I think this and many other comments on this article are taking the article the wrong way. The article isn't asserting that Nast created the image of Santa Clau

I think this and many other comments on this article are taking the article the wrong way. The article isn't asserting that Nast created the image of Santa Claus for everyone on Earth but only in the US. This might be wrong as well -- Nast perhaps took an image, or elements of various images, that were present in many locations in the US and popularized them -- but people are presenting evidence of the depiction of Santa Claus/Father Christmas/Saint Nick/Sion Corn/Sinterclas/etc. in other countries as contradicting the thesis of the article. It is an article in an American magazine for an American audience and it discusses the depiction of this entity in the US before and after Nast's influence. Evidently the author should have been more explicit on this point, but I expect she didn't think people would take it as they have. The "we" should refers to her assumed audience, is other people in the US, the sort of people who subscribe to Smithsonian. When she says the "the image we have today" she doesn't mean any disrespect to other cultures; she is just assuming her audience is Americans, that they will know she has this assumption, and that therefore she is talking about American culture, not global culture.