How did St. Nicholas become Santa Claus?

A friend from Germany once asked me how St. Nicholas (ascetic Bishop of the early church in Asia Minor, feast day Dec. 6th, known as the patron saint and protector of children) became Santa Claus (jolly old elf with red suit, a big round tummy and a chuckling laugh, flying the world on Dec. 25th with 8 tiny reindeer, or 9 if NORAD's reports are to be believed).

In Germany, gifts are apparently left under the tree by the Christ Child, and St. Nicholas has a separate role at the beginning of the Christmas season, while the Wise Men end the Christmas celebrations on January 6th--just one month from St. Nicholas' day.

Santa Claus is a uniquely American character, rising out of a uniquely American history.

Simply put, the earliest English settlers who came to what we call New England did not celebrate Christmas. They scorned the traditional English Christmas--feasting and caroling and wassailing and other such celebratory actions were just pagan nonsense, dressed up in a highly suspect Christian guise. They were Puritans, remember, and they wanted to purify their church: no carved gargoyles, no incense, no gold-embroidered vestments. And especially no parties at Christmas. If it is one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar, then surely Christians ought to be at church, on their knees, repenting of their sins rather than piling up new ones.

At least that was the thinking. And so celebrating Christmas was formally outlawed in Massachusetts (the oldest New England colony) from 1689 until 1856. By the time the girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women were coming down to breakfast to find Christmas presents on their table, Christmas celebrations had been legal for less than a generation in the author's home state.

Of course, the Puritans and their descendants did not all stay in Massachusetts. The inexorable pull of the west meant that some of them eventually drifted into New York--the colony that had once been Dutch. And they began bumping into Dutch Christmas customs: gingerbread cookies and Sinter Klaas, among others.

The descendants of Puritans had no remnants of "Father Christmas" in their handed-down English traditions. Christmas was for them a day of prayer, and Saint Nicholas/Sinter Klaas/Santa Claus came to them as a tradition of the newly-amalgamated American nation, a tradition first borrowed from Dutch origins and put into American form in 1823 (with numerous reprintings thereafter) in the poem called "A Visit From Saint Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore, who had been educated at New York's Columbia University. By 1870, Moore's St. Nicholas had been transmuted into the department-store Santa Claus at Macy's, a flagship Manhattan store both then and now.

The change from Sinter Klaas to Santa Claus--from a Dutch celebration of an ancient saint's feast day to an American celebration of Christmas--happened in the 19th century, and by the age of television in the 20th century, our own American Santa Claus was ready to conquer the world, one child at a time...

Which proves that festivities in the dark of the year have a certain attraction for us all, even the descendants of Puritans.