I'm fairly sure this can be done. All such figures come from the same general source. In the oldest stories, St. Nicholas / Father Christmas himself is a rather frightful figure, and the 'scary helper' was actually added later. (Or rather: there were often helpers of some sort present, but all the scariness later got transferred to those helpers.) One must consider, in that light, that some of the elements of the whole Christmas/Feast-of-st.-Nicholas shebang are really old... pre-Christian old. Some dispute this, but it's faitly evident to me that when we look at Father Christmas, we look at Odin. And when we look at his typically pitch-dark companion(s), we look at the ravens of Odin.
Well. Not really, of course. Not anymore. Because Christianity cleverly co-opted pre-existing traditions and overlaid Christian stories and feasts on top of them. Thus, pre-existing midwinter celebrations were repurposed to celebrate the birth of Christ, etc. -- and the figure of Odin became Father Christmas in folklore, and in a more official sense, was replaced by St. Nicholas of Myra. Now, Odin was a frightful figure in his own right, but portraying a saint as scary and perhaps even somewhat malevolent would not fly. So the scariness got transferred to his 'sidekick': a dark figure descended from those aforementioned ravens. In a Christian context, this became a tamed devil, enchained by the goodly saint to do his bidding... and to punish wicked children.
In Scandinavia and Iceland, I gather, the figure of Father Christmas is assisted by gnomes or dwarves of some sort-- and one suspects the polar-dwalling elves associated with him in America derive from that source. Yet could those (pre-Christian) sidekicks not easily be replaced by the 'tamed devil' archetype? Surely they could. Same for the Dutch 'Black Pete' (that poor chimney-sweep, blackened by soot, and these days so often tragically mistaken for a racist blackface caricature). This scary figure probably evolved from the 'tamed devil' archetype in the first place. The main challenge would be to make sure all such figures become or remain 'tamed devils'. We are talking about multiple separate developments, after all.
My suggestion would be a POD during Christianisation of Scandinavia, whereby the dwarves/elves/gnomes so popular there are seen as ungodly superstitition, and forcibly replaced by the tamed devil figure, i.e. a Krampus-analogue. This would result in a more standardised Father-Christmas-and-the-tamed-devil due throughout all of Northern Europe, a due which woyuld presumably spread to the USA as well. Assuming that this official interpretation of the festival becomes firmly set early enough, the Dutch evolution of the scary sidekick into a chimney-sweep is probably also butterflied away. Thus, the goal would be achieved.