William Holbrook Beard, “Santa Claus,” circa 1862

The forgotten painter William Holbrook Beard’s rendering of Santa in his swan sleigh only touches down in the galleries of the RISD’s Museum of Art during the holidays. You can see it through January 3, just past the main lobby, for a look at St. Nick as he carpet bombs a house with gifts—no chimney-surfing for this Sinterklaas. But Beard’s (like Clement Clarke Moore’s, before him) is just one (green-clad) personification of father Christmas: he emerged during the industrial revolution, when yuletide was evolving from an occasion for the exchange of homemade gifts into the consumer smack down we know today. For the rest of Santa’s story, see “The Vast Santanic Conspiracy” in The Las Vegas Weekly, where Mark Dery traces Santa’s roots to both an altruistic third century Greek orthodox bishop and a horned and hairy fertility god of the Middle Ages, asking, “Were Satan and Santa separated at birth?”