h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The man who invented Father Christmas

Just up the road from us is the attractive country town of Landau.

Up until very recently, it was occupied by the French military, and only now are they renovating and re-allocating the barracks and other military buildings for use by the local population.

It always was a military town, and it's in a barracks there in 1840 that today's little story starts.

A young Bavarian officer living in married quarters there had a son called Thomas Nast. Things were pretty dire in those days, and Thomas's mother made her way, with her son, to America when he was about five years old.

Hardly into his teens, Thomas was already a skilled artist, and by age 18 was employed by Harper's Weekly. During the American Civil War, his drawings became increasingly popular, and even caught the attention of President Lincoln.

He developed a knack for caricatures and political cartoons - the first person in the US to do this, if local legend (hereabouts) is to be believed. Probably it was just that the time was ripe for that sort of thing, humour and satire were beginning to become more mainstream, and the public needed some light relief from the tedium and horror of the war.

Allegedly, he furthered the concept and the look of "Uncle Sam", as well as the elephant and donkey symbols for the leading political parties.

But most significantly of all, his Christmas cartoons, from about 1862, depicted the first Father Christmas. He based this on the Belzenickel (St Nicholas) that he had come to know, and no doubt be scared by, in his early Pfälzer upbringing. Later, the red and white colouring slowly turned up - these being the colours of the Unionists, who Nast supported. In fact, the earliest pictures show him distributing presents to soldiers at the front rather than to children.

The English Wiki entry on him is longer than the German one and contains a few more interesting pieces of information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nast

This article (in German) tells the tale of how Father Christmas was definitely NOT invented for advertising Coca Cola, as people have been led to believe. In fact, a soft drinks company called White Rocks were already using him in 1915 for their advertising.
http://www.manager-magazin.de/lifestyle/leute/a-874273-2.html

In short, the article says that Nast's drawings were being published long before Coca Cola had even been invented, and the co-operation between the red-and-white Santa Claus figure and the brown liquid company began in 1931.

Nowadays, our local hero is commemorated by the "Thomas Nast prize" for political cartoons, awarded annually in Landau, and, during the Cold War, his name was given to an American missile launching station near Landau. The Christmas market in Landau is particularly special, in that it has an exhibition of artwork, superior in quality to the usual tat you get at Christmas markets, and the market is actually named "Thomas Nast Nikolausmarkt".

(Site is in German: http://www.weihnachtsmarkt-deutschland.de/weihnachtsmarkt-landau.html)

An interesting one, TC! I'm off to peruse the links.

[Amy P]

Fascinating!

Thanks, TC

Nast's cartoon came after Clement Moore's "A visit from Saint Nicholas" [1822] and Washington Irving's "A History of New York" featuring Saint Nicholas [1812]. "Saint Nicholas" and "Father Christmas" were soon merged into one in the public's mind.

There are also the French Pere Noel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A8re_No%C3%ABl
the Russian ded Moroz [Grandfather Frost]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A8re_No%C3%ABl
and numerous other local versions of the kindly yuletide gift-giver.

I can't get any dates earlier than the 19th century for any of these, though. Did Irving and Moore start the ball rolling, or were they well-travelled enough to sense that the English-speaking nations were ready for something that already thrived elsewhere?

Well, there you go. I always take these local legends with a pinch of salt. So I'm quite happy to accept that Nast wasn't the first one to think up Father Christmas. As far as I can tell, he was the first to draw him though. Moore's was a poem, and Irving's was a story - right?

Deb

That's very interesting. Gnomon did an entry on the Clement Clarke Moore poem now attributed to Henry Livingston A3349352, though I can't find it now. Some people think the image of St Nicholas comes from that, but it doesn't mention the colour red:

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

'Santa Claus' is a name in no extant language, but is the Americanisation of the Dutch Sinterklaas. I've been in the town of Sint Niklaas in Belgium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sint-Niklaas (for a ukulele festival of course), where the town square is dominated by a grotesque statue of the man http://files.chess.com/images_users/tiny_mce/Kop/sintniklaas/DSCF2830.JPG

Ho Ho Ho.