They reminded us that Santa Claus is based on St. Nicholas, a Greek who lived in what is now Turkey and would probably have had olive-colored skin, no freckles, and thus not be a white man at all.
It’s true that linguistic corruption eventually transformed “Saint Nikolaos” into “Santa Claus.” It’s also true that the real-life St. Nick was known for his gift-giving ways. But that’s where most of the similarities seem to end. Otherwise, the St. Nicholas legend veers off into other weird pathways such as how he liked to help sailors and how he saved three poor daughters from becoming hookers and the time where he resurrected three boys who’d been chopped to death by a butcher.
Other major elements of the Santa Claus legend seem to have been supplied by Northern European mythology that got subsumed into Christianity as it conquered the continent. Northern Germans and Scandinavians celebrated a holiday called Yule around the winter solstice. During Yule season, the white-bearded pagan god Odin would traverse the skies by night on his eight-legged horse. Children would place boots near the chimney filled with straw for Odin’s horse to eat. In the morning they’d awake to find the straw replaced with gifts and candy. It is thought that Odin’s eight-legged horse would later morph into eight tiny reindeer and the boots would become Christmas stockings.
The British, Dutch, and others would add several layers to the Santa myth, but what’s important is that beyond St. Nicholas’s Greek origins, everything else about the legend appears to have germinated and developed in Northern Europe. (Further modifications were made to the Santa Claus myth in America, but Thomas Nast and Clement Clarke Moore also had skin as pink as bubble gum.) Santa Claus is a primarily Northern European cultural icon and therefore about as white as it gets.
