History of Santa Claus timeline, told simply: 29 sourced events on a map, from a 4th-century bishop in Turkey and three bags of gold to Sinterklaas, Father Christmas, the Night Before Christmas, Thomas Nast, Ded Moroz and Snegurochka, Coca-Cola, Rudolph and NORAD. Explains why presents come on 6 December, 24 or 25 December, 1 January or 6 January.
Around the year 270 a boy called Nicholas was born in Patara, a port on the south coast of what is now Turkey. His later life stories say his parents were rich Christians who died young and left him their money. He grew up to be bishop of the nearby town of Myra. That is almost all historians can say for sure about the real man. Nearly everything else in this timeline was added by other people over the next 1,700 years.
The best-known story about Nicholas goes like this. A poor man had three daughters and no money for their dowries, so nobody would marry them. Nicholas threw a bag of gold through their window at night, once for each girl, and slipped away so nobody could thank him. In some versions the gold lands in a stocking drying by the fire. This is where secret night-time presents, and the stockings, come from. The story was written down centuries after he died, so it is a legend, not a record.
The Bible never says what day Jesus was born. The oldest surviving note that Christians in Rome kept his birthday on 25 December is in a Roman almanac called the Chronography of 354, in an entry for the year 336. Why the 25th? Historians still argue. One side says the Church chose the date of a Roman sun festival near the winter solstice. The other says early Christians worked it out: they believed Jesus was conceived on 25 March, and nine months later is 25 December. The evidence that the sun festival fell on that day is thinner than most people think.
Nicholas died in Myra on 6 December. The year is not certain: old sources give 343, 345 or 352. Churches remember a saint on the day he died, so 6 December became Saint Nicholas Day. That is the first of the gift dates. For more than a thousand years, children in much of Europe got their presents on the night of 5 to 6 December, not at Christmas. Churches that keep the old Julian calendar mark the same day on 19 December.
By the 11th century Myra was under Muslim Turkish rule, and two Italian ports, Venice and Bari, both wanted the saint's relics. Sailors from Bari got there first. In spring 1087 they opened his tomb, took most of the bones over the protests of the local monks and sailed home. The relics reached Bari on 9 May 1087. Bari built a basilica for him and pilgrims came from all over Europe. A saint loved in the East now had a home in the West, and his cult spread fast through Italy, Germany and the Low Countries. Eastern churches still keep 9 May as a second feast of Saint Nicholas.
By the 1100s the gold story had become a custom. Nuns began leaving small presents in children's shoes on the eve of Saint Nicholas Day. Children learned to put their shoes out on 5 December and find nuts, fruit and sweets in them in the morning. The rule was there from the start: good children got treats. Families in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Poland still put shoes or boots out that night. Ukrainian children look under their pillow.
Then came the Reformation. Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers were against praying to saints, and Nicholas was a saint. Banning presents would have been unpopular, so a new giver took his place: the Christkind, the Christ Child, who brought gifts on Christmas Eve. From 1531, gifts in Luther's own household were linked to the Holy Christ rather than Nicholas. Over the next centuries the main present day moved from 6 December to 24 and 25 December in much of Europe. Whether Luther invented the Christkind himself is disputed. In America the German word Christkindl later turned into Kris Kringle, another name for Santa.
England had its own Christmas character, and he was not a saint. In Ben Jonson's play Christmas, His Masque, staged for King James I in 1616, Old Christmas is a bearded old man in old-fashioned clothes who arrives with his children, named Mis-Rule, Carol, Minc'd Pie, Wassail and Plum Pudding among others. This Father Christmas was about feasting and drinking for grown-ups. He had nothing to do with children, chimneys or presents. That changed only in Victorian times, when he slowly merged with the American Santa.
Some Protestants wanted no Christmas at all. The English Parliament abolished the feast in 1647. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony a law of 1659 fined anyone caught keeping Christmas five shillings, whether by taking the day off or by feasting. The Puritans saw the holiday as unbiblical and an excuse for drunken disorder. The law stayed until 1681, when London made the colony repeal it. Christmas did not become a legal holiday in Massachusetts until 1856.
Two hundred years ago New York had no Santa Claus. Its Dutch settlers had kept Sinterklaas, but the custom had mostly faded. In December 1809 the writer Washington Irving published a comic fake history of the city under the name Diedrich Knickerbocker, full of jokes about the Dutch and their patron saint. Irving's Nicholas is a jolly Dutchman with a pipe who rides over the treetops in a wagon. Irving's friend John Pintard ran the New-York Historical Society, which held its first Saint Nicholas Day dinner on 6 December 1810, with a printed picture of treats in stockings by a fireplace. These well-off New Yorkers wanted a quiet family Christmas at home instead of the rowdy street holiday the city had.
In 1821 the New York printer William Gilley published a small picture book, The Children's Friend, with a poem called Old Santeclaus with Much Delight. Nobody knows who wrote it. For the first time in print, the gift-giver drives a sleigh pulled by a reindeer, just one, over chimney tops and snow. He brings toys to good children and a birch rod for the naughty ones. It is also among the earliest pictures of Santa Claus.
On 23 December 1823 the Troy Sentinel, a newspaper in Troy, New York, printed an anonymous poem, Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas. Today most people know it by its first line, 'Twas the night before Christmas. The poem fixed the details we still use: a plump, jolly elf, a sleigh on the roof, a trip down the chimney on Christmas Eve, filled stockings and eight reindeer with names. The last two were first printed as Dunder and Blixem, Dutch for thunder and lightning; later printings changed them to Donder and Blitzen. Clement Clarke Moore claimed the poem in 1844. Some researchers think Henry Livingston Jr. wrote it, and the question is still open.
In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus the winter spirit was Frost himself: Moroz, an old man of the forest who could freeze you or reward you, as in the folk tale of Morozko. He had nothing to do with Christmas. In 1840 the writer Vladimir Odoevsky published a children's tale, Moroz Ivanovich, in which Frost rewards a hardworking girl and punishes a lazy one. It is the first literary portrait of the character who became Ded Moroz, Grandfather Frost. The picture is Ivan Bilibin's later illustration of Morozko.
The Dutch kept their own saint. On 4 December 1850 the Amsterdam schoolteacher Jan Schenkman published a picture book, Sint Nikolaas en zijn knecht (Saint Nicholas and his servant). It is the first book in which Sinterklaas is the lead character, and it set customs still followed today: he arrives by steamboat from Spain, rides over the roofs on his horse and has a servant who helps him. Every November, towns in the Netherlands and Belgium stage his arrival by boat.
During the American Civil War the cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa Claus for the cover of Harper's Weekly dated 3 January 1863. Santa, in a jacket with stars and trousers with stripes, hands out presents to Union soldiers in camp. It was war propaganda, and it worked. Nast drew 33 Christmas pictures for Harper's between 1863 and 1886, and his round, white-bearded, fur-trimmed Santa became the standard American one.
In Spain the gift-bringers were never Nicholas. They are the Three Kings, the Reyes Magos, who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. Presents arrive on the night of 5 to 6 January, the Epiphany, twelve days after Christmas. Alcoy, in the province of Alicante, has the oldest Kings' parade in Spain: first documented in 1866 and held every year since 1885. Papá Noel is a newer arrival who has been gaining ground. Catalan children beat a log, the Tió de Nadal, until it poops out presents, and Basque children wait for Olentzero, a charcoal-maker who comes down from the mountains on 25 December.
In Santa Claus and His Works, printed in Harper's Weekly on 29 December 1866, Nast showed what Santa does all year: a workshop full of toys, a telescope for watching children and a book of who has been good or naughty. He also gave Santa an address: the North Pole. Before Nast, American writers usually put him somewhere vaguely north and snowy. Historians count this as the first picture of Santa living at the Pole.
In 1873 the playwright Alexander Ostrovsky wrote Snegurochka, The Snow Maiden, a spring fairy tale with music by Tchaikovsky. In it she is the daughter of Frost and Spring, a girl made of snow who melts when she falls in love. By the end of the 1800s Ded Moroz had become a popular figure who brought presents to children at Christmas, next to the decorated fir tree. Snegurochka became his granddaughter and helper only later, in Soviet times. The painting is Viktor Vasnetsov's design for the opera.
Nast's best-known Santa, Merry Old Santa Claus, filled a page of Harper's Weekly on 1 January 1881: a fat, smiling old man with a pipe, holly on his cap and an armful of toys. Harper's printed it in black and white. The red version shown here is a later colour printing, and red Santas were common in American prints long before 1931, like this Puck magazine cover from 1904.
Shops noticed that children loved Santa. In 1841 a Philadelphia shopkeeper, J. W. Parkinson, already had a man dressed as Kriss Kringle at his door. The first department-store Santa with a known name was James Edgar, a Scottish immigrant who ran the Boston Store in Brockton, Massachusetts. In December 1890 Edgar had a Santa suit tailored in Boston and walked his shop floor in it. Families came by train from Boston and Providence to see him, and within ten years most big American city stores had a Santa. Before that he dressed up as a clown, which is the photo here.
In 1897 an eight-year-old New York girl, Virginia O'Hanlon, asked her father whether Santa Claus was real. He told her to write to The Sun newspaper, because, as he said, if you see it in The Sun, it's so. The editorial writer Francis Church answered her in an unsigned editorial on 21 September 1897: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. It became the most reprinted editorial in English-language newspapers. Virginia grew up to teach in New York City schools for 47 years.
Americans said Santa lived at the North Pole. In 1927 Finland disagreed. Markus Rautio, the host of a children's radio show who was known as Uncle Markus, told listeners that Santa lived on Korvatunturi, Ear Fell, a hill in Lapland on the Russian border, where he could hear children's wishes. The Finnish name for Santa is Joulupukki, the Yule Goat. Korvatunturi is hard to reach, so in 1985 Lapland opened Santa Claus Village on the Arctic Circle near Rovaniemi. Its post office handles about half a million letters a year.
After the 1917 revolution the Soviet state went after religion and everything close to it. The Christmas tree was called a bourgeois and religious prejudice, and in 1928 Ded Moroz was declared an ally of the priest and the kulak, the rich peasant. Anti-religious cartoons mocked him, like the one shown here. For about seven years Soviet children had no official tree and no Grandfather Frost.
The most famous Santa myth says Coca-Cola dressed him in red. It did not. Red-suited Santas were on magazine covers decades earlier, and the mineral-water brand White Rock used a modern-suited Santa in its ads from 1915, in full red by 1923, as in this picture. What Coca-Cola did, starting in 1931, was hire the illustrator Haddon Sundblom to paint a warm, human, rosy-cheeked Santa for its Christmas ads, year after year, in magazines everywhere. The repetition turned one version into the version. Coca-Cola's own website says Santa wore red before Sundblom painted him.
On 28 December 1935 Pravda printed a call from the Communist official Pavel Postyshev: let's organise a good New Year tree for the children. Schools, Pioneer palaces, clubs, cinemas and theatres were to put one up. It was the old Christmas tree with a new job. It now stood for New Year, not for the birth of Christ, and factories started making Soviet-themed ornaments. Postyshev himself was purged by the same regime in 1938.
Ded Moroz returned at the children's New Year party in Moscow's House of the Unions, welcoming 1937. For the first time he came with Snegurochka, now cast as his granddaughter and helper. The pair became the Soviet answer to Saint Nicholas and Santa Claus. They bring presents on New Year's Eve, not at Christmas, and an invitation to the tree at the House of the Unions became an honour for Soviet children. After the war the pair spread to every country under Soviet control.
In 1939 the Chicago department store Montgomery Ward wanted a free Christmas booklet to hand to shoppers' children. A copywriter, Robert L. May, wrote a poem about a reindeer mocked for his shiny red nose who ends up leading Santa's sleigh through fog. The store gave away 2.4 million copies that first season. In 1949 May's brother-in-law Johnny Marks turned it into a song, and Gene Autry's recording has sold more than 25 million copies. The ninth reindeer was written by an advertising department.
In December 1955 a Sears store in Colorado Springs printed an ad telling children to phone Santa. The number had a misprint. It rang a red phone at the Continental Air Defense Command, on the desk of Colonel Harry Shoup. When a small voice asked whether this was Santa Claus, Shoup played along and had his staff give children Santa's position on the radar. NORAD, which replaced the command in 1958, has tracked Santa every Christmas Eve since. Shoup's children say it was the thing he was proudest of in his career.
Ukrainian children get presents from Saint Mykolai on his feast day. For about a century that was 19 December, because Ukrainian churches used the old Julian calendar, the same one that puts Russian Orthodox Christmas on 7 January. Ded Moroz came on New Year's Eve. In 2023 the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Greek Catholic Church switched calendars, and a law signed on 28 July 2023 moved the state Christmas holiday to 25 December. On 6 December 2023 Kyiv lit its main tree on Sophia Square on the new Saint Nicholas Day. Ukraine's foreign ministry has called Ded Moroz a Soviet creation.