A Visit from St. Nicholas
Although Washington Irving’s nostalgic turn-of-the century satires of New Amsterdam society feature some of the earliest American literary treatments of the St. Nicholas legend, the evolution from St. Nicholas to the American Santa recognized today appears to have begun in earnest at least two or three decades later.
Clement C. Moore’s enormously influential poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was written in 1822, but it did not become widely popular until several years after that. Moore wrote the verses for his own children, reciting it before his family for the first time on Christmas Eve. The poem was published anonymously, and to increasingly enthusiastic public response, until 1837, when Moore finally acknowledged authorship.
Christmas Spirit
Much of what we now consider as essential to Santa — such as his plumpness — first appeared in Clement C. Moore's poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Moore apparently based his St. Nick on a rotund gardener who worked for him, but preferred to call the character St. Nicholas rather than Santa Claus.
Although Santa has grown over the years from the elflike stature Moore assigned to him, it is from Moore’s lines that the first (and by far the most influential) concrete physical description of Santa comes:
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.
His eyes, how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry; His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow, And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath. He had a broad face and a little round belly That shook, when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
Festive Fact
Thomas Nast's 1863 illustrations for the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" — which itself went a long way toward standardizing the jolly one's physical appearance — were the turning point in Nast's career. Although his later political cartoons also won him national acclaim, he made a tradition of supplying fresh drawings of Santa for the Christmas issue of Harper's Weekly each year.
Moore’s portrayal of St. Nicholas as a generous gift giver and friend to children was, of course, an outgrowth of the legends surrounding St. Nicholas. The influence of Irving’s (often imaginative) accounts of the Dutch legend is also apparent throughout Moore’s poem.
Moore was not the first to assign a reindeer to St. Nicholas, but he was the first to set the total at eight, and the first to popularize the names now associated with the animals. (They are, for the record: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen.)
