and waned throughout history...

On 23 December 1951, the Catholic clergy at Dijon organised an execution of Santa Claus. An image of him was hanged from the railings of the cathedral and then burned in front of several hundred Sunday School children. Santa Claus arouses strong feelings.

His characteristics were set out by Clement Moore in his poem, A Visit from Santa Claus, published in 1823 in the Troy Sentinental: he was “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf”; he arrived on a sleigh drawn by flying reindeer; and came down the chimney with a sack of toys for children.

Essentially he’s a composite figure: a bit of St Nicholas, an element of the old English personification of Christmas and quite a lot of pagan mythology. It has even been suggested that this figure at the heart of our mid-winter feast draws on shadowy memories of shamans of central Asia, who were believed to be able to fly after eating the red and white fly agaric mushroom and entered yurts via the roof. At any rate, he’s very different to Saint Nicholas, an ascetic figure on a white horse.

This illustration depicts the attempt to ban Christmas under the mid-17th century Commonwealth, which held that there was no Biblical mention of the date of Christ’s birth and that the festival gave rise to feasting, drinking and bawdy behaviour. “Old Christmas” is told to keep out by a Cromwellian soldier. The personification of Christmas was known as Old, Sir or Captain Christmas.

These early Victorian images are taken from the same magazine, Illustrated London News, in 1847 and 1848. Both depict Old Christmas, the pre-modern spirit of Christmas. One is a jovial, almost Dionysian, figure, a Lord of Misrule dispensing alcoholic good cheer. The other is lean and gaunt and rather akin to Old Father Time though he, nevertheless, brings warmth and refreshment.

If Clement Moore described Santa Claus in words, it was his fellow American, the illustrator Thomas Nast, who fixed the appearance of this spirit of Christmas until well into the 20th century. His drawings for Harper’s Weekly which he began in 1863, show Santa as much like Moore’s “jolly old elf” though in his later work he settled on a portrayal closer to that which has now become traditional: a large jovial white-bearded figure, dressed in a red suit with a matching cap.

By the late 19th century, Father Christmas, as he was called in Britain, had become a central figure in Christmas festivities, even depicted delivering presents to British troops serving in Afghanistan. This illustration of a rather war-like Christmas spirit is taken from the Graphic (27 December 1869) and is part of an illustration of the way that British troops – sent, not for the first or last time, to a rather inhospitable Afghanistan – celebrated Christmas.

What has become the definitive image of Santa Claus was created from the 1930s to the 1960s by Haddon H Sundblom in his many adverts for Coca Cola. He exudes warmth and kindliness, has a luxuriant white beard and wears a long red jacket trimmed with white fur and fastened with an enormous belt and long leather boots. He is, however, secular and somewhat sanitised like the modern Christmas itself; there’s still an echo of the Lord of Misrule in his “Ho ho ho” but the pipe has gone and instead of holding a flowing bowl he drinks Coca Cola.

But did Coca-Cola really turn Santa red and white? BBC News Magazine says: “The red suit and hat with the white fur trim have given rise to the belief among some that Santa's togs were dreamed up by canny advertising men who recast him in the soft drink maker's corporate colours.

“But while there's some truth in the suggestion – Coke ran a campaign for 30 years featuring a jolly fat Santa – his colour scheme owes more to ecclesiastical vestments than a brainstorm on Madison Avenue.

“The colours are widely thought to derive from the original Saint Nicholas, who was the Bishop of Myra in the 4th Century. Red and white were the hues of traditional bishop robes, although some historians argue that he originally dressed in different colours.”

Researcher Tom Glamon adds: "Father Christmas is an evolutionary creation, influenced by folklore, legend and religion. He didn't spring to life at a certain time, fully formed and wearing a red and white suit. It wasn't really until the late 19th century that the image now recognised across the world became set."

Although the modern Christmas is an Anglo-American creation, the British Father Christmas dresses differently to the American Santa. He wears a long red habit trimmed with white fur and a hood rather than the red suit and cap favoured in America. Increasingly the British Father Christmas was replaced by the American Santa Claus.

In this illustration of a Second World War Father Christmas he also carries a tin hat (Picture Post 23 December 1939). Increasingly the British Father Christmas seems to be being replaced by the American Santa Claus.

This French Père Noël on a 1920s postcard wears a long habit and a hood but is a more ascetic and saintly figure, far from the corpulent and ruddy-cheeked English or American version.

The Anglo-American Santa is not always welcomed in European countries by those who cherish their own customs and versions of seasonal visitors. The Dutch Saint Nicholas is not popular with traditionalists in the Netherlands. The municipal authorities of Assen were not tolerant of one Santa who went there in 1994. As reported in the Sunday Times on 4 December, the police ran him out of town.

This article is curated from content first published in the Christmas 2014 issue of BBC History Revealed and the December 2006 issue of BBC History Magazine