Salon on how Santa Claus emerged in Victorian-era America (thank the retailing genius of Rowland H. Macy).

An excerpt: (free with a day pass)

There is no Santa Claus. Not in the poem now known as "The Night Before Christmas" published anonymously in 1823 and credited to Clement Clarke Moore, whose verses feature a weirdly elvish figure named St. Nicholas. Not in Charles Dickens' 1842 "Christmas Carol," with all its sanctimonious sermonizing about Tiny Tim and the true meaning of Christmas. For all practical purposes, there is no Santa Claus before 1862, the year that Rowland H. Macy took the gift-giving gnome known around New York as Sinterklaas (from the Dutch "Sint Nicolaas"), used an Anglicized name, had him impersonated by a reassuringly full-size human, costumed him in a nice, clean cloak, and installed him in the store as a means of snaring more Christmas shoppers.

True, there was St. Nicholas, an early Catholic saint from Asia Minor who went on to become the all-purpose patron of Greece, Russia, children, spinsters, brides and workers ranging from bootblack to brewer. Old Nick had survived the Reformation by ingratiating himself with prosperous Protestants as an unthreateningly unclerical dispenser of presents and punisher of naughtiness. But by the time Washington Irving, writing as the pseudonymous Diedrich Knickerbocker, put him in the fictional 1809 "History of New York," the Dutch settlers' St. Nicholas had shrunk to a small folkloric figure wholly without canonical clout.

That St. Nick, however, was still a long way from Santa. In 1841, Philadelphia store owner J.W. Parkinson hired someone to pose as St. Nicholas climbing the store's chimney, thus becoming the first retailer on record to sense the sales potential of Moore's much-published poem. (Though decades ahead of Macy, Parkinson unfortunately missed Macy's insight that the payoff comes from luring shoppers inside a store.) During the 1860s, Bavarian-born illustrator and war correspondent Thomas Nast featured Moore's version of St. Nick in a popular series of woodcuts made for Harper's Weekly. But Nast, who gave America its Republican elephant, Democratic donkey, and Uncle Sam, followed the verse descriptions and depicted a pot-bellied fairy figure wearing a tight fur jumpsuit and smoking a long clay pipe.

It took another German immigrant, Louis Prang, to Americanize the appearance of the character who, thanks in part to his annual appearance at Macy's, was fast becoming more famous as Santa Claus. Though stationers had started the custom of sending Christmas cards well before the Civil War, Prang, a chromolithographer, recognized the money to be made from postwar improvements in the U.S. postal system. Alongside his season's greetings showing bonny tykes frolicking in the snow and darling kittens sitting down to the dinner table, Prang came up with a Santa Claus so cute, so cheery, so chubby and charming, that it set the standard forever after. Santa was now identifiable by his white beard, his colorful red coat, his stocking hat, and his sturdy belt and boots. Trimmed in tasteful winter ermine, unsoiled by ashes and soot, the reformed goblin was now well-suited for welcome into middle-class Victorian households. Nast stuck close to the original and died more or less broke. Prang sanitized Santa and died a rich man.