Do you call him Santa, Santa Claus, or Santee? and what does it say about you?!

The English Father Christmas: A Separate Origin

The English Father Christmas seems to have had an entirely separate origin from Sinterklaas, being a personification of Christmas and a Yule-tide visitor - not a gift-giver - rather than a version of St Nicholas. The earliest reference to him comes from the mid-fifteenth century, when a Sir Christëmas appears in a carol, although most discussions start with Ben Johnson's early seventeenth-century old or Captaine Christmas. Whilst strenuous efforts were made by the puritans of the seventeenth century to do away with this character, they did not succeed. In the nineteenth century Father Christmas benefitted from the general Victorian revival of Christmas and can be found in, for example, Dickens' Christmas Carol. However, from the 1870s onwards Father Christmas became increasingly like the American Santa Claus, both in terms of his actions - he started giving gifts - and his appearance, with the result that two are nowadays virtually inter-changeable.