Discover the First Depiction of Santa Claus (and Its Origins in Civil War Propaganda)

It will no doubt come as a relief to many read­ers that San­ta Claus appears to have been a Union sup­port­er. We know this because he appears dis­trib­ut­ing gifts to sol­diers from that side of the Mason-Dixon in one of his ear­li­est depic­tions. That illus­tra­tion, “San­ta Claus in Camp” (above), first appeared in the Harper’s Week­ly Christ­mas issue of 1862, when the Amer­i­can Civ­il War was still tear­ing its way through the coun­try. Its artist, a Bavar­i­an immi­grant named Thomas Nast, is now remem­bered for hav­ing first drawn the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty as a don­key and the Repub­li­can Par­ty as an ele­phant, but he also did more than any­one else to cre­ate the image of San­ta Claus rec­og­nized around the world today: more than Nor­man Rock­well, and more, even, than the Coca-Cola Com­pa­ny.

San­ta Claus is an Angli­ciza­tion of Sin­terk­laas, a Dutch name for Saint Nicholas, who lived and died in what’s now Turkey in the third and fourth cen­turies, and who’s been remem­bered since for his kind­ness to chil­dren. Few of us would rec­og­nize him in his por­trait from 1294 that is includ­ed in the Pub­lic Domain Review’s pic­to­r­i­al his­to­ry of San­ta Claus, but with the pass­ing of the cen­turies, his images became mixed with those of oth­er fly­ing, win­ter-asso­ci­at­ed char­ac­ters from Ger­man­ic and Norse myth. In 1822, Clement Moore per­formed a defin­ing act of rhyming syn­the­sis with his poem “A Vis­it from St. Nicholas” (often called “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christ­mas”): in its vers­es we find the bun­dle of toys, the rosy cheeks, the white beard, the bel­ly shak­ing like a bowl full of jel­ly.

Nast clear­ly under­stood not just the appeal of Moore’s descrip­tion, but also the char­ac­ter’s pro­pa­gan­da val­ue. His very first ren­di­tions of San­ta Claus appear in the upper cor­ners of an 1862 Harper’s Week­ly illus­tra­tion of a pray­ing wife and her Yan­kee sol­dier hus­band. Near­ly two decades lat­er, Nast drew the car­toon “Mer­ry Old San­ta Claus” (imme­di­ate­ly above), whose cen­tral fig­ure remains imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able to us today, even as its moti­vat­ing polit­i­cal cause of high­er wages for the mil­i­tary has become obscure. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the icon­ic Father Christ­mas would be enlist­ed again to lend pub­lic sup­port to U.S. efforts in World War I and II, in the very decades when Rock­well was fur­ther refin­ing and cement­ing his image in pop­u­lar cul­ture. The once-unlike­ly result was an Amer­i­can San­ta Claus: “the sym­bol of our empire,” in the words of The New York­er’s Adam Gop­nik, “as much as Apol­lo was of the Hel­lenic one.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch San­ta Claus, the Ear­li­est Movie About San­ta in Exis­tence (1898)

Did San­ta Claus & His Rein­deers Begin with a Mush­room Trip?: Dis­cov­er the Psy­che­del­ic, Shaman­is­tic Side of Christ­mas

Hear “Twas The Night Before Christ­mas” Read by Stephen Fry & John Cleese

J. R. R. Tolkien Sent Illus­trat­ed Let­ters from Father Christ­mas to His Kids Every Year (1920–1943)

Bob Dylan Reads “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christ­mas” On His Hol­i­day Radio Show (2006)

Slavoj Žižek Answers the Ques­tion “Should We Teach Chil­dren to Believe in San­ta Claus?”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.