When Did We Start Giving Santa Milk and Cookies?

It’s pretty hard to choose a single facet of Santa Claus lore and point to it as out of the ordinary. Maybe, though, that’s why I’m particularly fascinated with the tradition of leaving out milk and cookies for him. The man has cracked traveling at light speed, violates gravity by levitating up and down chimneys unscathed and owns a sack that defies all known laws of matter. Yet somehow, there’s also the extremely human, straightforward favor of leaving him a snack because, well, the man must be hungry?

There are historians who suggest that this nicety has origins in Norse children leaving out hay for Sleipnir, Odin’s many-legged and very unjolly horse, but leaving out straw for a mythical steed feels like far from a direct line to milk and cookies for Santa. I want to know the first time somebody plopped out a plate of sweet baked goods and a dairy elixir for him to dip them in. (We won’t go into how gross his famous gloves would get from being submerged in billions of glasses of milk over 24 hours, but let’s hope they get swapped out in the post-season.)

The (deservedly) jaded among us might assume it’s something Coca-Cola cooked up, since they invented the modern character of Santa Claus whole cloth — except that they didn't. That’s a myth that, as a lover of true trivia and full-time scribe of minutiae, I strongly feel I need to put to rest. Neither the modern Santa, nor his traditional snack, were cooked up by an ad agency.

The real reason that we leave out cookies and milk for Santa, and when it started, is actually a feel-good story that might revive some faith in a heavily commercialized holiday. It seems that the milk and cookie gratuity started during the Great Depression. Parents wanted to teach their children the importance of giving, even when they had very little to give. 

And so, leaving out cookies, milk and sometimes carrots for reindeer in times of have-not was just a sweet, teachable moment that stuck.