Vocapedia > Time > Christmas > Santa Claus

Santa Claus School

Six of the 15 men enrolled in Santa Claus School

learning how wear wigs and whiskers

during course for Santa certification that will enable them

to get Yuletide employment in local department stores.

Location: Albion, NY, US

Date taken: November 1961

Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt

Life Images

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/b14b06fd562a3f5b.html - broken link

Peanuts by Charles Schulz

Gocomics

December 22, 2013

http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts#.UraltvTuKAk

Santa Claus / Father Christmas / St. Nicholas        UK / USA

https://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/
santa-claus

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/24/
949609279/in-baltimore-
these-santa-clauses-bring-pork-and-christmas-trees-to-your-door

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/20/
947119957/could-you-help-santa-in-christmas-wishlists-
children-write-of-pandemic-hardships

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/21/
we-can-have-all-the-magic-of-santa-without-the-lies

http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2016/12/25

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2013/dec/23/
conservatives

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/17/
santa-claus-black-white-christmas-race-debate-fox-news

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/dec/12/
pupils-father-christmas-ruined-by-vicar-santa-claus-origins 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/movies/ho-ho-homicide-killer-santa-is-back-in-silent-night.html

http://www.cagle.com/news/Santa10/main.asp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/24/santa-tracker-norad-radar

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/22/comment-christmas-santa-claus

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/22/christmas 

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/oct/12/retail.lifeandhealth 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/dec/11/netnotes

black Santa

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/24/
macys-secret-black-santa-claus-new-york

cartoons > Cagle > Santa        2012

https://www.cagle.com/news/santa-2012/ 

cartoons > Cagle > Santa and Wikileaks        2010

https://www.cagle.com/news/santawikileaks/ 

cartoons > Cagle > Santa        2010        USA

https://www.cagle.com/petar-pismestrovic/2009/12/2010
-santa-global-warming

Santa Claus outfit / suit        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/us/26Santa.html

Santa Claus performers for Christmas grottos

sleigh

reindeer        USA

https://www.npr.org/2013/12/25/
256579598/writing-rudolph-the-original-red-nosed-manuscript

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/
opinion/reindeer-are-fading-into-holiday-myth.html

1939 > USA > Rudolf - the red-nosed reindeer        USA

https://www.npr.org/2013/12/25/
256579598/writing-rudolph-the-original-red-nosed-manuscript

Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863) > A Visit from St. Nicholas

'Twas the night before Christmas,
when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! Now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On Cupid! On, Donder and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky,
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my hand, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.

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 pack.
His eyes -- how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of 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 bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

Related

"A Visit from St. Nicholas",

also known as "The Night Before Christmas"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
A_Visit_from_St._Nicholas

The Guardian        G2        pp. 14-15        20 December 2006

Gerald Scarfe

cartoon

The Sunday Times

December 21, 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article5373136.ece - broken link

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown

as Santa Claus

Background > Recession

Corpus of news articles

Time > Christmas

Father Christmas / Santa Claus

Man in a Santa Suit

Kills at Least 8 at a Party

December 26, 2008

The New York Times

By SOLOMON MOORE

and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

COVINA, Calif. — A man in a Santa Claus outfit opened fire on a Christmas Eve gathering of his in-laws in this Los Angeles suburb and then methodically set their house ablaze, killing at least eight people and injuring several others, the authorities said Thursday.

Shortly after the attack, the gunman, identified as Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45, killed himself with a single shot to the head at the home of his brother in the Sylmar section of Los Angeles, the police said.

In addition to the eight people whose bodies were found in the ashes of the house here, none of whom were identified, at least one other person was thought to be missing, and perhaps as many as three. Among the total of dead or missing were the couple who owned the home and their daughter, the estranged wife of the gunman, the police said.

Investigators continued to search the charred structure Thursday, and coroners said dental records would be needed to identify some of the remains.

The frenzied shooting occurred just before midnight Wednesday at the two-story house, set on a cul-de-sac in this middle-class town about 22 miles east of Los Angeles. Lt. Pat Buchanan of the Covina Police Department said Mr. Pardo, armed with one or two handguns and fire accelerant, had gone to the house looking for his former wife, Sylvia, with whom he was finalizing a contentious divorce after only a year of marriage.

People who escaped the house got out by smashing through glass and jumping. One woman broke an ankle when she leapt from a second-floor window.

The house was owned by James and Alicia Ortega, an elderly couple who were retired from their spray-painting business and who often invited their large extended family over for parties, particularly around Christmas.

Relatives said about 25 people, among them many children, were inside the home celebrating when Mr. Pardo knocked on the door around 11:30 p.m. He had apparently disguised himself as a hired entertainer for the children in order to gain access.

When a guest opened the door, Lieutenant Buchanan said, Mr. Pardo stepped inside the house, drew a semiautomatic handgun and immediately started shooting, beginning with an 8-year-old girl who was hit in the face but who survived, as did an older girl who was shot in the back.

As Mr. Pardo unleashed a barrage of gunfire in the living room, relatives smashed through windows, hid behind furniture or bounded upstairs. Then he sprayed the room with accelerant, using a device made of two pressurized tanks, one of which held pressurized gas. Within seconds, the house was ablaze.

Joshua Chavez of Seattle was visiting his mother’s house, which sits behind the Ortegas’, when he heard a loud explosion. “Then I saw black smoke and this large flame,” he said.

Mr. Chavez ran out to the backyard and heard three girls, including the one who had been shot in the back, trying to climb over his mother’s wall. “There’s some guy shooting in there,” he said one of the girls told him.

“About 20 seconds after that,” he continued, “the house was totally on fire. One girl said that a guy dressed as Santa started shooting.”

Another neighbor, Jeannie Goltz, 51, saw three more partygoers fleeing the burning home. One of them, a young woman, had escaped upstairs from the living room but broke her ankle when she jumped out a second-story window.

SWAT teams arrived shortly after Ms. Goltz had shepherded these three survivors into another neighbor’s house, but by that time Mr. Pardo was on his way back to Los Angeles.

Police officers said they could not recall so horrific a crime in Covina, and neighbors said they would never have imagined anything so grisly on their quiet block.

The Ortegas had lived in the house for more than two decades and were known for their family spirit, their generosity and their dog, which frequently escaped their yard.

“I would generally play Santa for the family every year,” said Pat Bower, a neighbor of the Ortegas for 25 years. “The family was always together. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles were always in the house. They were a gigantic family. We all envied them, actually.”

Robert and Gloria Magcalas lived next door to the Ortegas for 11 years but were celebrating Christmas Eve with relatives in Los Angeles. Their own home was barely spared the flames.

“They were a big, loving family,” Mrs. Magcalas said. “We usually exchanged gifts with them today. They gave us tamales and cookies every Christmas.”

The police said they had found two handguns in the ruins, and an additional two pistols at the scene of Mr. Pardo’s apparent suicide. Officials said they would continue to search the crime scene Friday, seeking information about the identities of the dead.

Solomon Moore reported from Covina,

and Anahad O’Connor from New York.

Man in a Santa Suit Kills at Least 8 at a Party,
NYT,
26.12.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/us/26Santa.html

Those Inflatable Santas:

Eyepoppers to Eyesores

December 22, 2006

The New York Times

By PAUL VITELLO

HOLTSVILLE, N.Y., Dec. 19 — On a recent quiet afternoon, with few witnesses around, Homer Simpson, Santa Claus and a penguin perched on an igloo suddenly appeared here on the Long Island landscape as if from nowhere, unfolding slowly like Frankenstein monsters lurching to life on the table. As Homer’s extremities reached full size, his pink nylon fist puffed into Mr. Snow Man’s face — an involuntary attack, to be sure. Bop.

Such is the phantasmagoric, Disney-esque experience of the new Christmas custom sweeping the suburbs.

Whatever else Christmas in America means — the birth of Jesus, holly wreaths, the Chipmunks, cultural tension — it now also includes these gargantuan, inflatable outdoor decorations, called “Airblowns” by their chief manufacturer.

They have been around for a while, but mark 2006 as the year these decorations became a full-blown fixture in the pantheon of holiday traditions — and, as is the holiday tradition, the subject of a rift.

Not quite a culture war. Call it an intramural disagreement among the Christmas crazed.

“Appalling,” Catherine Bruckner, a traditionalist who decorates only in holly and evergreen, sneered as she stopped her car in front of an inflated Santa playing poker with two shrewd-eyed reindeer in a menagerie totaling two dozen figures. “It’s bad enough to see those things on Halloween. At Christmas, they rise to a level of tackiness that is horrible.”

For the purists, the old-fashioned stuff is still out there: the strings of lights along the gutters, the lighted tin soldiers, crèches. The homemade wooden Rudolph with blinking red nose, hauled out of storage every Christmas for 45 years and put up on Frank and Diana Culmones’s roof in Franklin Square.

But the inflatables have brought the notion of Christmas self-expression to another plane. Now, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that televised triumphal march that inaugurates the season, can live on in miniature for weeks at a time, swaying and bobble-heading across the front lawn of anyone willing to pay the electric bill — maybe a thousand dollars if you keep them inflated all the time, less if you leave the skins of your Christmas characters sprawled on the ground most of the day, their crumpled faces staring blankly at the sky or the sod, depending.

Some people do not like — inflated, deflated — the whole thing.

“The children must enjoy it, but we were noticing how when they’re deflated, these things look like trash,” Robert Rickert, a friend of the appalled Mrs. Bruckner, said as he stepped from the car to snap a picture. “Or dead bodies,” Mrs. Bruckner added.

Old-school enthusiasts like the Culmones and their son Christopher, who spend weeks hanging 10,000 lights, have no patience for anything that advertises itself, more or less, as a big Christmas bang for the too-busy-to-bother set.

“We just wouldn’t have those things,” said Mrs. Culmone, whose house with the Rudolph on the roof is also adorned with a homemade replica of Rockefeller Center: the Rock, the tree, the ice skaters, the works. “The plastic. It’s not homey.”

The inflatables sell off the shelf for $69 to $300, and Gemmy Industries Corporation of Coppell, Tex., which claims to produce the majority of the large figures sighted this year on lawns, porches, terraces and roofs from Long Island to Los Angeles, is not shy about the product’s corner-cutting appeal.

“The magic of the Airblown is that you buy it, plug it in, and it’s ready to go,” said Sharlene Jenner, the marketing manager for Gemmy, a company that first made its mark six years ago with a wall-mounted singing fish known as Big Mouth Billy Bass, and began making Christmas floats soon after. “You’re going to make a big statement without 20 hours of work. It’s a lot of decoration for the dollar, in other words.”

Ms. Jenner refused to reveal specifics, but said that this year’s sales were “very strong.” The company also sells inflatable turkeys, pumpkins and the occasional dreidel.

A spokeswoman for Home Depot said its stores doubled the number of inflatable Christmas items offered this year to 18 from last year. Bob Davidson, vice president for merchandising of Brandsonsale.com, an online retailer in California, said sales of inflatables had tripled since his first sales four years ago, adding, “We’re bringing them in by the containerload.”

Is the divide between inflaters and noninflaters as big a deal as the one between, say, some outspoken Christians and the people they consider to be engaged in a “war on Christmas?”

There are no studies on the matter to date, but the answer seems to be, probably, no. There is too much intermarriage among the camps.

Anthony and Lena Colagrande of Baldwin Harbor, N.Y., for example, already had the big glass case outside with the dancing Christmas figurines, and the tin soldiers, candy canes and angels when they bought their first inflatable, a six-foot polar bear, a few years ago. They now have 25 inflatables of all kinds.

“Every year, I just buy more and more stuff,” said Mr. Colagrande, a home builder. “People started coming to look at what we had, and after a while it was like they expected it, and you can’t let them down.”

A grand tour of some of Long Island’s most ambitious Christmas displays suggests that the inflatable decorations are scarce in lower-income neighborhoods, but they are also rare in pricier places, where the culture of understatement seems to rule: white lights twined with fresh evergreen sprigs, etc.

There is something of Charles Dickens’s Mr. Wemmick in the bigger displays. He is that dour clerk in “Great Expectations” who turns out to be so kindly when entertaining Pip at his cottage, which is a sort of fortress of cozy curiosities and extravagantly rigged Rube Goldberg-ianisms contrived for the amusement of his father, the Aged P. You can hear Mr. Wemmick’s line: “My own doing. Looks pretty; don’t it?” in the pride of almost any homeowner whose display stands out from a few blocks off.

Homeowners like Ron Meoni, 52, the impresario of the tableau of 22 inflatable ornaments here in Holtsville where Homer slugged the snowman.

“You want to see that again?” Mr. Meoni, a carpenter asked an intrigued passer-by.

He cut the power, and as Homer and Santa and the others melted to the ground, and the absence of the thrum of their motors made the air seem especially still, there was no doubt about it: a theatrical moment was poised somewhere in the air above the crumpled plastic.

Mr. Meoni stood at the switch in the doorway of his garage.

“Ready?” he asked.

Those Inflatable Santas: Eyepoppers to Eyesores,
NYT, 22.12.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/22/nyregion/22inflate.html

2.15pm

Santa dies at children's party

Friday December 22, 2006
Press Association
Guardian Unlimited

Children watched in horror as a Santa Claus collapsed and died as he handed out presents at a Christmas party on Sunday.

Andrew Robertson was taken ill as the excited youngsters received their gifts. The 82-year-old was taken to a side room and attempts made to revive him, but he was pronounced dead when medics arrived.

Mr Robertson, from Dundee, had played Santa at the city's Broughty Castle bowling club Christmas party, held for the grandchildren of members, for several years.

"Andy was a father figure in the club who never had a bad word to say about anyone," Ian Smart, the bowling club's secretary, said. "If you asked him to do anything for you, he would always say 'no problem'.

"One wee kid said 'how are we going to get our presents next week if Father Christmas is ill?' - they didn't understand what had happened."

Mr Smart said Mr Robertson, who had played an active role in the club, was "well liked and will be sorely missed".

Mr Robertson's brother, Alister, said he had complained about feeling hot shortly before collapsing.

"The kids saw him getting taken away," he told the Courier newspaper. "They knew something was wrong with Santa Claus as he went away with the two guys, but they didn't see anything further.

"It has been quite a shock for everybody, but my view is that he was there thoroughly enjoying himself when he was struck down."

    Santa dies at children's party, G, 22.12.2006,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/christmas2006/story/0,,1977823,00.html

12 questions of Christmas

12 questions of Christmas, I, 25.12.2005,
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article335011.ece

Vicar tells children 'Santa is dead'

10 December 2002

Ananova

A vicar has apologised for telling children at a Christmas carol service that Santa Claus was dead.

He also told the congregation at St Mary's Church in Maidenhead it was impossible for so many presents to be delivered in such a short space of time.

The Reverend Lee Rayfield, of nearby St Peter's Church, has now admitted he made a terrible mistake.

He based his sermon on joke scientific research from the internet and says it was meant as a bit of fun for older children who already knew Santa did not exist.

He added: "I made a serious misjudgment of the ages of the children. I did not realise how young some of them were and I am sitting here now wondering how I managed not to realise.

"Even when I was there, I did not twig. I am mortified and appreciate I have put some parents in a difficult position with a lot of explaining to do. I love Christmas."

Mr Rayfield's comments came from a joke story that circulated on the internet earlier this year on how scientific research would dispel the myth of Santa.

It says Santa would have to deliver 378 million presents to 91.8 million homes in 31 hours. To do it, he and the reindeer would have to travel 3,000 times the speed of sound.

It says the reindeer would be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second and Santa would be killed by 4,315,000 pounds worth of force.

Mr Rayfield is now writing a letter to parents apologising for the incident.

Story filed: 11:39 Tuesday 10th December 2002,
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_725147.html

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time > Christmas > Ornaments / crèches / presents / tree

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