Every time I see an image of Santa Claus, I think of Boss Tweed. The reason is simple: Our image of Santa Claus is the invention of the same man who pursued the Boss to his death in jail.

"I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles," Tweed said in 1870, as his powers were crumbling into dust and indictments. "My constituents don't know how to read. But they can't help seeing those damned pictures."

The man who made those damned pictures was an immigrant from Germany named Thomas Nast. He was the greatest political cartoonist of the 19th century, perhaps of any American century. He created the symbols of the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. With pencil and pen, he defended the rights of freed slaves, of Chinese immigrants, of what were then called American Indians. He was a Republican when that party was passionately liberal, and he could be brutal with those he thought were on the wrong side of Republican idealism.

"I try to hit the enemy between the eyes," he said, "and knock him down."

And yet Nast was riddled with contradictions. For all his secular liberalism, he sided with industrialists against trade unions. He loathed the form of revolutionary socialism that erupted in the Paris Commune of 1871. Worst of all, he was a vicious hater of Catholics, from the Pope in Rome to the poor Irish bricklayer locked in the squalor of the Five Points. One of his most unforgettable images was the sight of bishops crawling ashore in the United States with their miters opened like the jaws of alligators. Among those who did not forget this image were American Catholics.

But in his heyday, Nast was honored by Presidents, toasted by the elite and feared by the objects of his wrath. The many thousands of words employed against the Tweed Ring are now forgotten; Nast's ferocious political images remain a vital part of American history, a triumph of popular art over the more refined arts of any academy. But even Nast, with his healthy ego and swagger, could not have imagined that 100 years after his death in 1902, one of his images would have spread to the great wide world. The image of Santa Claus.

From legend to Sinter Klaas

This Nast invention did not spring from the air. The legend of St. Nicholas had been around since the fourth century. This saint was a Greek-speaking priest from a town in what is now Turkey, and was noted for giving away his family's fortune to the poor. By the time of the Reformation, which dismissed St. Nicholas as too Catholic (along with most other saints), local variants on the legend were invented: Father Christmas in England, Pére Noel in France, and among some of the Dutch, Sinter Klaas. Most versions of this figure described a gaunt, ascetic man, rewarding the virtuous, ignoring the sinful. Then the image began to change.

In New York, Washington Irving in 1809 jokingly made generous St. Nicholas the patron saint of the city, and by 1821 had him riding over the treetops on his Christmas missions. Reindeer first appeared in an anonymous poem of 1823. Then, in 1824, the public first read Clement Clarke Moore's poem called "A Visit From St. Nicholas." Composed on the immense family farm that now makes up most of Chelsea, the poem described St. Nicholas as "chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf."

During the holiday season of 1862-63, Nast put visual flesh on the poetic bones provided by Moore. At that point, young Nast had been working as a journalistic illustrator since he was 15. In 1860, he covered prizefights in London and Garibaldi's campaign of liberation in Sicily and Italy. Back home, he went to see the carnage of the Civil War, made drawings for newspapers, and went to work for Harper's in 1862. In the Jan. 3, 1863, issue of that weekly, he showed Santa Claus cheering up the battered Union troops. He's wearing striped pants and a shirt spangled with stars. Nast would do a year-end drawing of Santa Claus for each of the following 25 years.

Sketchy creation

Years later, Nast told his biographer, Albert B. Paine, that his Santa Claus came from tales told of Pelze-Nicol (St. Nicholas) during his childhood in the town of Landau in Bavaria, where he was born in 1840. The German image, Payne wrote, was of "a fat, fur-clad, bearded old fellow." In the years after the Civil War, Nast refined and elaborated the image. Here came the bag stuffed with gifts and the pipe and the twinkling eyes. His 1866 Christmas spread in Harper's first located Santa's workshop at the North Pole, where it has remained ever since. By 1888, long after his own powers had waned, Nast finally illustrated Moore's poem.

In a wonderful book called "Inventing Christmas" (Abrams, 2001), Jock Elliott has charted all of this story (and more) with care and good cheer. He reminds us of how recent the Christmas "tradition" is, and how ancient. He tells us, for example, that the Christmas tree is basically a product of the second half of the American 19th century, and can be traced to England. The British royal family - themselves imports from Germany - first pitched such trees in their palatial homes. But the trees, and the rituals of winter celebrations, could themselves be traced all the way back to pagan times and the celebrations of the winter solstice.

For Americans, Nast was decisive. He shaped their visual vocabulary of Christmas. He even changed the American economy. In giving the world the visual image of Santa Claus, he created a symbol that could be embraced by many people: Christians of all sects, of course, but also Jews and atheists and a few surviving pagans. Nast's images of Santa Claus made it easier to remove religion from Christmas and turn it into an annual orgy of consumerism. By 1931, Santa Claus was selling Coca-Cola in a series of annual illustrations by Haddon Sundblom.

Today, the plump little man sells everything else, too. And that evolution surely would have brought a twinkle to the eyes of Boss Tweed.

Originally published on December 22, 2002