A Turkish Immigrant Makes Good in America

According to the Guardian's history of Santa Claus. And you just knew that Coca-Cola had something to do with it, too:

St Nicholas had not previously been particularly plump, but in America he rapidly put on weight and also, reprehensibly, smoked a pipe, as depicted by the New York cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly from 1863 onwards.

In the 1930s the image was further refined when a Swedish artist named Haddon Sundblom started drawing advertisements for Coca-Cola featuring a fat Santa in a red coat trimmed with fur and secured with a large belt: the image that now we know. Sundblom's Santa carried his bottle of coke to quench "a thirst for all seasons" and turned up in annual festive advertisements for the drink for the next 30 years. As such, this entirely secular figure has now become an inescapable feature of a religious festival, more in keeping with the winter solstice's pagan saturnalia than with an early Christian saint.

Santa Claus-- he's the real thing.