Creepy 19th-Century Photos Show What Santa Claus Used To Look Like
These remarkable 19th-century photos reveal that Santa Claus was not always the portly, jolly, red-cheeked figure known today.
A hunchbacked, skinny, and sometimes terrifying man, the fascinating images show what Father Christmas looked like in the 19th century — before he became the cuddly, bearded man marketed to modern-day consumers.
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The black-and-white photographs, that date as far back as the 1880s, show Santa as a scary, scrawny, and episcopal-robed man with no reindeer-powered sleigh in sight.
Instead, Saint Nick has developed a hunchback from dragging around presents.
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Other 19th-century representations of Santa are far more terrifying. Some 1880s images depict a grotesque old man with a large mask – whilst some 1890s pictures represent Father Christmas as a spooky, ghostly apparition.
Meanwhile, some early 20th-century European images show Saint Nick accompanied by a gruesome creature known as Krampus — a devil-like character who beats badly-behaved children and drags them back to Hell.
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It was only in the 1920s that the modern vision of Santa as a plump and jolly man was created and this was mainly down to Coca-Cola’s holiday advertising.
Coca-Cola wanted to move away from the traditional thin, intellectual, strict-looking Santa of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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For its festive commercial, the brand wanted to project a more lovable, fat Santa with a taste for cookies, milk, and of course Coca-Cola bottles.
Afterward, many other brands and television shows in the twentieth century continued fuelling this modern depiction of Santa.
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Father Christmas dates back as far as the 16th century in England. However, it was during the Victorian period that Christmas customs enjoyed a significant revival including the figure of Santa.
Father Christmas’s physical appearance in the 19th-century was changeable. While the signature white beard was always present, Santa was variously portrayed as hunch-backed, svelte, haggard, and even frightening.
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Loosely based on the patron saint of children, St Nicholas, Santa Claus was also represented as a strict, pious figure clothed in bishops’ red and white robes. This was later replaced by a fur-trimmed suit in the early 1900s.
Image credits: All photos courtesy of News Dog Media.