Father Christmas is what the British call the figure who delivers presents on Christmas Eve. “Santa” and “Santa Claus” are used just as often now, especially by children, but Father Christmas is the older domestic name and the one most adults reach for.
Two different figures
They began as separate characters and only merged in the nineteenth century.
Father Christmas is English and much older — a personification of the festive season itself, appearing in mummers’ plays and carols from at least the fifteenth century. He was a large, bearded, jovial man in a green or occasionally scarlet robe, associated with feasting, drinking and adult merriment. He had nothing to do with children and brought nobody any presents. Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol is recognisably this figure.
Santa Claus descends from Saint Nicholas via the Dutch Sinterklaas, carried to New Amsterdam and reshaped in America — the sleigh, the reindeer, the chimney and the stocking all come from the American tradition, largely fixed by the 1823 poem ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.
Victorian Britain imported the American version, and it absorbed the native one. By the twentieth century they were the same person with two names.
What is left out for him
The British offering differs from the American plate of cookies and milk. The standard is:
- A mince pie.
- A glass of sherry — or brandy, or whisky, or increasingly a beer, depending on the household.
- A carrot for the reindeer, left beside it.
In the morning the carrot has a convincing bite taken out of it, and there are usually crumbs.
Stockings
British children hang stockings at the end of the bed or on the bedroom door, not by the fireplace. They are opened first thing in the morning, in bed, before anyone goes downstairs — which buys parents an extra half hour and is the entire point of the arrangement.
Stocking presents are small: chocolate coins, a satsuma in the toe, socks, a puzzle. The larger presents go under the tree and are opened later, usually after breakfast or, in some households, after lunch, a delay children have been protesting against for generations.
The red suit
Contrary to a much-repeated claim, Coca-Cola did not invent the red-suited Santa. Their advertising from 1931 was enormously influential in fixing the modern image, but red-robed depictions were already common in Britain and America from the 1870s onward. Green persisted alongside red well into the Victorian period, and some British Christmas cards still use it.
Meeting him
Department stores, garden centres and National Trust properties run Santa’s grottoes from late November, and visiting one is a fixture of British childhood. The Lapland experience — reindeer, elves, an alarming price — has become an established alternative for those willing to fly.