Santa's red suit is a nineteenth-century American look
The jolly, white-bearded gift-bringer in fur-trimmed scarlet traces less to medieval icons than to U.S. popular art after Dutch Sinterklaas arrived in New Amsterdam. An 1823 poem put flying reindeer on the roof; commerce and illustrators finished the costume.
Santa Claus, in Western Christian folklore, delivers presents late on Christmas Eve, with elves crafting toys and airborne reindeer hauling the sleigh. The figure grows from traditions about fourth-century Greek bishop Saint Nicholas of Myra (now Demre, Turkey), famed for secret generosity—including dowries that spared three poor daughters from prostitution. English Father Christmas, a Tudor spirit of cheer in green or scarlet furred robes under Henry VIII, later fused with Santa in popular imagination. Medieval gifts often fell on the eve of Nicholas's 6 December feast; Reformation pressure in many lands shifted children's presents toward 24–25 December, a change Martin Luther's circle helped spread where saint days faded.
In 1087 Bari merchants removed major bones from Nicholas's Myra sarcophagus while the city sat under Seljuq rule and after the 1054 East–West schism, carrying relics to Italy over local Greek Christian protests. Dutch settlers carried Sinterklaas to seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. The anonymous 1823 American poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" describes the saint arriving Christmas Eve by reindeer sleigh—cementing that aerial logistics in Anglophone culture. The now-standard portly laugh ("ho, ho, ho!"), glasses, black belt, and bag of toys solidified in nineteenth-century U.S. depiction.
Workshop elves and flying deer are later narrative furniture hung on an older bishop's charity. Santa thus wears layered centuries: Anatolian saint, English revels, Dutch import, and American mass-print fantasy—all delivering overnight wonder to children who leave the stockings out.
Source: Santa Claus
