Victorian Era Santa Claus Trade Cards

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Victorian Era Santa Claus Trade Cards

By Roy Nuhn

As seen in The Antique Shoppe Newspaper, December 2007

Given away free by merchants, found inside packages and tins of various products, and available through the mails, trade cards were once a major advertising medium. These beautiful miniature chromolithographs were immensely popular with the public, who saved and cherished them in special albums. Provided by all kinds of merchants, vendors and manufacturers, they touted a wide range of products and services.

Trade cards played an important role in the early history of America's advertising industry, and a small part in the unfolding saga of the industrial revolution. People's fascination with them created a demand so strong that few businesses or manufacturers, large or small, failed to use them to promote their wares.

The 1880s and 1890s were peak years and the quality and quantity of advertising cards produced is truly remarkable. It was a golden age for these masterpieces of illustration and advertising. From the beginning, they were especially plentiful during the Christmas season to promote individual stores and specific merchandise. Far and away the favorites of children and adults alike were advertising cards picture Santa Claus.

The popularization of Santa throughout the nation also seems to have coincided with the birth of modern marketing and advertising. Very early, businessmen sensed the potential of turning Santa Claus into a spokesman.

Actually, Santa Claus and Christmas itself had not fared too well in Colonial American and the early United States. In the New England states, the Puritans were successful in banning holiday festivities outright for a couple of centuries. In the South, though celebrated for generations, it was more a special day for adults than a holiday for children.

The adoration of Santa and the custom of his yearly Christmas Eve rounds to bring gifts to deserving boys and girls was, for a long time, confined to New York. Dutch immigrants had brought St. Nicholas to America when they settled New Amsterdam in the early 1600s. Over the years they continued to soften

"Sinter Klas's" severe, patriarchal Old World image.

In 1822, Clement C. Moore wrote his immortal, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (often referred to as "The Night Before Christmas"). This lighthearted poem was based in large part upon Washington Irving's writings of a decade earlier. Aided by famed American illustrator Thomas Nast's imaginative cartoons and drawings, Santa Claus, his reindeer and much of his legend entered the mainstream of American culture.

It was primarily Nast's interpretation of Santa, as drawn for Harper's Weekly from 1862 to 1889, that steadily came to be used as a sort of super salesman by the nation's business community.

The emergence of St. Nick as an American tradition took place as the Christmas holiday itself increasingly became one of festive celebration, laden with ritual and folklore.

Christmas scenes on advertising cards reflected this new cultural outlook. By the middle of the 1880s, and for the next fifteen years, Santa Claus illustrations on trade cards were very much a part of the glad happenings every Yuletide season.

The majority of Santa Claus and Christmas trade cards were all-purpose stock types printed with general scenes and sold in wholesale quantities to many different companies, large and small. These often can be found with numerous different overprints that were added by individual stores or businesses to personalize them. Some, with special illustrations and texts, were made for use by a specific type of store, such as a toy shop or import bazaar. They contained advertising messages and captions relevant to the goods or service being sold.

And some, among the best ever produced, were published by individual companies with illustrations, having a direct tie-in to their product. An 1880s trade card, for instance, by Mrs. Potts' Cold Handle Irons, portrays Santa Claus with a sleigh full of irons, speeding past signs advertising the gift idea. On other cards, a sewing machine, bar of soap, or other consumer item is part of the drawing.

Most of Santa Claus and Christmas trade cards were distributed by stores and firms as small tokens of holiday good wishes to their customers. But they almost always carried a little bit of a commercial message, as well.

All of these Victorian masterpieces - and many survived down through the years - are today lovingly preserved and displayed by collectors. The most beautiful of all Santa Claus advertising cards are thought to be those once distributed nationally by Woolson Spice Company of Toledo, Ohio. These were insert premiums, usually 5x7 inches, found inside of one-pound packages of their Lion Coffee. The Woolson Spice cards were produced in large quantities over a 20-year span, with each new holiday season during the l890s bringing a new set of Christmas and Santa Claus scenes.

By the turn of the century, however, interest in advertising cards sharply declined as the public became caught up in a new fad imported from Europe, the picture postcard.

Also, more and more reliance was being placed on advertising in mass circulation magazines by ad agencies.

Advertising cards are in relatively plentiful supply, considering they are over a century old. Prices range from $10 for less quality, general stock designs up to $50, or more, for the very best lithographic gems such as those by Woolson Spice.

Such cards are eagerly sought by folks anxious to add to their collection or to help decorate homes at Christmastime, just as their grandparents and great-grandparents probably did.