Midcentury Christmas by Sarah Archer

Author:Sarah Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Countryman Press
Published: 2016-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

American Christmas Card, 1900. Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collection.

Midcentury modern Santa Claus cut a pretty sharp figure for someone whose primary means of transportation used to be a reindeer-drawn sleigh. In the nineteenth century, the idea that Santa was making toys by hand using old-fashioned tools added a nostalgic sheen to the business of holiday retail, disguising its coarser commercial side with a patina of wholesome, preindustrial craft. The postwar obsession with outer space, both as the site of scientific exploration and as the potential arena for a new kind of warfare, cast Santa’s annual sleigh rides in a new light and made him an unlikely sci-fi character of sorts. Space was the place where Americans in the 1950s and ‘60s projected their highest hopes and their deepest anxieties. And because the night sky figures prominently ‘in two major aspects of Christmas lore-the journey of the three wise men following the star of Bethlehem and Santa’s global toy delivery-it made a certain kind of sense to weave it all together. It was probably comforting, too.

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