Santa Claus

by Gerry Bowler

  Did you really kiss my Mom? because it said in a song called “I saw santa kiss Mommy,” but, I don’t think your that rude! Like, I mean, your already married! I hope that you have a Merry Christmas!

  thank you, devon

  P.S. please, please, please write back, and to remember to wear a scarf because it’s very chilly outside.

  An Irish girl wrote to Santa thanking him for previous favours and reminding him that she had seven siblings who needed a lot for Christmas. “If you want anything from Ireland,” she promised, “we will send it to you. Santy, don’t send us any more babies. The last lad is very cross.”

  Some are on the frightening side:

  Dear Santa,

  I want a camera, a remote control car, a BB gun, some firecrackers, and most of all I want a Nintendo 64. If you don’t get it you’ll be sorry. I know where the North Pole is. We looked it up at school. It’s above Canada. Bring it to me or we’ll have Prancer burgers tonight! I’m not kidding. The grill is cook’n!

  Jeremy

  P.S. Mom say we might be in Denver

  Some would break the hardest heart:

  You can forget all the toys this year. What I would like most of all is for my brother to get better, recover from his stroke and speak and act like he used to and not have to take pills all the time.

  Dear beloving santa,

  I have some wishes that had never comed true and you are my last hope. Here are my wishes: I wish that my mom wont have seasers and have to go to the hospital again.

  I wish that my tored vane would stop bleeding. I don’t want toys I just want that for Christmas.

  Sometimes kind souls and community groups are able to help Santa Claus fulfill these wishes. All too often there is no identifying information on the envelopes and the children remain beyond reach. There can be an emotional toll on the volunteer readers, as one Finnish helper attests, “All of us who work here, we’re affected by what we read. The sadness of children’s lives, their hopes and dreams. People used to have the saints to call on when they felt they couldn’t reach God himself. Now, some of them think, ‘If God can’t help me, maybe Santa can.’ ”

  Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Santa Claus continued to represent organizations that seek to bring love and care to a troubled world. He has supported the Red Cross, his face has appeared on Christmas Seals, which raise money for medical research, and his name has adorned countless Christmas charities around the planet – Operation Santa Claus in Hong Kong, and Shelby, North Carolina; the Santa Claus Fund of Toronto, Ontario, and Medicine Hat, Alberta; Project Santa Claus of Fayette County, Georgia, and Carson Valley, Nevada; the Santa Claus Caravan of Costanta, Romania; Santa Claus Anonymous in Baltimore, Maryland; and, in Greenland, Santa’s Children’s Account.

  Every year new ideas to raise money for charity in the name of Santa Claus emerge. In 1997, beery but well-meaning Newfoundlanders instituted the Santa Claus Pub Crawl. Participants who dressed as Santa, a reindeer, an elf, or a Ho* would receive discounted booze at a number of pubs with a share of the revenue and sponsorship dollars going to worthy causes. In 2004, three thousand Scots were sought to dress up as Santa Claus and take part in Edinburgh’s Great Santa Run, an attempt to break the record (currently held by 2,685 Swedes) for the Largest Number of Uniformed Magical Gift-Bringers in a Philanthropic Jog and to solicit funds for vacations for sick children. The Scots were in competition that year with a Welsh town that wanted to put five thousand Santas onto the streets of Newton. Sad to report only four thousand Welshmen appeared in Newton dressed as Santa Claus, and they, far too liberally lubricated with alcoholic cheer, fell to rioting. Police discovered an army of Santas punching and kicking each other and had to employ batons and tear gas to quell the disturbance. Nonetheless it was hoped that more than £80,000 would be raised for charity. It would seem that Santa Claus continues to inspire benevolence in those, no matter how bellicose, who call upon his name.

  * The Loyal Temperance Legion was the youth wing of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Children took a pledge: “not to buy, drink, sell, or give alcoholic liquors while I live. From other drugs and tobacco I’ll abstain, and never take God’s name in vain.”

  * What is a Ho? There is some naughty wordplay being attempted here by these rustic wits, punning on Santa’s merry shout and the slang term for women of easy virtue. One might guess at what such a participant would wear on the pub crawl from this instruction: “Ho costumes are ho-made. A minimalist philosophy is encouraged.”

  IV

  Santa the Adman

  Santa as Advertising Icon: Haddon Sundblom’s Coca-Cola Santa raids the refrigerator in this 1959 ad. (photo credit 4.1)

  Those who have observed the Christmas culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are so used to seeing Santa Claus in commercial advertising that we tend to forget that the gift-bringer is the first fictional character from whom humans ever took advice. Formerly, the power of endorsement lay in the hands of royalty who allowed merchants to boast they were suppliers of tea biscuits to the crowned heads of Europe or celebrities who attributed their near-flawless complexion to some magic unguent, but now a host of imaginary personages guide us in our purchasing decisions. Ronald McDonald, Madge (“You’re soaking in it”), Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Sara Lee, Uncle Ben, Ernest P. Worrell (“Hey, Vern!”), Chef Boyardee, Buster Brown, the Doublemint Twins, Juan Valdez (and his burro), Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Swedish Bikini Team, the lonely Maytag Repairman, Johnny the Philip Morris Call Boy, the Jolly Green Giant, the Frito Bandito, the Marlboro Man, the Michelin Man, Mr. Peanut, Mr. Clean, the Ajax White Knight, the Glad Garbage Bag Guy, Joe Camel, the Energizer Bunny, Tony the Tiger, Smokey the Bear, Morris the Cat, Elsie the Cow, and a host of elves and pixies who populate our kitchens and bathrooms are all descendants of Santa Claus. All of these impart some virtue to the products they represent; they give us clues as to the meaning of the objects we are offered for sale. In the advertising industry, this endorsement phenomenon is called “spontaneous trait transference” – and no one has done this for so long or more successfully than Santa Claus.

  Soon after his appearance in America, Santa Claus began to feature as a mercantile tout. The figure who had recently been described by Clement Clarke Moore as “a peddler just opening his pack” was a natural choice as salesman. Christmas advertising was becoming increasingly a part of the holidays as merchants vied to take advantage of the new interest in year-end gift-buying, and who better to bring together sellers and consumers than Santa Claus? He was of genial disposition, omnibenevolent, and famed for his record of on-time delivery. He disarmed suspicion by demanding nothing for what he gave. He made the goods himself or personally supervised his diminutive employees in a home-workshop atmosphere. What appeared in the children’s stockings had, therefore, been “decontaminated” of its mercenary, manufactured aspects and represented something more personal, more loving than if it had come directly from a store.

  In 1820, even before Moore’s poem, “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” first appeared, a New York jeweller distributed a flyer claiming that Saint Nicholas had been seen in his shop checking out the merchandise. Ten years later in the same city, a merchant named B.G. Jansen styled himself the “Agent of Saint Nicholas” and his store a temple of “Santaclaus.” In the 1840s, engravings of Santa Claus descending a chimney (a copy of the picture of the sharp-bearded gent who had decorated an early version of Moore’s poem) were printed by different merchants. One of these, H.W. Pease, owner of an Albany emporium known as “Pease’s Great Variety Store,” was shameless enough to inscribe his own address on Santa’s wicker basket.

  Pease would later earn immortality in the early 1850s by producing the first Christmas cards printed in the United States. These were black-and-white cards depicting a family scene in the centre with pictures on the corners of Santa Claus, ballroom dancers, Christmas presents, and a building marked “the Temple of Fa
ncy.” The text read: “Pease’s Great Varety [sic] Store in the Temple of Fancy.” It would not be until the 1880s, however, that Pease’s example of sending Christmas cards would find much of a following in the United States, and until then it was the advertising card, known as the “trade card,” which helped spread and standardize Santa Claus’s image. The colourful cards, given away by merchants or included with their products, were avidly collected and many even became decorations on Christmas trees. Merchants used Santa Claus to persuade children to associate their store and its goods with the gift-bringer. A famous London department store distributed a card headlined “My Christmas Wish.” It read:

  Dear ____________

  I do wish that Santa Claus would bring me a

  ________________

  this year from Harrod’s Toy Fair.

  Your loving

  ____________________

  Children were instructed to “fill in carefully and post to a relative or friend.”

  It was but a small step for merchants to move from using Santa Claus to endorse their store to employing him to recommend a particular product. Santa might, for example, speak through a trade card directly to adults. “My Dear Friend,” says Saint Nick, waving a finger at the reader, “I have placed a very beautiful ‘New Royal A’ Cabinet Sewing Machine in the store of______. It makes a most beautiful Christmas Present. Come and see it so that I can deliver it to you in time for Christmas.”

  Trade cards, however, would not be the wave of the future for introducing Santa Claus to the world as an adman. The last few decades of the nineteenth century saw an explosion in the popularity of general-readership magazines. Weekly or monthly journals such as Harper’s, Lippincott’s, Saturday Evening Post, or the Ladies’ Home Journal sold millions of copies across North America, exercising powerful influences on culture and taste. These magazines derived their income largely from the advertisements they carried. (The publisher of the Saturday Evening Post admitted that, with the amount of ad revenue his weekly was pulling in, he could afford to give away the magazine to anyone who cared to pay for the postage.) Retailers now understood the role that Christmas played in shaping their annual profit statement. “This is our harvest time,” F.W. Woolworth told his store managers, “Make it pay.” His stores were decorated to create the experience of a special time of year, one where the seasonal excitement would allow canny merchants to get rid of “stickers” – those otherwise unsaleable goods that would be snapped up by Christmas-crazed shoppers. These advertisements worked side by side with the stories, in the words of one social historian, to buttress “the interests of the advertisers and the commercial discourse as a whole, and constructed the reader – especially the female reader – as a consumer.” The late nineteenth century saw, perhaps not coincidentally, the simultaneous rise of the female shopper and the feminization of Christmas – a holiday centred around children but one planned and carried out by the women of the house. A frequent, stereotypical image was that of the confident female shopper striding purposefully along the street, or the aisles of a store, with her spouse trailing behind, struggling under the burden of the purchases his mate has made. How would these magazines use Santa Claus as a seasonal salesman?

  One of the earliest types of advertisements to employ Santa Claus treated the ad as an extension of the traditional letter to the gift-bringer and, not surprisingly, often featured children. In December 1892, a shoe company produced a three-part ad entitled “St. Nick’s Shoes,” which ran in Cosmopolitan, Century, and Scribner’s magazines. Three children crowd around a wall-mounted telephone by which they have reached the North Pole: “Hello! Are you Santa Claus? We want to tell you what to bring to our house. Bring grandma – you know she’s old and her feet get cold – a pair of Alfred Dolge’s felt lace shoes like style 220 in ‘On A Felt Footing.’ We think that Alfred Dolge calf lace shoes with Felt inner sole and hy – what is that? – h-y-g-i-e-n-i-c woolen lining would be nice for papa … Mamma wants that lovely Romero slipper … And you telephone mamma to give us a pair too.” A boy reached Santa Claus by telephone in 1919 with his own request and we see the changes a single generation had wrought on the vocabulary of the young:

  Hello! Hello, up there! Gee! Is this really you? Well, this is Bob. Yes, I just thought I’d ask you about that Lord Elgin we picked out for Dad, you know. What’s that? You’ve got it all wrapped up and in the sleigh already? That’s bully! Dad will be tickled to death – he’s still lugging around that old turnip he got when he was a boy, and it’s about an inch thick – And say, Santa – how about me? There’s nothing I’d like half so – Aw, Betty, keep still a minute, cantcha! I just gotta tell him this –

  Why use the telephone when one has him immediately to hand? A 1949 advertisement featuring a precocious tyke on a department store Santa’s lap has the child implore the gift-bringer: “My Daddy’s been a good boy too – and he wants a new PLYMOUTH!”

  “People will not buy a thing for presentation purposes unless it has a gift vogue,” said a trade journal in 1922. “The article has to be approved by Santa Claus before it is an acceptable gift.” Many advertisements had Santa put his credibility on the line and testify directly about the merits of, for example, a grain-based coffee substitute. In a 1912 Postum ad, Santa Claus revealed himself to be a Social Darwinist when he assured readers that “men who fail to supply the body with food and drink of the kind needed to make up for daily wear and tear must stand aside in the race for pre-eminence. Those who are properly fed will surely win the laurels.”

  In recommending gifts, Santa Claus could be downright testy too. In an ad for Arrow ties published during the Second World War, he speaks out forthrightly in defence of the fairer sex. Hitching a gloved thumb over his shoulder at a disconsolate group of females, he asserts:

  I’d like to scotch a rumor about women!

  I’ve often heard a terrible little rumor about women, and it makes me sore. According to this rumor, some of the presents women give menfolks for Christmas are apt to be – well, kind of impractical.

  Now in wartime, when it’s especially important to give sensible gifts, this is a pretty serious charge. But –

  It’s false. It’s just plain malicious. And I ought to know, because I’m the lad who delivers the gifts. Why most of the presents from women that I deliver are very sensible. Take ties. Every year I deliver millions of ’em and they’re always practical … So ladies, if you ever hear any low character spreading that evil rumor, just send him around to see me. I’ll fix his wagon.

  To show Santa Claus himself using a product was another form of direct endorsement. This was not always a successful approach if one is to judge by a 1900 advertisement produced for Williams’ Shaving Soap of Glastonbury, Connecticut. The clever boys in its creative department put their heads together to bring forth this ditty:

  Old Santa Claus was grumpy –

  He’d come with Christmas chimes:

  But found the men so modern

  He felt behind the times.

  How did he get in fashion?

  He didn’t moan and mope

  But quickly shaved his whiskers

  With –

  WILLIAMS’ SHAVING SOAP

  Have you a friend discouraged,

  And would you give him hope?

  Put in his Christmas stocking,

  Some Williams’ Shaving Soap

  Not content merely to offend poetic sensibilities, the Williams ad team decorated its text with pictures of Santa Claus before and after a close shave, transforming a majestic, magical polar visitor into a simpering old-timer in a funny fur hat.

  It was an easier commercial fit in 1955 for makers of a laundry detergent who showed Santa dismayed by chimney soot on his nice red coat and proclaimed, “It’s a good thing that Tide keeps on working after other suds have quit!” but it was Haddon Sundblom’s famous paintings of Santa for the Coca-Cola Company that were the best examples of this technique of turning the gift-bringer into a product consum
er. In the 1920s, the Coca-Cola Company was recovering from attacks by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the federal government, and other critics of its soft-drink formula. A U.S. senator had claimed in 1921 that the carbonated water beverage caused sterility in women and dissolved “brain power, and the digestive power and the moral fabric.” The company wanted advertising campaigns that emphasized relaxation and carefree refreshment and it also wanted to improve the sales of Coca-Cola during the winter months. To these ends they turned to a Chicago illustrator named Haddon Hubbard Sundblom, a hard-drinking, six-foot-three commercial artist who was able to capitalize on the well-established image of Santa Claus that existed by1931.

  It is far too frequently believed that Sundblom’s work for Coca-Cola created the familiar red-and-white-clad Santa of the modern era. In fact, the Coke Santa was in no way groundbreaking; illustrators for the Saturday Evening Post such as J.C. Leyendecker and Norman Rockwell had already helped fix the standard Santa in the public’s mind.* Nor was the Atlanta company even the first purveyor of soda to use the gift-bringer in its ads. That honour belongs to the White Rock Natural Mineral Spring Company of Waukeshar, Wisconsin, which advertised mineral water and ginger ale in Life magazine in 1923 and 1924. Two full-page ads show a portly Santa Claus, reading letters and delivering presents, with a bottle of White Rock and (despite Prohibition) a whisky bottle close at hand. In these presentations Santa closely resembles the gift-bringer the New York Times described as the prototype in its November 27, 1927, issue: “Height, weight and stature are almost exactly standardized, as are the red garments, the hood and the white whiskers. The pack full of toys, ruddy cheeks and nose, bushy eyebrows and a jolly, paunchy effect are also inevitable parts of the requisite makeup.”