This 19th-Century NJ Cartoonist Designed The Santa We Know Today

MORRISTOWN, NJ — A big fat belly, a jolly white beard, rosy cheeks, and festive fashion. You probably know who we're talking about. But you might not know that the man who designed the Santa Claus we recognize today was from New Jersey.

Thomas Nast was a German-American political cartoonist from the late 19th century. He is credited with popularizing the political cartoons of the Democrat Donkey and the Republican Elephant. He’s also known to have designed the American image of Father Christmas we know and love this time of year.

Nast moved to Morristown in 1872 and worked with publications including Harper’s Weekly and New York Illustrated News, for which he drew his cartoons. His earlier illustrations are considered to have lent a hand in taking down crime kingpin "Boss Tweed" and Tammany Hall.

Before Nast’s first publication of Santa Claus with Harper’s Weekly in 1863, most illustrations showed Santa as a short, sometimes skinny figure. It was Nast’s drawings that showed him as a more pot-bellied “grand figure” we know nowadays.

According to Ryan Hyman of Morristown’s Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, Nast’s earlier depictions of Santa Claus were used as a political figure, specifically with regard to military ideologies.

“Nast’s first published Santa Claus for Harper’s Weekly in 1863… Was very much a political Santa Claus, supporting the Union army,” Hyman said. “He was one of Nast’s characters to support the causes that Nast believed in.”

Hyman said that over the years, however, Nast began using his Santa Claus for more “family-oriented” cartoons, rather than politically inclined ones. Perhaps his most famous Santa illustration, “Merry Old Santa Claus,” (pictured above) shows the Christmas figure donning holly, smoking a pipe, with a great big beard and belly and an armful of children’s toys.

According to Hyman, Nast drew his Santa Claus inspiration from Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” more popularly known as “Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Some of Nast’s work directly depicts the famous poem, one showing little mice sleeping on a mantle, since “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

It wasn’t until after Nast’s death in 1902 that companies began adapting Nast’s image of Santa Claus to fit commercialized agendas.

“Coca-Cola took Nast’s Santa and made him even bigger and jollier…Other companies and other artists in the early 20th Century took (Nast’s Santa) and made it even more commercialized as a character,” Hyman told Patch. “It was Nast who really gave the first American version of Santa that we know today.”

More examples of Nast’s work, both Christmas-related and not, can be found at the Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, which is right across the street from where Nast lived.

The museum, located at 45 MacCulloch Avenue, has more than 5,000 images from Nast in its collection. The organization does two to three rotating exhibitions of Nast’s work each year, in addition to some permanent installations.

The 75-year-old museum also has historical artifacts from other families who lived in the home, as well as two acres of gardens that bloom throughout the warmer seasons. Click here to learn more about the museum and what it has to offer.

Nevertheless, when you see Santa in your favorite holiday movie, in an advertisement drinking a soda with a polar bear, or even catch him trying to fit down your chimney, you know who to thank for his jolly design.