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SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN...

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Winking Santa by Essie Fox

The VV has found her old box of watercolour paints and created this greetings card of Santa Claus to say thank you and to wish a very special Happy Christmas to each and every one of you who follow The Virtual Victorian blog.

While painting she started to ponder on how odd it is that, before Queen Victoria came to throne in 1837 there was no commercial sending of Christmas cards – that tradition only beginning after the introduction of the Penny Post when Sir Henry Cole had the bright idea of printing up thousands of images and selling them in his London art shop, priced at one shilling each. What an industry that began!

The design for Sir Henry Cole's commercial Christmas card

But, as far as the VV’s jolly old gentleman is concerned there was hardly anyone living in England then who would even have known his name. And yet, by 1870 most every child knew about the sleigh drawn by reindeer, and a stocking full of precious gifts - if only an orange or apple - a present from Father Christmas.

The two names - Santa Claus and Father Christmas - have become interchangeable. But their origins are quite different. Father Christmas, on whom Dickens based his Christmas Present, was derived from an old English midwinter festival when Sir Christmas, or Old Father Christmas, or Old Winter, was depicted as wearing green; a sign of the fertility and the coming spring – hence homes being decorated with mistletoe, holly and ivy. He did not bring gifts or climb down chimneys but wandered from home to home feasting with families and bringing good cheer, as described in the mediaeval carol below this illustration.

Illustration by John Leech from Dickens' A Christmas Carol


Goday, goday, my lord Sire Christemas, goday!
Goday, Sire Christemas, our king,
For ev’ry man, both old and ying,
Is glad and blithe of your coming;
Goday! 

The image of Christmas Present  that we are more familiar with  today – Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas – arrived in America in the seventeenth century when Dutch settlers imported their own Sinter Klass. And it was there in 1822 that Clement Clare Moore wrote a poem for his children which went on to have such a wide and enduring influence -

He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his sack.
His eyes how they twinkled! His dimpled how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up in a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laughed like a bowl fully of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, - a right jolly old elf –
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.

A Visit from Saint Nicholas (now more popularly known as The Night Before Christmas) described the old man’s appearance – the very image that every child today has come to know and love today, and which is so beautifully illustrated in this woodblock print, published in 1866 in Harper’s Weekly magazine which the artist, Thomas Nast, based on memories from his childhood in Germany.

 Santa and his works by Thomas Nast


Merry Christmas! Ho Ho Ho!


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