Amsterdam/New York: Santa Claus is the Child of Global Cities (part 3)
For more than a century, though, it lay dormant, effectively outcompeted by the Puritans’ Thanksgiving, who viewed this mitered figure with papist origins with suspicion. However, the struggle against the British metropolis would revive it and prepare for its transformation in the early 19th century. Exhumed by the New York author W. Irving, Sinterklaas would become St. Nick in the poem by Pastor Moore (1823), with two major innovations: he would come on Christmas night instead of December 6th, and his horse would be replaced by a reindeer-drawn sleigh. Along the way, the former Catholic saint had become a... pipe-smoking elf.