Mr Irving and Mr Moore also wanted to turn Christmas Eve from a raucous partying of street gangs into a hushed family affair, everyone tucked up in bed and not a creature stirring - not even a mouse.
Mr Moore - who penned the line "'Twas The Night Before Christmas" in - did as much as anyone to create the American idea of Santa Claus, the red-robed patron saint of giving presents to everyone whether they want them or not. It was in the s, too, that advertisements for Christmas presents became common in the United States. By the s, Santa himself was a frequent commercial icon in advertisements. Retailers, after all, had to find some way to clear their end-of-year stock. In Boston in , 10, people paid to see Charles Dickens give readings of his Christmas Carol - a story light on biblical details and heavy on the idea of generosity.
Down the coast in New York the same year, Macy's department store decided it was worth keeping the doors open until midnight on Christmas Eve, for last-minute Christmas shoppers. Its first line: "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.
Prof Joel Waldfogel, an economist and author of Scroogenomics, has been able to track the impact of Santa on the US economy back across the decades.
By comparing retail sales in December with sales in November and January, Prof Waldfogel has estimated the size of the Christmas spending bump all the way back to , the era of the Coca-Cola Santa.
In fact, relative to the size of the economy, Christmas spending was three times bigger then than now. What is an everyday indulgence today would have been a once-a-year treat back in the s. Prof Waldfogel has also compared the US Christmas boom to other high-income countries around the world.
Again, perhaps surprisingly, the US's December spending boom is not particularly large, relative to other countries. You can find more information about the programme's sources and listen online or subscribe to the programme podcast. In the grand scheme of things, Christmas is a modest affair, financially speaking. After all, you would have lunch anyway, pay your rent, fill your car with petrol and buy clothes to wear. However, for certain retail sectors - notably jewellery, department stores, electronics, and useless tat - Christmas is a very big deal indeed.
Economists and moralisers do not often find themselves having common cause, but on the subject of Christmas we do: we agree that a lot of Christmas spending is wasteful. Time, energy and natural resources are poured into creating Christmas gifts which the recipients often do not much like. Santa's gifts rarely miss the mark; he is, after all, the world's number one toy expert. The same cannot be said of the rest of us. Prof Waldfogel's most famous academic paper The Deadweight Loss of Christmas tried to measure the gap between how much various Christmas gifts had cost, and how much the recipients valued them - beyond the warm glow of "the thought that counts".
This wastage figure seems to be fairly robust across countries. To put it into context, that is about what the World Bank lends to developing country governments each year.
So why is father Christmas red? Because the actual Father Christmas was based on a real-life person. Saint Nicholas was a 4th Century bishop who lived in what is now modern-day Turkey and was known for his incredible generosity.
In fact, Christmas was personified before any associations with the Saint were made. The first personification of Christmas dates all the way back to the 15th Century in the English-speaking world. Father Christmas as we see him today with the jolly robes began in 19th century England. People often grumble about major corporations having too much of an influence over the festive season. But not this time. The well-versed myth that Coca-cola is the reason that Santa Claus is red is just that: a myth.
This red-suited, rosy-cheeked Santa was used in numerous Coca-Cola adverts, and probably helped to cement the modern image in the minds of Americans and the ubiquity of the drink around the world meant it became one of the most widely-seen depictions of Santa Claus. However, the version of Santa Claus created by Sunbloom was based on an already standard depiction.
The depiction of Santa Claus as a red-suited old man has been in existence since at least the 19th century. All the sources used in our checks are publicly available and the FFS fact-checking methodology can be viewed here.
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Evidence The story of Santa Claus goes back to a monk named St Nicholas , who is believed to have been born around AD in what is now modern-day Turkey. Thomas Nast cartoon, The modern image of Father Christmas, which became broadly interchangeable with the American Santa Claus, was popularised in Victorian times by poems and short stories. Santa Claus in red suit used to advertised confectionary,
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