Before the red suit
The figure begins as St. Nicholas of Myra, bishop and gift-bringer, and travels into German-speaking Europe as a whole family of characters: the Weihnachtsmann, the stern fur-clad Pelznickel, and, in Pennsylvania German America, the Belsnickle, a switch-carrying judge of children's behavior. Early Santa-form ornaments and candy containers inherit that severity: thin, hooded, robed in mustard, white, or blue as often as red. Among collectors, "Belsnickle" now names that whole class of old-world Santa figures, and honest examples command serious prices, which is exactly why the class is heavily reproduced.
The American Santa
The plump, merry Santa is a nineteenth-century American construction, shaped by Clement Clarke Moore's poem and Thomas Nast's illustrations, and standardized in the twentieth century by advertising art, most famously Haddon Sundblom's Coca-Cola paintings. The persistent story that Coca-Cola invented the red suit is a myth: red-suited Santas appear in print well before those campaigns. What advertising did was settle the picture everyone already almost agreed on, and the ornament trade followed it happily ever after.
A Santa somebody made
A flat painted Santa from our shelves, yarn hanger and all, in the family-craft manner. Whether it came from a kitchen table or a church bazaar, it is the one Santa on this shelf nobody else owns.
Reading the shelf
Santa is where every material drawer of the Cabinet shows up at once: mold-blown glass Santas with molded robes, turned-wood Santas from the Erzgebirge workshops, spun-cotton and felt figures, and the modern figural houses' elaborate showpieces. Age tells differently in each material, so the type pages' checklists are the right companions here. With Belsnickle-class figures especially, buy the piece, not the story: honest wear, period materials, and paint that has aged like paint ages.
Santa, or possibly an angel
A folk fabric figure from our shelves, green felt gown and gold trim, whom we read as a Santa though the angel argument has been made in this household. The old figures did not always choose sides, and the shelf is richer for it.
The modern shelf
Today's Santa collecting runs from the revival houses' glass showpieces to dated annual Santas that mark each year. Our own shelf's most traveled resident appears in the figural drawer: a blown-glass Santa head wearing Las Vegas signage, proof that the man in red goes where the culture goes.