Seeing a lot of commercials with pseudo Santas. Like the Chevy commercials with a guy in white hair, full bushy beard, but wearing a dress shirt and tie. Lady customer approaches and nervously says hi. Then asks him where is his Suit? He replies it’s casual Friday. 
Or the Deer Hunter Chevy Commercial.
Lots of other Santas out there shilling for someone.
Anyone getting paid for the rights to use Santa’s likeness or name?
If anyone, I would guess it would be Coca-Cola, with their Santa-themed ads going back decades. I would imagine that if they ever had it to begin with, their claim would be tenuous today because lots of other people use it and Coca-Cola never seems to complain.
As for the more traditional St. Nick, I don’t see how anyone could have a trademark on a figure that has been claimed by several religious groups for hundreds of years.
There can be no broad claim to Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas with regard to Christmas-themed promotions.
And Coca-Cola, while it might have been one of the first companies to use the current form of Santa Claus in its advertising, has never used Santa Claus as a trademark.
To maintain trademark rights in something, you must use it as a trademark. That means it must be the indicator of the source of goods or services. If Santa Claus always appears next to something else that’s the trademark, like “Coca-Cola” or “Coke,” then Santa Claus isn’t being used as a trademark.
I don’t think that’s quite true: The Dynamic Ribbon and the distinctive bottle shape are also both always used together with the words, but those are both trademarked.
Agree, though, that the jolly old elf isn’t a trademark for anyone (except North Pole Industries, LLC, of course, but they’re not very lawyer-happy).
Thanks for the replies.
Santa gives toys to the kids and is a great marketing tool. What a guy. 
Both have to be used by themselves to be validly enforceable trademarks. Otherwise they can only be considered as a component of a larger trademark. That’s just the way it is. If you investigate, you will find that Coca-Cola has evidence of their being used separately. Unless they do, they can’t register them as trademarks.
(And, please, forget the use of the word “trademark” as a verb. When you do that, you are leading yourself down a path of misunderstanding of the law. Whether something is “trademarked” is not a legally significant question and it leads to misconceptions about the basic concepts of trademark law.)
To simplify this even more, a trademark is a brand name. Just because you use something in an ad doesn’t mean that you are using it as the identity of your business or of a product. Chevy doesn’t have a line of Santa pickups. (They should. Available only in red. But I digress…)
You could sell cookies under the name Santa’s Cookies and get a trademark for that. But that wouldn’t preclude all other from using the Santa name or image, which I think is what the OP is getting at.
The Santa/St Nick character is public domain, so nobody owns it.
Right. If anyone did own it, you can be certain that you wouldn’t see Santa everywhere in advertising during the Christmas season.
Here’s an example in a recent decision. Nordstrom Inc. v. 7525419 Canada Inc. d/b/a Beyond the Rack, No. C12-1387 TSZ (W.D. Wash. Dec. 27, 2012) (A Canadian corporation is assigned a number as its legal name, apparently). The dispute is over whether “Beyond the Rack” infringes Nordstrom’s registered trademarks “Nordstrom Rack,” “Nordstrom Rack NR,” “Rack,” and “The Rack”:
So the court refused to give Nordstrom the credit for holding any trademark rights in the terms “Rack” and “The Rack” by themselves, even though they held trademark registrations, because they always appeared in proximity to the brand or house mark “Nordstrom.”
According to the Trademark database, there are two live US trademarks for the phrase “Santa Claus” alone. Neither refer to the Christmas character – one is an online store (and may be dead) and the other is a type of plant.
“St. Nick’s” is a trademark for a store, but that does not include the character.
Which raises another point: Trademarks are context-specific. If I were to start making Chronos brand floor wax, and got my trademark for that floor wax recognized, it wouldn’t stop anyone else from making Chronos brand dessert topping, since there would be no possibility of confusion.
This is true, but it’s a little more complicated now that brand owners tend to license their trademarks for display on all kinds of goods. You’ll often see trademark registrations that not only cover the original goods, but then also apparel, drinking mugs, key chains, and every other thing that can conceivably bear a logo.
Now, what these registrants often don’t understand is that you can’t just list every damn thing and expect it to be protected. It’s quite common for courts to look at such registrations and say, “Well, you never actually sold any such products, so this registration doesn’t count.”
Note that any particular representation of Santa Claus would be subject to copyright protection. Anyone can use Santa in an ad, but they can’t just completely copy someone else’s Santa.