Well, of course. Did you think that he was going to use an alphorn? Those things take up too much room in a sleigh.

The tune becomes more recognizable about halfway through the video.

-via View from North Central Idaho

No question, Atari would have been a great gift for you in 1981. I did get you a skateboard. As you skated around your neighborhood that spring you met your best friend for life, Victor. You ran over the girl you’d eventually bring to your senior prom, Dominique. If you’d spent all that time indoors playing Atari, maybe your life wouldn’t have taken these turns. Sometimes I’m not able to give children the gift they want, but I can give them a gift they’ll use and enjoy that is maybe the perfect gift for them at that moment. Part of believing in the spirit of the Holidays is trusting in that spirit.

Read more at The Hairpin. Link

Four-year-old Dominic McCracken-Bruce and his 2-year-old brother Tyson only asked for one thing for Christmas -their Mommy. Army Reserve Capt. Dawn McCracken-Bruce was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait for the past nine months. When she came home for the holidays, she and her husband decided to surprise the boys during their visit with Santa Claus at the Mall at Robinson in Pittsburgh. See the video at WTAE. Link -via Fark

So that’s how the big guy in the red suit delivers all those toys in one night! I wonder if he happens to be friends with a Time Lord, and what other tricks does he have up his sleeve, say for those on his naughty list? The world may never know…

Link

This Christmas Twaggie was illustrated by artist Ingrid Doering from a Tweet by @1surlygurl. You have to feel sorry for Santa Claus -especially if you are Santa! Link

On Christmas Eve 1911, a brother and sister, who signed their names, “A or H Howard”, penned their personally designed letter to Santa with their requests for gifts and a good luck message at their home in Oaklands Terrace, Terenure (or Terurnure, as the children spelled it) in Dublin.

They placed it in the chimney of the fireplace in the front bedroom so that Santa would see it as he made his way into the Howard household in the early hours of the morning.

A check of the 1911 census lead Byrne to believe the children were 10-year-old Hannah Howard and her seven-year-old brother Fred, who lived at the address with their parents and older sister. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Eric Luke)

Ever wonder how the Santa Claus of 21st-century Christmas lore came about? Here’s the story of how an almost completely unknown bishop became the most recognized holiday character in Western civilization.

A MAN NAMED NICHOLAS

In the fourth century A.D., a man named Nicholas became the bishop of a village called Myra in what is now Turkey.

That’s all we know about him.

Nevertheless, Bishop Nicholas of Myra was later canonized and went on to become the most popular saint in all of Christianity. He is the guardian saint of Russia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Norway, and Greece. He is the patron saint of children, virgins, pawnbrokers, pirates, thieves, brewers, pilgrims, fishermen, barrel makers, dyers, butchers, meatpackers, and haberdashers. He has more churches named after him than any of the apostles. And he has evolved into one of the best-known characters in the world -the fat, jolly, red-suited Santa Claus who delivers presents on Christmas Eve, St. Nick.

How did it happen? It took centuries.

MAKING A SAINT

It’s a pretty safe guess that the real Nicholas of Myra was a kind and generous man, because most of the legends attributed to him describe kind acts toward children. Here are two of the most famous:

1. The Three Daughters. Nicholas was walking past a house when he overheard a man telling his three daughters that he was selling them into prostitution because he didn’t have enough money for the dowries that would make them desirable wives. Later that night, Nicholas snuck back to the house and threw a bag of gold through a window. He did the same thing the following night, and then again a third night, providing enough gold for all three daughter’s dowries. (According to a later version of the story, one of the bags landed in a stocking that was hung out to dry over a fireplace.)

Because of this, he became the patron saint of young brides and unmarried women. And because he delivered financial aid at a time when the girls needed it the most, pawnbrokers made him their patron saint. To this day, the symbol of the pawnbroker trade is three balls of gold -a spinoff of St. Nick’s three bags of gold.

2. The Three Boys. For centuries, it was common to paint St. Nicholas holding his three bags of gold. But not every artist painted them well …and at some point during the Middle Ages, artist painting new pictures of the saint began mistaking the bags for three human heads. To explain this image, a second legend evolved. According to this tale, St. Nicholas checked into an inn during a terrible famine and was surprised when the innkeeper served him meat -which had been unobtainable for months- for dinner. Suspecting the worst, Nicholas snuck down into the cellar and found the pickled bodies of three murdered young boys floating in a barrel. He restored the boys to life and helped them escape.

ST. NICK AND KIDS

These tales helped make St. Nick the patron saint of children. And to honor him, Europeans began giving gifts to their children on the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, which fell on December 6.

(Image credit: Flickr user Roel Wijnants)

Nicholas was especially popular in Holland. The Dutch St. Nick was tall and gaunt, wore the traditional dress of a bishop, including the pointed bishop’s hat (a mitre), and carried a long shepherd’s staff. He also rode on a donkey, not in a sleigh. Later, it became a white horse. On St. Nicholas’s Eve, children left shoes filled with straw for the donkey, and by morning the straw was gone and their shoes were filled with presents.

ST. NICK ARRIVES IN AMERICA

In 1664, the flourishing Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was taken over by British forces -who renamed it “New York” after the Duke of York.

For the next 200 years or so, the Dutch citizens of the colony waged a losing battle to preserve what was left of their culture and traditions. One of the most active groups was an association of Dutch intellectuals who called themselves the “Knickerbockers.”

FATHER KNICKERBOCKER

Writer Washington Irving was a member of the group, and in 1809 he published a satirical version of Dutch traditions in a book called The Knickerbocker’s History of New York. It contained several dozen references to “Sinter Klaas” (an adaptation of “Sint Nikolass”), including a tale of how he flew across the sky in a wagon and dropped presents down chimneys for good little girls and boys -not just on Christmas, but on any day he felt like it.

Irving “created a new popularity for the bishop,” Teresa Chris write in The Story of Santa Claus. “He saw Saint Nicholas in America not in clerical robes, but as a jolly fellow, like the good Dutch burghers.” And New Yorkers loved the image.

Irving’s description of the saint rapidly became known to New Yorkers. The English settlers enthusiastically adopted the joyful Dutch celebrations of St. Nicholas’ Day, but they gradually merged them with their own traditions of celebrating Christmas or the New Year. It is not hard to see how Sinter Klaas became Santa Claus in the mouths of English-speaking New Yorkers.

SANTA’S HELPER: CLEMENT CLARKE MOORE

A most important contributor to the modern image of Santa was a professor of divinity in New York -Dr. Clement Clarke Moore.

When Moore, a friend of Washington Irving, sat down to write his children a Christmas poem in 1822, he was heavily influenced by Irving’s vision of Sinter Klaas and his flying wagon and gift-giving. But Moore made a few more alterations to make the story more believable. For example, Chris writes, “The clogs that the Dutch children left by the chimney corner on December 6 became something all children could relate to in cold weather -stockings.” And the wagon became a “miniature sleigh” pulled by “eight tiny reindeer.”

The sleigh and horse with its bells was a common means of transport in New England…And for it to be pulled by reindeer gave St. Nick an exotic link with the North -a land of cold and snow where few, if any people traveled and hence was mysterious and remote.

Moore described Santa as a dwarfish “jolly old elf,” dressed in furs who goes down chimneys to give children their gifts. Moore even gave the reindeer names: Dasher, Dancer, prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen. Other Christmas stories have portrayed St. Nicholas on a white horse, or with one or two reindeer -one version even had him in a cart pulled by a goat- but Moore’s account was so vivid and compelling that it became the standard.

RELUCTANT HERO

Moore never intended for anyone other than his children to hear A Visit From St. Nicholas -in fact, for more than 20 years he refused to admit he was the author (apparently because he was afraid it would damage his standing in the stuffy academic community of the 10th century). But his wife liked the story so much that she sent copies to her friends …and somehow the poem wound up printed anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel on December 23, 1823. It eventually became known as The Night Before Christmas. It was so popular that within a decade it had become a central part of the Santa legend…as well as the best-known poem in American history.

Now Santa had a personality and a mission, and was permanently linked to Christmas. But what did he look like?

SANTA’S HELPER: THOMAS NAST

In the mid 1800s, it was popular to draw St. Nick either in his bishop’s robes or as a man with a pointed hat, long coat, and straight beard. Sometimes he even had black hair.

This changed in 1863, when Harper’s Weekly hired 21-year-old Thomas Nast to draw a picture of Santa Claus bringing gifts to Union troops fighting the Civil War. The Santa that Nast drew combined Clement Moore’s description of St. Nicholas in his poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas” with, believe it or not …Uncle Sam. Nast’s Santa was a jolly, roly-poly old man who wore a star-spangled jacket, striped pants, and a cap.

“The drawing boosted the the spirits of soldiers and civilians alike alike because it showed that the spirit of Christmas had come to the Civil War,” says historian James I. Robertson. It was so popular, that every year, for 40 years, when the magazine asked Nast to draw Santas, he stuck with the same concept -although he did drop the stars and stripes in favor of a plain wool suit. “Hence,” Robinson says, “the American Santa Claus took shape by repetition. We just became accustomed to this same figure.”

A GROWING IMAGE

Nast added new little details every Christmas: one year he showed Santa pouring over a list of naughty and nice children; another year showed him in a toy workshop in the North Pole.

Nast also went on the become the most famous political cartoonist of the 19th century -he’s responsible for giving the Democratic Party its donkey and the Republican Party its elephant- but his Santa drawings are his best remembered works.

In fact, Nast almost singlehandedly established the Santa “image” as it is today… except in one major area: the color of his suit. That was a product of Coca-Cola.

SANTA’S HELPER: HADDON SUNDBLOM

In 1931, the Coca-Cola company hired an artist named Haddon Sundblom to create the artwork for a massive Christmas advertising campaign they were preparing.

Until then, the soda was primarily a summer drink, with sales dropping off sharply in the cooler winter months. Coke hoped to reverse this trend by somehow linking the drink to the winter holidays…and they decided the most effective way to do that would be to make Santa a Coke drinker. Sundblom was told to create a painting of Mr. Claus that the company could use in magazine advertisements.

Sundblom’s first brainstorm was to dump Nast’s black-and-white Santa suit in favor of one in Coca-Cola red and white. Then he managed to find a real-life retired Coca-Cola sales rep named Lou Prentice who looked so much like Santa he could be used as a model. Prior to the Sundblom illustrations,” Mark Pendergrast writes in For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, “the Christmas saint had been variously illustrated wearing blue, yellow, green, or red… After the soft drink ads Santa would forever be a huge, fat, relentlessly happy man with a broad belt and black hip boots-and he would wear Coca-Cola red… while Coca-Cola has had a subtle, pervasive influence on our culture, it has directly shaped the way we think of Santa.”

SANTA’S HELPER: ROBERT MAY

More commercial influence: In 1939, Montgomery Ward hired ad man Robert May to pen a Christmas poem that their department store Santas could give away during the holiday season.

He came up with one he called “Rollo the Red-Nosed reindeer.” Executives of the company accepted it, but didn’t like the name Rollo. So May renamed the reindeer Reginald -the only name he could think of that preserved the poem’s rhythm. Montgomery Ward rejected that name, too. Try as he might, May couldn’t come up with another name that fit -until his four-year-old daughter suggested Rudolph. the rest is history. When the poem was put to music and recorded by singing cowboy Gene Autry, it became the second-bestselling single in history.

________________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Stephen Wildish’s Venn diagram illustrates that if Santa wanted to become a major league superhero — or, more frighteningly, a supervillain — he would be immensely powerful. He already has something of a Fortress of Solitude set up.

Link -via Jeremy Barker | Designer’s Website

The result is a Christmas season in which Santas — including the 115 of them in this year’s graduating class of the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School — must learn to swiftly size up families’ financial circumstances, gently scale back children’s Christmas gift requests and even how to answer the wish some say they have been hearing with more frequency — “Can you bring my parent a job?”

Santas here tell of children who appear on their laps with lists that include the latest, most expensive toys and their parents, standing off to the side, stealthily but imploringly shaking their heads no… Some children show up with elaborate printouts, cross-referenced spread sheets and clippings from catalogs. “I try to guide the children into not so unrealistic things, and I do tell them that Santa’s been cutting back too,” said Tom Ruperd, of Caro, Mich., who added that parents often silently signal their appreciation.

Additional details at the New York Times link.  And, in case you were wondering, “mall” Santas earn about $25-50 per hour.

Link.  Photo from the school’s gallery.

(YouTube Link)

This is why a guy in a fat suit and fake beard shouldn’t try rappelling from one level of a mall to the next, especially if kids are watching. I hope that mall gives out gift cards that repair shattered childhood dreams!

–via Geekologie

The Scottsdale (Arizona) Gun Club invites you to have your picture taken with Santa Claus ..and his machine guns. Other firearms are available for your photo shoot, and you can even try out the machine guns! Link to story. Link to website. -via Arbroath

Baby Santa Jacket – $34.95

Are you looking for a festive and fun way to keep your favorite bundle of joy warm this holiday season? You need the Baby Santa Jacket from the NeatoShop. This adorable zippered coat is made from super soft, wide-wale corduroy with satin lining and faux fur trim.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Clothing & Accessories and Christmas cheer.

Link

]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2011/11/24/baby-santa-jacket/feed/ 0 http://www.neatorama.com/2011/11/11/mrs-claus-half-doris-apron/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/11/11/mrs-claus-half-doris-apron/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:36:25 +0000 Tiffany http://www.neatorama.com/?p=55733

Mrs. Claus Half Doris Apron – $41.95

Are you looking for a way to add a little holiday cheer to your Thanksgiving festivities? You need the Mrs. Claus Half Doris Apron from the NeatoShop. This adorable Christmas apron is made from plush velvet and has a white faux fur trim.

Warning: The Mrs. Claus Half Doris Apron in combination with an excellent holiday meal may have your significant other:

• Breaking out into Christmas songs
• Asking to sit on your lap
• And requesting you give them your toys

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Apron fun and festive Christmas Decorations.

Link

In 1920, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote and illustrated a letter from Santa Claus for his three-year old son. This became a regular tradition for his children for the next twenty-three years. Below the fold, you can find a copy of one such letter as well as a partial transcription from Letters of Note.

Santa tells the Tolkien boys that a polar bear climbed up on his roof and fell through:

I am dreadfully busy this year — it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it — and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address, and why I can only write one letter between you both. It all happened like this: one very windy day last November my hood blew off and went and stuck on the top of the North Pole. I told him not to, but the N.P.Bear climbed up to the thin top to get it down — and he did. The pole broke in the middle and fell on the roof of my house, and the N.P.Bear fell through the hole it made into the dining room with my hood over his nose, and all the snow fell off the roof into the house and melted and put out all the fires and ran down into the cellars where I was collecting this year’s presents, and the N.P.Bear’s leg got broken.

Link -via Flavorwire

Santa’s Rocket Ship was one of five custom buses made with a Christmas theme. They were built by Lloyd Laster of Tyler, TX, who used them as advertising venues:

The vehicles traveled all over the southern and southwest parts of the country taking Holiday Shoppers on joy rides while making appearances at shopping centers and malls. Each of the Santa’s Rocket Ships traveled with a crew of five; a driver, two attendants, a hostess, and of course Santa Claus. Laster started in the 1950s with one Santa’s Rocket Ship and had gradually built up the fleet of five Christmas vehicles by the time he retired in 1974.

Laster sold the business to another man who continued to use the vehicles for several years before it ceased to be a profitable activity. So what happened to Santa’s spaceships? Tom Joslin of Jalopnik tracked down the one surviving bus at Mukluk Land, a small amusement park in Tok, Alaska.

Link | Photo: Mukluk Land

Hi Santa,
My name is Jennifer and my little sister’s name is Stephanie. I’m 8½ years old and Stephanie is 7 years. Santa our behavior this year have been excellent. You can ask my mom if you want. Please Santa bring me some clothes. I’m 10T and my shoe size is 4 and Stephanie is 8T shoes size 2½. Please make my dreams come true for Christmas.

This year, instead of wondering why they get them, Jim and Dylan are trying to fulfill the children’s wishes, with the help of friends, neighbors, and anyone who wants to lend a hand. Tom Mason and Sarah Klein produced a video about the letters. Link

-via Metafilter, where a commenter may have found a clue as to the origin of the address in a 1998 article.

Santa Claus came about when the story of the St. Nicholas of Myra was melded with the legend of Odin. The image was refined by poetry, illustration, and advertising. Get the details on the origins of Santa Claus at it THING. Link -via the Presurfer

Somewhere in that photo above is Jean-Guy Laquerre, who holds the Guinness World Records for having the world’s largest collection of Santa Claus memorabilia.

Laquerre, a 74-year-old retired geography teacher from outside Montreal, has devoted all his time to his Santa collection, which he proudly displays between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15 as an invitation-only exhibit in his house.

"I’ve been collecting since 1988," he said. "Various people give me these items as gifts. I purchase them here and there, and then friends will give them to me."

If you want to beat Jean-Guy, you’ve got your work cut out for you: he’s got 25,189 items! Lee Speigel of Aol News has the story: Link

Nick Brewer appeared as Robot Santa at SantaCon in New York City. It was his second year as a robot Kris Kringle, with an updated costume he calls Santabot 2.0.

Construction of Brewer’s Santabot outfit took about a month, not including the crash course in using an Arduino board for the electronics. Arcade-style buttons on his chest controlled various features, including lights, voice-changer (“Destroy! Destroy!”), sound system, LOL shield (scrolling, “What is love?” along with holiday messages) and the well-loved but short-lived candy dish that emerged from his 8-bit belly.

People got a little rough on the cardboard at times, but overall Santabot was mobbed with admirers, so much so that Brewer didn’t even make it to the main SantaCon convergence area at Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain.

“We got so bogged down with people and pictures it got to the point we couldn’t make it across the street,” Brewer said.

See several videos of Robot Santa in action at Underwire. Link

(Image credit: Jess Alford)

You probably don’t give Santa a second look when you see him in a department store or on a street corner every December …but maybe you should.

SANTA COPS

By December 2001, Mafia fugitive Francesco Farina had been on the run from Sicilian police for more than five years. Holed up in what he thought was a great hideout -a flat in downtown Catania- Farina was able to look out his window and see whether the cops were closing in on him. But all he saw were the regular assortment of Christmas shoppers, schoolchildren, and a Santa Claus ho-ho-hoing on the street corner. A few days before Christmas, thinking that the coast was clear, Farina decided to go out on the town. Bad idea: the guy in the red suit wasn’t Santa after all. A succession of surveillance cops dressed as Santa had kept their eyes on Farina, who ended up spending Christmas in jail.

SANTA’S FISTS OF FURY

An unidentified Santa was cruising down a LeHigh Acres, Florida street in his convertible when he was approached by 20-year-old Jonathan Danzey, who asked Santa for a present. Informed there was nothing for him in Santa’;s sack, Danzey got angry. Words were exchanged, Santa got out of the car, and Danzey tried to punch him. According to Katherine Phillips, who witnessed the altercation, “Santa Claus whipped his butt.” He ripped Danzey’s shirt, knocked him to the ground, then drove away.  The cops soon arrived and arrested Danzey on drunk and disorderly charges. “He won, ” Danzey conceded, “but he was stronger and more soberer.”

SANTAS ON THE RUN

One of the oddest sights in the history of sports took place in Newtown, Wales, in December 2002. More than 1,000 runners -both male and female- participated in a four-mile race for charity …all dressed in full Santa Claus garb: black boots, red pants, red coat, and a big white beard. Said one of the runners: “It’s a lot easier to run in a Santa suit than to try to hold a normal conversation in one.”

SANTA PROTESTORS

What if Santa were banned from Christmas? That’s what they tried to do in the small town of Kensington, Maryland in 2001. Some of the townspeople complained that it made them feel uncomfortable having a “religious figure” participate in the annual tree-lighting ceremony, so the town fathers decided to ask Santa to stay home. Unfortunately, not everyone in town agreed with the decision. Result: 50 Santas showed up and marched on City Hall. Pro- and anti-Santa factions clashed; one Santa was arrested.

SANTA MELTDOWN

Shortly before Christmas in 1999, Kelley Fornatoro placed her 19-month-old son next to Santa for a holiday portrait in a Woodland Hills, California shopping mall. The baby immediately started crying. So Fornatoro suggested that Santa put his arm around the boy to calm him down. That’s when Santa had a fit of his own. “I will not imprison your child!” he yelled at her. “Was it worth it for you to torture your child for a picture? You must be an evil person.” As Fornatoro retrieved her baby, she said she’d be filing a formal complaint. “You can complain about me if you want, but I am Santa Claus. I am the best person in the world!” Then he got really mad. While parents rushed to cover their shocked children’s eyes, Santa began undressing. He took off his hat, beard, wig, coat, and belt, and was down to his red, baggy pants and a tank top when security guards escorted him out of the building.

THE SANTA

In a quest to find Great Britain’s ultimate Santa, organizers at Guinness World Records sponsored the first-ever “Santathon” in December 2001. The event included a field of eight top contenders donned in full beards, red suits, and black boots. Competitive events included sack-hauling, pie eating, chimney climbing, stocking filling, and ho-ho-hoing. First prize was awarded to David Broughton-Davis, 43, from Croydon, a professional department store Santa. “I’m not very proud to admit that my best event was eating three large mince pies,” Broughton-David lamented after being awarded the Golden Boots trophy. “I just wish that event hadn’t taken place before the chimney climb. It was hard on the stomach.”

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Thomas Cane patented a device in 1996 that will alert children to the presence of Santa Claus. If someone trips the sensor disguised as a ribbon across the fireplace, lights in the stockings will be triggered, giving proof that Santa came through the hearth! One would think the appearance of candy in the previously-empty stockings might be proof enough. Link -via the Presurfer

YouTube user SterlingBreed captured this marvelous video. Keep Portland weird!

via Geekosystem

Brody Qat attended a gathering of Santas as her character “Desaturated Santa”, which she introduced last year, and posted photographs at Flickr. To counter many accusations of Photoshoppage, she also posted a picture of her makeup and contact lenses to explain how it’s done. She said:

Many people find it hard to believe that someone would go to all the effort of creating a gray & white Santa suit and painting their face, when it’s “so much easier just to do it in Photoshop”. (Yes, but where’s the fun in THAT? Heck, why visit Paris when I can just Photoshop myself in front of a picture of the Eiffel Tower?)

Link

Even Santa Claus gets the TSA treatment before flying! Today’s shirt at shirt.woot! is a creation of Neatoramabot designer Adam Koford.

When Adam “Ape Lad” Koford heard about the authorization of new, more invasive air security procedures, he was outraged… that the TSA never responded to his job application.

Link -via Laughing Squid

Cartoonist Mark Anderson constructed the Robot Santa from the TV show Futurama out of Lego bricks! See lots more pictures at Andertoons. Link -Thanks, Mark!

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.

Link -via Digg

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!

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.

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.

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

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)

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)