Political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped give Santa’s look a makeover from a Christian bishop to a jolly rotund man in a red suit. Nast’s first Santa drawing appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1863, where he is gifting Union soldiers socks, issues of the magazine, and a puppet of Jefferson Davis hanging by a noose.

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Why Charles Dickens Wrote A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens’s idea for A Christmas Carol originated in the north of England when he traveled to speak at the Manchester Athenaeum, a sort of philanthropic organization for the working poor—a population that was largely uneducated, powerless, exploited by factory owners, and ignored by everyone