Surprises from Santa's Mailbag

By Roy Nuhn

As seen in The Antique Shoppe Newspaper, December2008 

Collecting souvenir postcards was a preoccupation which greatly enthused people from 1893 to 1918. However, their greatest use of cards was much more down to earth. Before Hallmark, Rustco,

Gibson and other greeting card manufacturers came along, our grandparents and great-grandparents

used picture postcards to exchange with one another on every imaginable holiday and occasion.

Of all our holidays, Christmas inspired more postcards than all the others combined. So great was the demand, hardly any publisher failed to offer a large line of Yuletide postcards each and every year. Then, as now, most companies needed a successful Christmas season in order to survive.

And they quickly discovered, too, that old St. Nick was a runaway seller. Hundreds of publishing houses, large and small, both in this country and in Europe, turned out thousands of different scenes picturing Santa Claus in numerous situations. Yearly, dozens of English and German publishers exported tons of postcards and other paper goods to this country for Christmas.

American companies eventually responded to this rivalry by lobbying in the halls of Congress. Success came in 1909 with the passage of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act which imposed import duties so high that European competition declined almost overnight. A few foreign businesses however, engaged in joint ventures with u.S. firms, such as Valentine & Sons of Scotland and Maine’s H. L. Leighton Co., to evade such restrictions. A couple of other publishers, which had long maintained branches in this country - notably Raphael Tuck & Sons, made some operational changes and shifted production stateside.

Estimates are that close to 3,000 different top-of-the-line Santa Claus designs were printed in the 15 years between 1903 and 1918, including about 200 sets of six, eight, and 12 cards each. Everyone of these is a masterpiece and highly collectable.
 

All are colorful portrayals of Santa in every conceivable situation - making toys, speeding along in his auto or bus, trudging through the snow, handing out toys to gleeful children, looking into the windows at family Christmas gatherings, filling up stockings, and dashing through the moon-lit night in his reindeer-drawn sleigh.

There were also thousands more of poorly drawn and cheaply printed Santa Claus postcards manufactured to sell for a penny, half-cent, or even lower.

The majority of the quality Kris Kringle postcards are embossed - a few quite heavily, and some frequently have gold and silver embellishments. Santa is usually depicted full figured, or head and

shoulders, and dominates the picture. Many collectors tend to specialize in cards showing the various means Santa used to get around on Christmas, and he did utilize a wide range of different modes of transportation. Possibilities included horse-drawn stagecoaches, autos, dirigibles, bi-planes, bicycles, donkeys and horses.

Americans, in the years leading up to World War I, were fiercely patriotic, and Uncle Sam was everyone’s favorite relative. A small number of postcards show him and Santa in good fellowship or  

celebrating the season. A couple of other postcards picture the jolly elf at the top of the world, a clear reference to the fact that it was the Stars and Stripes that was first planted at the North Pole.

The rarest Santa Claus postcards - and the ones collectors spend lifetimes seeking - are the novelties. These include add-ons, silk-suited Santas (his clothes are woven from real silk), real hair glued on for a beard, and mechanicals in which parts move or a disc wheel revolves.

European publishers, back at the turn of the 20th century, were the first to popularize St. Nicholas on picture postcards, and their offerings reflected the Old World conception of him as the stern, severe and thin saint in his many different colored robes. Missing completely was Thomas Nast’s jolly, red-suited elf we so identify with today. Our own postcards began portraying the now familiar Santa Claus of American thought and literature about 1905.

These gems of  European and American lithography were so appealing to the public that publishing houses couldn’t produce enough of them quickly enough or in sufficient quantity. The search by all

companies for first rate artists was an intensive one. Eventually, many important illustrators of the era designed Santa Claus postcards, including such greats as Ellen Clapsaddle and Bernhardt Wall. Today’s insatiable desire for such artist-signed postcards has caused prices for them to keep going up.

Ellen Clapsaddle drew several fine sets for the giant International Art Publishing Company, located in New York City. Bernhardt Wall, a man who would go on to become one of America’s greatest etchers, labored for Ullman Manufacturing Co., also in New York City, doing several Santa cards for them. New York City was the heart of the American postcard industry, and here the artists and

publishers lived and worked.

Numerous other firms, however, were located in other parts of the nation, but most of them maintained business offices in New York City. In Worcester, Massachusetts, for instance, was found the whitney Company, long an important marker of greeting cards and papel- novelties.

Postcards by certain publishers - PFB (Paul Finkenrath of Berlin), John Winsch Co., Raphael Tuck & Sons, to name a few - are so highly prized for their constant quality and excellence of design that they today command premium prices. Also greatly sought is Ullman Manufacturing Company’s “National Santa Claus” series illustrating Santa in the image of different nationalities, such as Germany, the United States, Scotland and England.

A few sets tell a story, or at least a vignette. PFB’s Series No. 9593, as an example, depicts Santa Claus and an angel cutting down a tree, decorating it, planning the gift list, and then bringing gifts and tree into a home. More than one publisher produced sets telling the wondrous story of Clement Moore’s Night Before Christmas classic, roly-poly Santa and all.

For those of you who have some old Santa Claus postcards tucked away somewhere, I recommend digging them out and displaying them now that the Christmas season is fast approaching. They will add yet another interesting note to your holiday decorating and chances are they will become conversation pieces. At the very least they will make your home different from that of your neighbor’s.

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