Jeremy Barker of The Ampersand gives us the run-down on saints, demons, and other mythical figures associated with Christmas throughout Western history. Pictured above is “The Lord of Misrule”:
In medieval England a low-ranking servant was appointed Master of Ceremonies for the midwinter revelries. This tradition originates in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, where the social order was turned on its head for a week.
Link | Image: Dean Tweed
Children of the Victorian Era had to be tough, because this Santa Claus would have given me nightmares! This picture is a detail of a larger family portrait from Flickr user stevechasmar. For sheer weirdness, it just might beat out the previous creepy Santa post. See more Victorian Christmas ephemera in his photostream. Link -via Buzzfeed
Lapland, a region of Fenno-Scandinavia that lies mostly within the Arctic Circle, is where tourists go to find Santa Claus, reindeer, dog sledding, skiing, the Northern Lights, and unbelievable scenery. In this post, it’s easy to see why Santa Claus wants to live in Lapland -I fell in love with the place just from the author’s charming use of English!
A more traditional mode of travel – dog sledding. Here management is not so elementary, because dogs often have their own ideas about the itinerary and you do not have a lot of ways to persuade them to move in the right direction. So it will take all possible strength and agility, but it only makes the trip more interesting.
NORAD has been tracking Santa every year since 1958. In 2007, Google Maps and Google Earth got involved with following Santa’s progress on Christmas Eve. As often happens with new projects, something went awry in 2008. Jeff Martin, a senior marketing manager at Google Geo, found himself in hot water quickly.
Inexplicably, as Santa made his way through Toronto that night last year, the mapping software began identifying the city as being in the United States. Instantly, NORAD Santa’s dedicated Gmail account “just lit up” with messages from irate Canadians, Martin said, and quickly, the Google team fixed the problem.
But not before Martin’s run-in with Canadian Lt. Gen. Marcel Duval. “He said, ‘I understand that you have a new American city,’” Martin recalled. “It was a slightly tense moment for me, standing in front of a three-star general explaining to him why one of his cities had been designated as a United States city.”
Read more about how the NORAD Santa Tracker came about and the technology used in the program today. Link -Thanks, Vince d’Eon!
The Web is Agreement by Paul Downey
The Wonderful World of Early Computing
Mom Always Liked You Best: Mismatched Siblings
Would you let your children pose with this Santa and his taxidermy donkey? This postcard is part of an extensive collection of found photos belonging to Albert Tanquero. I spent a lot of time this morning looking through pages and pages of his Flickr stream of old photographs, each of which has a story we may never know. Link -via mental_floss (where you’ll find more creepy Santas)
Photo submitted by Z. (Sketchy Santas)
Sketchy Santas is a site devoted to reader-submitted pictures of that bastion of the season: sitting on Santa’s lap. It’s a time when children are either enchanted with the prospect of meeting the magic man who will bring them whatever toys they desire… or it’s nightmare time.
Link. Previously on Neatorama: Scared of Santa.
An archaeological investigation in Akron, Ohio has uncovered the first mass-produced toy Santa Claus in the United States. The figurine is 2.5 inches tall, dressed in blue, and was recovered amidst thousands of marbles and penny toys from the site of a toy factory that burned to the ground in 1904.
Today the archeological site is Lock 3 Park, but in 1884 is was The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company, site of the world’s first mass-produced toys — clay marbles and penny toys. “Marbles were made using a device [that] allowed one worker to make 800 to 1,000 clay marbles per hour… So significant was the economy of scale, that one penny could buy a handful of marbles or dozens of different penny toys. The Blue Santa was a penny toy…” Before Dyke opened his company, there were only hand-made toys, beautifully painted, clever in design and so expensive only the world’s wealthiest families could afford a toy… “From that point forward, all children could have a toy,” says Cohill.
The figurine is wearing a blue cloak.
Link.
The Beverly Center mall in Los Angeles has a different kind of Santa Claus. For nine years now, Santa is a hunky young man who performs with the Candy Cane Girls in a 15-minute show in the center of the mall on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Twenty-nine-year-old James Ellis is this year’s Hunk Santa. The show is quite popular with shoppers.
This year, though, Hunky’s story took a turn for the serious when one of his fellow mall performers — a 26-year-old female aerialist — plunged three stories in front of hundreds of horrified spectators and landed on a video projection cube on the mall’s first floor. Hunky Santa was the first person to rush to her aid.
The aerialist injured her wrist and pelvis, but is expected to recover completely. Link -via a comment at Metafilter
The 2,100 citizens of North Pole, Alaska take Christmas very seriously. Since 1954, they’ve volunteered for Operation Santa, a program of the US Postal Service which answers letters to Santa Claus. The program has volunteers all over the country, and many letters are routed through Alaska to get the special North Pole postmark. However, the USPS is discontinuing the practice of sending letters to the town of North Pole.
Anchorage-based agency spokeswoman Pamela Moody said dealing with the tighter restrictions is not feasible in Alaska.
“It’s always been a good program, but we’re in different times and concerned for the privacy of the information,” she said.
Moody stressed that kids around the world can still send letters to Santa Claus. The Postal Service still runs the giant Operation Santa Program in which children around the world can have their letters to Santa answered, and the restrictions do not affect private organizations running their own letter efforts.
But what will change are the generically addressed letters to “Santa Claus, North Pole” that for years have been forwarded to volunteers in the Alaska town. That program will stop, unless changes are made before Christmas.
North Pole residents are upset over the changes, and also unhappy that North Pole cancellations will now be stamped in Anchorage instead of Fairbanks, which is only 15 miles from North Pole. Link -via Consumerist
(image credit: AP/Sam Harrel)
Christmas has come and gone and if you’re going through Santa Claus withdrawal syndrome, here’s a post for you: the world’s largest Santa Claus snow sculpture in Harbin, China.
China’s freezing northern city of Harbin is building what organizers say is the world’s largest Santa Claus ice sculpture.
The giant Father Christmas, 160 meters (525 ft) long and 24 meters (79 ft) high, centers on an enormous face of Father Christmas, complete with flowing beard and hat.
Its huge size and unseasonably warm temperatures have made the job especially challenging, said Tang Guangjun, one of the sculptors.
"It is even bigger and higher than last year’s, and more difficult. The weather swings between warm and cold, so it becomes very wet and slippery on the ice. It is very dangerous for us," he told Reuters Television.
Link (Photo: Sheng Li/Reuters) – via Weird Asia News (who has the video clip)
What could be cuter? Penguins at Everland Park in South Korea aren’t used to snow, so their keepers outfitted them with suits to wear the first time they used their new snow run. Link (embedded video) -via Metafilter
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