Cartoonist Thomas Nast first drew Santa Claus in January 1863, for Harper's Weekly. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1929, via Metropolitan Museum of Art under CC 1.0 You could call it the face that ...

Thomas Nast, “Santa Claus in Camp (from Harper’s Weekly)” (1863), wood engraving (all images courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art) These days, Santa sightings typically take place in ...

In early 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, cartoonist and illustrator Thomas Nast created a Christmas scene for the cover of Harper's Weekly. The cover showed Santa Claus arriving at a Union ...

Santa Claus is an American. This news may surprise readers who know he lives at the North Pole (where an American artist, Thomas Nast, put him in Christmas 1866) or who remember that the ...

In your issue of May 21 you question Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine's assertion that Thomas Nast practically created our accepted pictorial embodiment of Santa Claus, and as Mr. Paine has since ...

By the 1860s, famous cartoonist Thomas Nast had turned Santa Claus into a fully human-sized character and given him a home at the North Pole. Read more of this story from our National Museum of ...

The image of Santa Claus as a jolly, red-suited man bearing gifts is so widespread it's easy to take for granted, but Coca-Cola marketing played a major role.

How did Santa Claus become the figurehead of Christmas? Here's a history lesson on ol' Saint Nick.

In 1881 -- five years before the founding of The Coca-Cola Company -- political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an extremely popular version of Santa based on Moore's poem.

Drawing upon Moore’s story, Thomas Nast, a well-known cartoonist in the mid-19th century, began to draw Santa Claus in a red suit with a long pipe and big grin during the Civil War.

In 1870, American cartoonist Thomas Nast famously drew Santa in red for Harper's Weekly, incorporating key elements such as the fur-lined outfit and black belt.