In Australia, families book weeks in advance to have Santa photos on the beach, in shopping centers and other various locations across the country.
In Eastern Europe, there is a celebration of “Christmas Brother” as well as of “Grandfather Frost” painting house doors in gold, and bringing simple presents to well-behaved children and ashes to those who were misbehaving.
But who is Santa Claus and how did he become so famous?
Coca-Cola’s Father Christmas as a marketing image (1931)
Many cultures across the world celebrate New Year with famed images of Santa Claus, a white bearded jolly man with rosy cheeks and thick white beard, dressed in red and white winter outfit and boots. It is one of the most recognised holiday images in the world, popularized by Coca-Cola’s commissioned illustrator, American artist of Swedish and Finnish origins, Haddon Sundblom who in 1931 created his first image of Santa Claus.
Smoking pipe Santa by poet Clement C. Moore (1822)
Source: Coca-Cola Ireland website
The inspiration for Sundblom’s painting, worth at the time more than a car, was a poem by American poet Clement Clarke Moore from 1822, called “A visit from St. Nicholas”. In this poem, Santa Claus was “dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot”, with twinkly eyes and merry dimples, rosy cheeks and red nose, smoking a pipe as he got down the chimney, with white beard, broad face and a little round belly, looking like “a right jolly old elf”.
Surely, a smoking Santa would not be O.K. in the 21st century Australia, where one in five cancers (excluding melanoma cancers) are attributed to lung cancer!
Harper Weekly’s Santa images
In 1913 American artist Norman Rockwell painted various Santa Claus depictions, when he was Art Director of the Harper’s Weekly. The magazine’s history of Santa’s paintings goes back to the second part of the 19th century as per images below.
Source: Norman Rothwell’s Museum
Source: Norman Rothwell’s Museum
Another American illustrator and Civil War cartoonist, German refugee Thomas Nast, famously painted Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly Cover in 1862. He wanted to memorialise the family sacrifice during the worst phase of American Civil War, drawing 32 paintings of Christmas Santa Claus. The most famous image resembling today’s Santa was Nast’s criticism of the government’s indecisiveness to pay higher wages to the military, with Santa’s backpack representing Trojan horse and criticizing “government’s treachery” of the Army.
Source: North Wind Pictures Archives
Monk named St. Nicholas (4th century)
There is also a legend of St. Nicholas, a holy man in 4th century Myrna (today’s Turkey) who was helping poor and sick. The legend says that he helped three poor girls get married by putting money into their boots put outside their house doors as a dowry so that they could get married and not sold into prostitution and slavery.
Source: Russian artist Aleksa Petrov’s 1294 painting of St. Nicholas of Myrna
The legend of St. Nicholas lives on to this day and age, with new versions of Santa Claus likely to emerge and take hold in our lifetime.