I prefer the nomenclature “Father Christmas”, which was pretty well universal in Britain when I was young (and indeed is more British - see below), but in this case Santa Claus is the more relevant term, since it seems that the two personae were originally quite distinct.
In a long article in this week’s Sunday Times, Waldemar Januszczak explains the origin of Santa Claus and of presents coming down chimneys:
St Nicholas was a bishop of Myra in ancient Turkey, a 4th-century Christian hero renowned for giving presents. The kindly bishop was passing a house one night and heard the dad of the family lamenting that his three daughters had to be sold into prostitution because he could not afford their wedding dowries.
Moved to tears, Nicholas came back in the dead of night and threw three pouches of gold down the chimney. The next day the relieved dad found the gold by the fireside and realised he would not need to turn his daughters into sex workers after all. The chronicles of the saints do not record if peals of merry laughter rang out across Myra that happy morning, but I bet they did. Chimneys, presents, night rides — St Nicholas had invented Christmas.
So it wasn't so much “Ho, ho, ho!” as “No to 'Ho, ho, ho!'”
In his fascinating article, Januszczak goes on to explain that over the centuries the Santa Claus tradition came via Holland to the USA, with "Saint Nicholas" gradually shortening into "Santa Claus". Meanwhile Father Christmas — an even older figure — originated in England (and only in the 19th century did the two begin to blend):
But wait. You’ll be thinking, did the Americans invent all of it? No, they didn’t. Because running concurrently with the arrival of Santa Claus, and in most aspects preceding him, was the parallel development of an eerie character called “Father Christmas”. And Father Christmas was specifically English.
His roots were older than St Nicholas of Bari, and could be traced deep into pagan times, when the winter solstice was accompanied by an annual commemoration involving hefty feasting and drinking. Some authorities see connections between Christmas and the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when the ancients, too, went on mad drunken benders. From my vantage point the Roman angle is a coincidence. What really counts is something unshiftable in the British character. When Christmas comes, it’s time to party.
Throughout the Middle Ages, a succession of gaunt, weathered, drunken scarecrows in rags, their heads topped with sprigs of holly, were imagined as embodiments of the Yule wildness.
