Santa Claus is a fourth-century Greek bishop who spent sixteen hundred years being slowly redrawn — and the most famous fact everyone knows about his red suit is wrong.
The bishop underneath
The original is St Nicholas of Myra, a fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey, whose reputation for secret gift-giving made him the patron of children. Bishops of his era wore red and white ceremonial robes — meaning the colour scheme was attached to the character roughly sixteen centuries before anyone tried to sell a soft drink with it. Dutch settlers carried “Sinterklaas” to America, where the name wore down into Santa Claus.
Drawn into shape
The plump, bearded, fur-trimmed figure is largely the work of the political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who drew Santa for Harper’s Weekly dozens of times between the 1860s and 1880s. Nast experimented — brown, tan, blue and green suits all appear — but red kept winning, including in a well-known 1881 drawing, and by the late nineteenth century red-suited Santas were selling sweets and appearing on magazine covers.
The Coca-Cola myth, dealt with
Coca-Cola did not invent the red suit. When the company hired the artist Haddon Sundblom in the 1930s to paint Santa for its winter campaigns, it chose red because Santa already wore it (conveniently matching the label, rather than the other way round). What the campaigns genuinely did was standardise and globalise one particular warm, grandfatherly version of him — popularisation, not invention. Fifty years of prior red-suited Santas say so.
Source: Snopes and The Public Domain Review
Santa on a jumper
He is the most-printed figure in the entire category, from faithful traditional knits to versions in sunglasses — the full range of what a century and a half of redrawing does to a bishop. Which register suits you is really the cute, ugly or classic question.
