This is our last post of 2010! Hallmark is closing so we can all spend time with our families and so we are doing the same. See you back here in January.
I’ve had fun going through decades worth of greeting card images this year to see just how closely the cards we exchange have always reflected the times.
But when it comes to Santa, tradition reigns. For the most part, he’s been expansive in girth and red in garb in cards throughout Hallmark’s 100-year history.
According to Lynley, blogger and historian, the concept of Santa first appeared in American culture in the late 1700s, by way of Washington Irving’s tales of a Dutch St. Nicholas Day.
Clement Clark Moore’s poem, “The Night Before Christmas,” established Santa’s image as a bearded elf with cheeks like roses, a nose like a cherry, and “a little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.” Subsequent depictions in Coca-Cola ads and Norman Rockwell illustrations sealed the deal, giving thousands of middle-aged, white-bearded men a six-week employment opportunity in shopping malls around the country.
Over the years, as technology and leisure activities changed our lives, some of Santa’s ways changed as well. He delivered gifts via airplane, took up golf and bowling, watched TV and vacationed with the reindeer. He developed a funny bone and skin color in the 1960s and 1970s, tried to lose weight in the low-carb era, and today can speak words that would have been naughty, not nice, in decades gone by.
But he generally looks today much as he has for years. As this blast of images past attest:
Whether or not you celebrate the season with Santa, Linda hopes you enjoy these final days of 2010 in the company of people you love.
