By Marian Carache
One of my favorite icons of the Christmas season is the photos of happy — or sometimes screaming — toddlers on Santa’s knee.
At our house, the season doesn’t start until I bring out the black-and-white photo of me with Santa Claus that was taken in a dime store or drugstore on Broad Street in Columbus, Georgia, in 1959. There are two shots. In one, I’m glaring at the camera and have obviously been crying. In the other, I am giving shade to the man whose lap I’ve been forced to sit on, but clearly have no affection for.
According to Mama, as soon as we left the store that day, I furiously said to her, “That man was NOT the real Santa Claus.” When she asked how I knew, I told her he was too skinny. Apparently, I felt made a fool of.
We also have Christmas photos of our dogs with Santa Claus, taken as a fundraiser for the local Humane Society. Most of the dogs were as suspicious as I was when I was five years old, so much so that part-Beagle Marie got out of her collar and took off, scaring the life out of me. All ended well, and the photos are treasures.
Recently, I have been asking my friends to share their department store Santa photos with me, for framing or, perhaps, to include in a book someday.
And, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as the cliché goes. My son has collected dozens of vintage photos of children on Santa’s lap from estate sales. Many ended up in Alabama from out of state, but regardless of where they’re from, they are delightful.
The history of the Santa photo dates to the 1840s when businesses such as candy or toy stores began hiring live Santas to greet customers, marking the beginning of using Santa Claus to market Christmas.
James Parkinson is most likely the first retailer to hire a costumed Santa for publicity at his dry goods store in 1841. By the 1890s, James Edgar, a Scottish immigrant who owned a department store in Massachusetts, was wearing a Santa suit, modeled after the Thomas Nast illustrations of Santa, to greet customers who visited his business. He is considered “the first department store Santa,” and perhaps the catalyst for the tradition of photos with St. Nick.
The tradition of posing children on Santa’s lap began in 1943 in Seattle, Washington. After noticing a line of children waiting to have their picture made with Santa at a local store, photographer Art French took leave from his regular job at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper to photograph children with department store Santas full-time. Ironically, French’s nickname was “Happy” because of his ill-tempered demeanor. However, he successfully sold the photos of children with Santa Claus to their parents for a dollar each. Soon, the grumpy man called “Happy” catapulted the Santa photo into a widespread icon and earned $10,000 in one month, the salary he had made in a year at the newspaper.
Santas soon appeared every Christmas in stores across the country.
By the time my son was born, dime stores, sadly, were disappearing. Santa was setting up in shopping malls, with sexy female elves in short velvet skirts, candy-cane striped tights, and cone-shaped caps with jingle bells on the top. No longer just for children, now entire families, dressed in Christmas sweaters, gathered around to have their picture made.
Like most doting mothers, I have the required collection of Polaroid-type pictures of my son screaming on Santa’s lap in a mall, but I also have an even more treasured photo of him with Santa. One Christmas, a friend who had been a photographer for Southern Living magazine and I had an idea. She photographed children with Santa in black and white at a local church, and I hand-tinted the photos with oils to give them a vintage look. The results were quite beautiful. Sadly, due to the rise of digital photography, I can no longer buy the photo paper that I used to hand-tint.
I wonder what the future of photos with Santa will be. The malls that replaced department and dime stores are now failing. The ones that survive often are not considered safe places to be. In addition, cell phones now snap pictures effortlessly and send them to “the Cloud.” Often, they are never printed. When the phone dies, the hard drive cracks, the Cloud disappears, the pictures will be gone, too.
And yet, the beloved tradition survived Covid-19. During the pandemic, some stores put Santa behind plexiglass and others put a clear face shield on him — after all, Father Christmas’s age and weight do put him in an at-risk demographic — but he showed up and pictures were made, the lovely custom carried on.
Despite changes and obstacles, Olin Viydo, the current owner of the “Photos with Santa” business started by Art French, believes that the tradition will live on. I hope he is right, because nothing replaces the wonder of childhood, and seeing it captured on film is priceless.
