A Christmas tale from long ago: Santa Claus was Black

Black Santa has been around for a really long time. He can now be found in Disney Christmas parades and suburban Southern lawns. He is still very much a minority figure, though, subject to occasional pushback from those who contend that, as TV personality Megyn Kelly put it in 2013, 'Santa just is White.'

By Justin Fox for Bloomberg Opinion

Santa Claus is in a sense native to New York City. If you’re willing to accept “St. A Claus,” he made his first known written appearance in the New-York Gazette in 1773. If not, there’s a “Santaclaus” in 1808 in Salmagundi (the humor magazine co-edited by author Washington Irving that also introduced “Gotham” as a nickname for the city), a “Santa-Claus” in several papers in March 1809 and finally a two-word, no-hyphen “Santa Claus” in the New York Public Advertiser in April 1809.

After 13 more years of public experimentation in New York with the character also referred to as Sancte Claus, Sainte Claus, Santa-Closs, Sante Claws, Santaclaw, Santa Clause, Sanctus Klaas, St Class, Saincte Claus, Sante Claus and St. Nicholas, a poem published anonymously 200 years ago this week in the upstate Troy Sentinel, and later claimed by Manhattanite Clement Clarke Moore, established most of the traits of the rosy-cheeked, cherry-nosed, jelly-bellied gift-giver with a reindeer-drawn sleigh who was to conquer the world.

It took a few decades for “The Night Before Christmas” to become canon, though, and in May 1827 the Gentleman’s Magazine in Britain offered up a somewhat different Claus. In an article on St. Nicholas traditions, an author identified only as “H.” quoted “a friend” on the custom of New Year’s Eve gift-giving in America “among the descendants of the old Dutch settlers, and those who have fallen insensibly into their habits” (an indication that this was in Dutch-colonized New York or New Jersey):

Long before the important night arrives, numerous conjectures and inquiries are made by the young urchins respecting the person and being of Sandy Claus (evidently a corruption of St. Nicholas), who, in the opinion of the majority, is represented as a little old negro, who descends the chimney at night, and distributes a variety of rewards with impartial justice, according to the degree of good behaviour in the candidates.

In other words, Black Santa has been around for a really long time. It has been 60 years since Black boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa hat on the cover of Esquire shocked readers and advertisers, and 50 since record producer Teddy Vann and his daughter Akim created the enduringly endearing Christmas song “Santa Claus Is a Black Man.” Black Santa can now be found in Disney Christmas parades and suburban Southern lawns. He is still very much a minority figure, though, subject to occasional pushback from those who contend that, as TV personality Megyn Kelly put it in 2013, “Santa just is White.”

In fact, Santa is — if you are younger than 8, you should probably stop reading right here — imaginary. He (or she, or they, or it) can be whatever you choose. But the possibility that Black Santa was the original Santa Claus, or at least one of the originals, seems like a Christmas story worth exploring.

Old Dutch settlers

The Gentleman’s Magazine was the leading British periodical of the 1700s and a fading but still potent literary force in the early 1800s, and I am not the first modern reader to notice its Sandy Claus story. Charles W. Jones, the most influential scholar of Santa’s New York origins, quoted from it at length in his 1978 book Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Jones was only interested, though, in its illustration of the continuing uncertainty over whether Santa (aka Sandy) delivered presents on the eve of Christmas or New Year’s. He had convinced himself that there was no Santa Claus or St. Nicholas tradition in New York before Irving, New-York Historical Society co-founder John Pintard and a few others invented it in the early 1800s. Tales of customs handed down from “old Dutch settlers” could thus be disregarded.

Even based on the evidence gathered by Jones, this was an odd conclusion. “Would Santa Claus pop up in America like a mushroom, with no relation to the European colonizers?” scoffed Gerardo Cioffari, director of the Centro Studi Nicolaiani at the Basilica San Nicola in Bari, Italy, near the end of an extended critique of Jones in his 2010 book La storia di Santa Claus. Part of the problem was that Jones was writing when histories of New York gave short shrift to the Dutch presence in the region, assuming that the 1664 English takeover and renaming of what had been called Nieuw-Nederland (New Netherland) put a quick end to Dutch influence and customs.

A lot of history has been rewritten since then. Charles Gehring’s transcription and translation of the old Dutch documents moldering in Albany and elsewhere — which he started in 1974 and continues today at the New York State Library’s New Netherland Research Center — helped enable and inspire a flood of research into New York’s Dutch legacy, with recent work focused increasingly on the region’s early Black residents, many of whom adopted the language and customs of the Dutch colonists who enslaved them. Gehring’s 1973 Indiana University doctoral dissertation is also relevant here, as it showed (on the basis of shifts in spelling in 17th and 18th century documents) how the long Dutch “a” — pronounced something like “aah” in modern Dutch and written as “aa” — evolved into more of an “aw” sound in New York. That’s how the Dutch shortening of Nicholas spelled Klaas, Claas or Claes became Claus, Claws or Closs, with obvious implications for the origins of Santa Claus.

All this puts the Gentleman’s Magazine account in a much different light from the one in which Jones considered and dismissed it. Not only did Dutch customs and the Dutch language linger well into the 18th century in New York City and well into the 19th in rural areas of New York and New Jersey, but Black people were key carriers of both. The first name Claus, it turns out, seems by 1800 to have become associated mainly with Black men. The Santa-adjacent occupation of chimney sweep was also practiced almost exclusively by Black men and boys. There are accounts from those days of Black New Yorkers as repositories of folklore and organizers of festivities for children of all races. Santa Claus a Black man? In early 1800s New York, what else would a guy with that name and those job responsibilities be?

Fine, he could be other things, too. “American Santa Claus lore through the middle decades of the nineteenth century was a heterogenous jumble of images, stories and legends,” Leigh Eric Schmidt, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in 1995 in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, one of only three scholarly works I’ve found that take the Gentleman’s Magazine Black Santa even slightly seriously (the others being a 2007 paper, in Dutch, by John Helsloot, a since-retired ethnologist at the Dutch-culture-focused Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam, and the 2010 Santa Claus book by Cioffari, which is in Italian and does not appear to be available online or in a single library on this side of the Atlantic, but from which I have some pages that Helsloot scanned for me).

Alternative versions of Santa Claus in those days included the ogre described in the New-York American on Dec. 31, 1823, just three days after the “right jolly old elf” of “The Night Before Christmas” was introduced to New York City readers in the rival Mercantile Advertiser:

He is a little short hump-backed man, with sharp grey eyes buried beneath ponderous black brows, which curve forward to join the sides of a long crooked hawk-bill nose, which overhangs a toothless trench beneath that serves him for a mouth.

In a circa 1837 depiction by New York artist Robert Weir that received a lot of attention at the time, St. Nicholas resembles a background figure from a 17th century Dutch genre painting, with no beard, bushy eyebrows, a missing tooth and an unsettling leer.

An 1850 illustration showed Santa Claus as a trim, clean-shaven 18th century patriot sharing a broomstick with Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind. It wasn’t until the 1860s that Bavaria-born cartoonist Thomas Nast, drawing on the “The Night Before Christmas” and his own childhood memories of the German St. Nicholas offshoot Pelznickel, began to define and standardize the Santa look that still holds sway: a stout, kindly looking older White man with a full white beard. But in his first go at the subject, a bracingly political cover illustration for the Jan. 3, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly, Nast depicted a Santa clad in Stars and Stripes at a US Army camp — dangling a doll representing Confederate President Jefferson Davis from a noose — who sure looks as if he’s a Black man.

Santacedents

As we’ve already heard, the New York Santa Claus was not a mushroom that popped up out of nowhere. He had antecedents across the Atlantic, with St. Nicholas himself said to have lived from 270 to 343 AD in the Greek port city of Myra on what is now the southern Turkish coast. Starting several centuries after the supposed Dec. 6 death of this supposed early Christian bishop (hard evidence on Nicholas is scarce), stories about his miraculous powers began to multiply.

Nicholas rescued seafarers. He saved innocent men from execution. He brought children back to life years after they were slaughtered and pickled by an evil innkeeper. He threw bags of gold through an open window to prevent a financially distressed father from selling his daughters into prostitution — a story that as the Nicholas cult migrated to colder northern climes evolved into gift delivery by chimney on the eve of the saint’s death day.

By the late Middle Ages, Nicholas was the most important non-biblical Christian saint, a status he retains in Orthodox churches. He was especially popular among the seafaring Dutch. The oldest building in Amsterdam, consecrated in 1306 and now called simply the Oude Kerk (old church), was originally dedicated to St. Nicholas. A St. Nicholas Day donation of shoes to the poor by the pastor of Utrecht’s Nicolaikerk in 1397 is said to have evolved into a tradition of putting money and gifts into shoes for children.

Such rituals came under pressure in 1500s from the Protestant Reformation, a chief theme of which was sticking to the Bible. Martin Luther sought to supplant St. Nicholas with a gift-giving Christ child who arrived on Christmas Eve — the Christkindl, precursor to the American Kriss Kringle. But mostly Nicholas’ work was taken over by a thriving underground of non-church-sanctioned figures, some with possible pre-Christian roots. Pelznickel (“fur Nicholas”) did the honors in some German-speaking areas. Sinterklaas, a contraction of Sint — Dutch for saint — and Niklaas/Nicolaas (the genesis of the connecting “er” remains disputed), held sway in the Netherlands.

These were nocturnal beings, often associated with the color black. This was partly for the practical reason that they delivered gifts through soot-covered chimneys, but also because blackness was exotic and sinister and frightening — the better to scare children into behaving. In Central and Eastern Europe, St. Nicholas sidekick Krampus had horns. In Amsterdam, Zwarte Klazen (Black Klaases) reportedly roamed the streets at night, dragging chains, banging on doors and windows and yelling, “Any bad children in there?” Those who portrayed these figures often donned masks, daubed their faces with soot or fully blackened it with a mix of soot and oil. An 1827 account of Christmas in the nearby “German districts” published in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Gazette described “Bellschniggle” (Pelznickel, basically) as “Ebony in appearance, but Topaz in spirit.”

A 2018 roundup of the evidence by four Dutch researchers shows that there were different opinions in the Netherlands in the first half of the 19th century as to whether such figures were associates of Sinterklaas or the man himself and whether their blackness was makeup, metaphor or Moorish (meaning North African, although in the Netherlands in the 1800s it seems to have just been a synonym for Black). One poem published in Amsterdam in 1829 told of “a black man” who came “riding out of the chimney/his name was Sinterklaas,” but then made clear that this was an imaginary figure, while from around the same time there are references to a Sinterklaas assistant described as an actual Black person. An illustrated children’s book published in 1850 standardized and nationalized the Sinterklaas-servant relationship, and the servant came to be known as Zwarte Piet (Black Pete, which happens to be an archaic synonym for the devil, as is Old Nick). In the 20th century, public festivities in which Sinterklaas arrived by boat in Amsterdam and other cities in the lead-up to St. Nicholas’s death day accompanied by multiple Black Petes in blackface makeup became a beloved holiday ritual. As the Dutch population grew more diverse starting in the 1970s, it became a controversial ritual, and this year Sinterklaas arrived in Amsterdam in the company of just plain Petes with slightly sooty faces.

Escaped clauses

Such practices may have evolved differently in New Netherland and New York because, unlike in Europe or the German districts of Pennsylvania, Black people were a familiar presence there. The first non-indigenous resident on or near Manhattan Island, in 1613, was of mixed African and Portuguese descent. The first group of enslaved people arrived in 1627, mostly from West Central Africa by way of Portuguese captivity. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, about 15% of the colony’s non-American-Indian residents were Black — similar to today’s state Black population share of 17.7%. That percentage fell gradually as more immigrants arrived from Europe, and suddenly when the departing British transported thousands of former slaves to freedom in Canada in 1783, but in 1800 Black people still made up 10.5% of the population in New York City and above 20% in nearby rural areas. In Kings County, now New York City’s most populous borough (Brooklyn) but then a farming area with a heavy Dutch presence, it was 31.6%.

As of 1800, most of these Black New Yorkers, especially those in Dutch-speaking rural areas, were still enslaved. The reason I think the name Claus was mostly associated with Black men is because when I searched for it in the New York newspapers of the era, what I mostly encountered — once I’d sifted out the many, many mentions of a musical instrument dealer and father/son duo of British/Canadian military officers with the surname Claus — were escaped-slave notices such as the one that ran for two weeks in April 1805 in at least three New York City papers offering a $30 reward for:

a Negro Man, of the name of CLAUS, or NICHOLAS, about 5 feet, 7 or 8 inches high, thick set, has something of a Roman nose, a full eye, and a roll in his walk; has been brought up among the Dutch, which he speaks well, speaks English somewhat imperfectly, with a Dutch accent. Plays on a fiddle (which he took with him,) and is fond of Dancing — Appears from his countenance to be about 28 years of age; … Has been accustomed to sail as a cook, on board a sloop, from Albany to New-York.

All that detail was of course meant to aid in tracking down Claus, who had already run away from an enslaver in Watervliet near Albany in January and had, after his capture or voluntary return, been sold to another in the countryside north of Troy. Recent histories such as Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York by Andrea Mosterman of the University of New Orleans and Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry by Nicole Maskiell of the University of South Carolina make clear that for enslaved New Yorkers, the place bore aspects of a totalitarian surveillance state. Law after law was passed restricting slave movements and behavior. In New York City, a real slave uprising in 1712 and a purported one in 1741 were met with reprisals of unspeakable brutality.

But the details in this and other New York runaway notices also evince a great deal of familiarity. With an average of just 2.4 slaves per slave-owning household in the state as of 1800, relations between slaves and enslavers were less formal and more intimate than on the plantations of the American South and the Caribbean. Whether that made things better for the enslaved is debatable, given how isolating it must have been. It did lead, though, to a lot of portrayals of Black New Yorkers in the letters, memoirs, poems, novels and, yes, escaped-slave advertisements of the early 1800s as engaging, appealing, familiar characters.

The work of New York’s two biggest literary stars of the era, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, was no exception in this regard. In his reputation-making 1809 History of New York, Irving described how in New York Dutch families of old,

The young folks would crowd around the hearth, listening with breathless attention to some old crone of a negro, who was the oracle of the family, — and who, perched like a raven in a corner of the chimney, would croak forth for a long winter afternoon, a string of incredible stories about New England witches — grisly ghosts — horses without heads — and hairbreadth scapes and bloody encounters among the Indians.

In the illustration of the scene that Irving’s close friend Charles Robert Leslie crafted for an 1824 British edition of the History, the little girl of the family lovingly rests her elbow on the storyteller’s knee. The little boy sits at his feet, the teenage girl looks on attentively and the parents busy themselves with other pursuits.

Cooper’s literary breakthrough, The Spy, published in 1821 and set in Westchester County during the American Revolution, features the elderly slave Caesar Thompson as a leading character, a de facto member of the Wharton family around which the story revolves and a man whose heart, in Cooper’s words, “was in the right place, and, we doubt not, of very just dimensions.” Two years later, in the first of Cooper’s famous Leatherstocking novels, The Pioneers, set in the early 1790s in a fictionalized Cooperstown — the upstate New York village founded by Cooper’s father — the enslaved Agamemnon is an expert young sleigh driver whose face lights up with “thoughts of his home, and a Christmas fireside, with its Christmas frolics” and is promised “a visit from Santaclaus to your stocking to-night” if he’ll keep quiet about something, but ends up telling the truth.

Such portrayals were often accompanied by heaping loads of condescension, and sometimes even defenses of slavery. But they strike me as compatible with both Black and White children in early 1800s New York imagining that their bringer of holiday joy might be a Black man.

For children in Albany, one literally was. The holiday was not Christmas or New Year’s or St. Nicholas Day but Pinkster, the Dutch term for Pentecost. The days following Pentecost Sunday — which comes seven weeks after Easter — have long been a time of outdoor celebration in the Netherlands. In New York by the early 1800s, Pinkster had become a mostly Black-run affair, a carnival that, Jeroen Dewulf of the University of California at Berkeley writes in his book The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo, probably built on traditions from West Central Africa and Portugal as much as those of the Netherlands. It also bore some resemblance to the festivities that took place on Southern plantations between Christmas and New Year’s.

Albany’s Pinkster carnival, which seems to have been the state’s biggest, exerted great attraction for the city’s White children. “Under the careful guidance of a trusty slave, forth we were ushered into the densely thronged streets, and never shall we forget the scene of gayety and merriment that there prevailed,” Albany resident James Eights recalled six decades after attending in the early 1800s. Most impressive in his memory was the ceremonial entrance of the festival’s King Charles, a Black man in his 60s of “stately form and dignified aspect” whose ceremonial entrance left “mingled sensations of awe and grandeur … on our youthful minds.” The Pinkster King had a playful side as well: An anonymous Albany memoirist of similar vintage wrote in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1857 that “King Charley” had once lifted him on his shoulders (“I was a light boy”) and “leaped a bar more than five feet in height.” Charles was enslaved, the property of a wealthy Dutch Albany merchant seemingly up to his death in the 1820s. Which didn’t prevent him from being an icon to Albany’s children.

Inventing Santa

No one has come across any such firsthand accounts of an early 1800s Black Santa — just the third-hand one in Gentleman’s Magazine. Then again, there seem to be no written accounts from before 1809 of Santa Claus delivering presents in New York. The 1773 “St. A Claus” was in a notice of a St. Nicholas Day gathering in Brooklyn, the 1808 “Santaclaus” in a description of early 18th century New Year cakes impressed with the image of St. Nicholas.

It was this paucity of written evidence that led Charles W. Jones, an English professor and Medieval literature specialist at Cornell University and then UC Berkeley, to conclude that the gift-giving New York Santa was a 19th century invention — a claim since repeated by countless writers, including me four years ago. “It is hard to believe in the face of all evidence from the time that there was any gifting at Christmas, any knowledge of a name Santa Claus, any hymns or song,” Jones wrote in 1978. Or, as he put it in the 1953 presentation to the New-York Historical Society (published in 1954) where he first presented his theory: “Santa Claus was a parasitic germ until the Knickerbocker History in 1809. After 1809 Santa Claus spread like a plague which has yet to reach its peak.”

The Knickerbocker History was Washington Irving’s History, which he wrote under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker — yes, that’s where the use of Knickerbocker as a nickname for New Yorker comes from. A fuller title (the complete title of the first edition is 71 words long) is A History of New York From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. The book is a bizarre mix of parody, fantasy, social criticism, nostalgia, misinformation and a few dribs of actual history that took American readers by storm. (It was with the Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a series of short stories and essays published in 1819 and 1820 that included “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” that Irving became an international sensation.)

In the fictionalized telling of Irving, whose parents came to New York from England in 1763, the first ship carrying Dutch settlers to New Amsterdam in the 1620s had as its figurehead “a goodly image of St. Nicholas, equipped with a low, broad brimmed hat, a huge pair of Flemish trunk hose, and a pipe that reached to the end of the bow-sprit,” and the pipe-smoking saint “immediately took the infant town of New Amsterdam under his peculiar patronage.” His name pops up again and again after that in the book, including in a brief reference — an American first, it has long been thought — to the tradition of “making presents” and “hanging the stocking in the chimney” for St. Nicholas Day.

The book was published on St. Nicholas Day, 1809. A year later, the fledgling New-York Historical Society, of which Irving was a member, held its first St. Nicholas Day dinner. Historical Society recording secretary and driving force John Pintard, the descendant of French Huguenots, arranged for the publication of a St. Nicholas print (on display through Feb. 25 at the society) with a Dutch poem about “Sancte Claus, goed heylig man” (good holy man) and drawings of an emaciated saint with a beard but no headgear beyond a halo, stockings hung by the chimney and one child delighted with her gifts and another crying about receiving only a switch (a small branch used for swatting naughty children).

In 1812, a second edition of Irving’s History added a dream sequence in which St. Nicholas rides above the treetops “in that self same waggon wherein he brings his yearly presents to the children” then disappears after “laying his finger beside his nose,” a trick repeated a decade later in “The Night Before Christmas.” And that, in what has become the standard account since Jones first laid it down in the 1950s, was that. Two men with minimal family ties to Dutch New York had called into being an ersatz Dutch St. Nicholas tradition for New Yorkers to unite around. “No question, Irving made our Santa Claus,” Jones wrote. “But who made his? The New-York Historical Society.”

Santa before Irving

Washington Irving and the New-York Historical Society did a lot to spread the word about Santa. But we call him Santa Claus, not St. Nicholas or Sancte Claus. He doesn’t wear Flemish trunk hose or a broad-brimmed hat. He isn’t an emaciated saint. He delivers presents for Christmas, not St. Nicholas Day. And it’s clear that some version of him was making the rounds in New York before Irving’s History.

Why else would the author of the notice that ran in the New-York Gazette and then Rivington’s Gazetteer in 1773, almost 10 years before Irving’s birth, have felt compelled to add the qualifier that St. Nicholas was “otherwise called St. A Claus”? Why else would James Paulding, Irving’s Salmagundi collaborator, have written in 1808 of “St. Nicholas, vulgarly called Santaclaus”? More definitively, Irving’s History did not in fact mark the American print debut of Santa Claus descending the chimney. That honor now goes to an opinion piece in the April 21, 1809, edition of the New York Public Advertiser, the same one that also marks the debut of the unhyphenated, two-word Santa Claus. As far as I can tell, I am the first modern researcher to notice it.

The article discussed the toasts made at a Federalist Party dinner in New York a month earlier, one of which had been offered in the voice of explorer Henry Hudson, whose 1609 voyage up the Hudson on behalf of the Dutch East India Company marked the beginning of Dutch involvement with the region. A snippet: “Now, my good fellows, take care of little Manhattan — I and old stout hearted Santa-Claus found it — snug between the Sound and the Sea.” This brought mockery from the Republican American Citizen and Public Advertiser, with the former labeling the toasts’ presumed author, former federal judge Egbert Benson, “old Judge Santa-Claus” and the surely pseudonymous “John Smith” writing in the latter on April 21 that:

The glass was filled to rhapsodies which defied all explanation, and which seemed the incoherent ravings of some inspired ideot [sic]. “Old father Hudson with his dipsey” [a lead used for sounding in deep water] was called from his oozy bed and Santa Claus was invoked to come down the chimney and assist at this glorious debauch of reverend dotards.

The Federalist Party of George Washington, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton was in terminal decline in 1809, and the Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (which later became the Democratic Party) dominant. One possible explanation for the derision aimed at the Santa Claus toast was that the Federalists had come to depend on support from Black voters in New York City, and Santa, if he was thought to be Black, could be seen as symbolic of that. And while that interpretation may be a stretch, Smith’s words do clearly show that New York newspaper readers were already expected to be familiar with the concept of Santa Claus coming down the chimney to deliver gifts.

Other mentions in subsequent months and years similarly give the impression that Santa and his ways were already well known in New York. A letter writer to the Political Bulletin and Miscellaneous Repository in January 1811 identified himself as a “Yorker” whose children are “as fine a set of pratting little toads, as ever enjoyed a present of a New-Year-Cookee, from Santa-Closs.” In an 1811 political pamphlet, the fictional Abimelech Coody averred that “I was born in this city, and bred up to the pleasing trade of making shoes for the ladies, in which business I have worked man and boy 40 years next Sante Claws.” False Stories Corrected, an 1813 book from the Quaker publisher Samuel Wood, warned children against believing “foolish stories” such as those involved in hanging up stockings and finding them filled with “cakes, nuts, money, &c. placed there by some of the family, which they are told Old Santaclaw has come down chimney in the night and put in.”

The variety of spellings alone points to this being an organic phenomenon rather than an invented one. Either there was an existing Santa Claus tradition in New York, or there was a remarkably wide-ranging and airtight conspiracy to pretend that there was.

So why doesn’t this tradition show up in the written record? One answer is that it now does. Decades ago, Janny Venema, Gehring’s longtime deputy at the New Netherland Research Center, found a 1675 notation for a purchase of “Sinterklaasgoet” — baked goods — in the records of Van Rensselaer Manor near Albany. There’s also an 18th century Dutch St. Nicholas cookie mold depicting the saint’s pickled-children rescue in the collection of Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson, and culinary historian Peter G. Rose tells in her book Delicious December of examining centuries-old handwritten cookbooks of New York Dutch families that contain recipes for Sinterklaas specialties such as hard and soft gingerbread and spiced honey cake.

That’s not a lot, and there’s no such evidence for Sinterklaas presents. But as Venema wrote in her Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam doctoral dissertation, published in 2003 as Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652-1664 (Beverwijck was the original name of Albany):

Instead of assuming that the lack of information indicates that no attention was paid in Beverwijck to this popular children’s feast, we could assume that the fact that it is not mentioned anywhere indicates that these celebrations took place in a way similar to the ways of the fatherland.

Also, that “goed heylig man” poem presented at the New-York Historical Society dinner in 1810, which did mention gifts, was not written in 1810. Pintard told his daughter in 1828 that it had been “procured” by Historical Society President Egbert Benson — the Judge Santa-Claus from a few paragraphs back, who was of mostly Dutch heritage and could read Dutch — “from Mrs Hardenbrook, an ancient lady 87 years of age. Several, g[ran]dma Brasher & others knew some lines, but none except Mrs H. remember[ed] the whole.” It seems to have been making the rounds, then, in early to mid-1700s New York.

According to Nicoline van der Sijs of Radboud Universiteit in the Netherlands, the poem also provides the earliest written evidence that St. Nicholas had a presence in Spain, now a key tenet of Dutch Sinterklaas mythology. There’s not a whole lot of written description of Sinterklaas beliefs and rituals from the 17th and 18th century Netherlands, either, despite it being the center of European publishing for part of that time (there are some evocative paintings). It was a semi-underground celebration, discouraged by the Reformed Church and in some cases by civil authorities. And all over the West, it was really only in the early 1800s that an expansive literature began to develop around end-of-year holiday customs.

The fall and rise of Black Santa

So why did the expansive literature about St. Nicholas and Santa Claus that developed in 19th century New York not mention anything about Black Santa? One can’t entirely discount the possibility that the Sandy Claus described in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1827 wasn’t a real New York phenomenon and was the product instead of either an author’s overactive imagination or a wildly unrepresentative focus group of “young urchins.” It’s just one magazine article, after all. But I think I’ve presented ample evidence that such a figure is plausible, and it certainly isn’t hard to think of reasons — as Santa Claus changed from a figured whispered about by children to one written about by adults — that he would have ceased to be thought of as Black.

One is that, as Jones argued, many of these writings were part of concerted effort to build up a quasi-Dutch identity for New York as an alternative to Englishness. While the specifics of this effort never resonated much outside of New York, it did help determine the trajectory Santa Claus followed. Clement Clarke Moore, a member of the New-York Historical Society and an acquaintance of Irving, said he modeled his more-enduring St. Nick on a “portly, rubicund Dutchman” in his neighborhood, for example. Wonder where he got that idea?

The growing commercialization of Christmas, which entailed catering to the desires and prejudices of those with purchasing power, also probably had an effect. As Leigh Eric Schmidt put it in his brief riff on the Gentleman’s Magazine Black Santa, “such images were clearly out of harmony with the dominant white, middle-class market for Christmas presents.”

With the end of slavery, White New Yorkers also became less disposed to view their Black fellow citizens in the paternalistic, benevolent terms that might have encompassed a Black Santa Claus. The state enacted a gradual emancipation law in 1799 that was followed by widespread negotiated emancipations of slaves not freed by the law, then final abolition as of 1827. But over that same period, the political and civil rights of free Black New Yorkers dwindled. In 1811, for example, Albany banned the Pinkster festival, and the state legislature passed the first in a series of laws aimed at making it harder for Black men to vote. In New York City, conditions turned progressively more hostile for Black residents as newly arrived immigrants from Europe saw freed slaves as competition for jobs, and the city’s economy grew dependent on slave-picked Southern cotton. Racist rioters ransacked Black churches, businesses and homes in the city in 1834.

Partly because of that hostility but mainly because of the sheer scale of European immigration, Black people also effectively disappeared from the New York scene. Their share of the state’s population fell in every Census from 1790 to 1870, then again in 1890, to an all-time low of less than 1.2%. In New York City, their numbers fell outright in the two decades before the Civil War.

It’s also at least conceivable that some Black New Yorkers weren’t thrilled with one of their number being stuck with the unpleasant, dangerous work of cramming down the chimney to deliver presents. Disapproval from Black civic and religious leaders played a role in the decline of raucous Pinkster and Southern post-Christmas celebrations, and while Santa Claus is respectable enough now, recall that in some of his earlier iterations he was a miniature weirdo with ties to the devil. Speculating after an 1880 US visit as to why the American Sinterklaas didn’t have a Black servant, Dutch journalist Robert Boissevain concluded that it was “probably out of courtesy to the Negroes, who have votes in the election and might take offense.”

The problem with that take is that, while such considerations surely played a role in NBC Universal’s 2020 decision to remove Zwarte Piet from a 2012 episode of The Office, not offending Black people wasn’t exactly a priority for White Americans in the late 1800s. White entertainers frequently portrayed Santa Claus in blackface for laughs, and fictional Black Santas popped up in newspapers in extremely derogatory terms, E. James West of University College London writes in “Searching for Black Santa,” a just-published article in the journal Comparative American Studies that doesn’t find the Gentleman’s Magazine Black Santa but does turn up a lot of other interesting information.

It was in the early 1900s, reports West, that Black Americans began to turn the tables. Children wrote to newspapers to express hope that, in the words of a 1914 letter to the Buffalo Times, there was a Santa “for little colored boys like me, too.” Church and charitable organizations began to organize Black Santa events. Black entertainer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson’s 1936 appearance as Santa at a Christmas party for underprivileged children in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem was something of a landmark, garnering widespread positive media coverage and inspiring similar events in other cities. Black Santa had returned to New York — but by that point nobody remembered that he had been there before.