Thomas Nast invented Santa Claus? Clement C. Moore didn’t write
the famous poem that starts out, “‘Twas the night before
Christmas, and all through the house . . . ?” The murky waters
of history from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub soak even our most
cherished ideas and traditions. But isn’t that part of the fun
of history? Yes, Virginia (and California, too)! Thomas Nast
created the image of Santa Claus most of us in the U.S. know
today. Perhaps even more significant than his campaign against
the graft of Boss Tweed, Nast’s popularization of a fat, jolly
elf who delivers good things to people for Christmas makes one
of the great stories in commercial illustration. Nast’s
cartoons, mostly for the popular news publication Harper’s
Weekly, created many of the conventions of modern political
cartooning and modeled the way in which an illustrator could
campaign for good, with his campaign against the graft of
Tammany Hall and Tweed. But Nast’s popular vision of Santa Claus
can be said to be the foundation for the mode