When Santa wore ranch mink …
David Sumney with his vintage postcard collection and a photo of his parents Roy and Velma Sumney at his home in Bentleyville.
Once upon a Christmas, in a time before Coca-Cola Co.’s Haddon Sundblom sweetly co-opted the image of Santa Claus as a man who always wore a red suit trimmed with white fur, artists depicted Santa and his namesake, St. Nicholas, with a varied wardrobe and a countenance reflecting emotions other than mirth.
David Sumney knows. He has postcards bearing postmarks from early in the 20th century. One card shows a white-bearded Santa clad in red with rich brown pelage. Ranch mink? Did Santa Baby slip a sable under the tree for he?
Clement Moore, author of “A visit from St. Nicholas,” the poem that many know by its opening line, “‘Twas the night before Christmas,” describes the right jolly old elf as having cheeks that were like roses, “his nose like a cherry,” but never mentions the color of Santa’s attire, except to note chimney smudges:
CELESTE VAN KIRK
“He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, and his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot.”
If his fur doesn’t have to be white, does his suit have to be red? Santa sometimes sports quirky diversity. There’s the Steelers Santa suiting up in black and gold. Irish Santa is clad in green velveteen. St. Nicholas often wears white robes.
“These are all from 1905, 1910 – in that range,” Sumney says of his collection of many holiday postcards preserved in an album. “Most of them have my dad’s name on them. He was born in 1901. My grandmother kept them, and my mother finished putting them in there.”
The recipient of these postcards was the family of Roy Sumney, David’s father, who lived until 1995.
And true to the name, sticking to the penny postcards are single, one-penny stamps bearing the image of Benjamin Franklin, founding father of not only his country, but also first postmaster general of the media delivery system now known as the U.S. Postal Service.
Sumney’s collection boasts vintage images from these ghosts of Christmases past: a yule log and a plum pudding carried on a sled; Mr. Claus speaking to a child on a wall telephone; cherubs and bells; a church ringed with mistletoe; a pine tree near a pond; and a woman and child walking on a snowy road.
CELESTE VAN KIRK
Maybe to save space, one card uses the term “Xmas,” with which some today take umbrage. The Greek letter chi looks like the X of the Roman alphabet, and the name “Christ,” when written in Greek, begins with the letter chi.
Mailing a postcard is presumably cheaper than sending a card in an envelope, because one sacrifices privacy and weight. The sender cannot enclose the pre-printed Christmas newsletter in a postcard. Today, mailing a one-ounce letter costs 49 cents.
Those who are motivated by thrift or the motto of “reduce, reuse, recycle” can go without an envelope and repurpose holiday cards, but if choosing this method, measure and cut carefully. Stamps.com lists current United States Postal Service rates at 34 cents for a postcard, which is defined as a rectangle at least 3 1/2 inches high, 5 inches long and 0.007-inch thick and no bigger than 4 1/4 inches high, 6 inches long and 0.016 inches thick. (These rates don’t apply to USPS Marketing Mail, for which the sender pays the same price as a first-class letter, 49 cents.)
CELESTE VAN KIRK
Wondering how to measure 0.007? The postal service website notes, “As a guide, an index card is thick enough.”
Whether you send photograph, postcard, card with matching envelope or digital image, who can predict what may last until Christmases yet to come? Perhaps your holiday mailings or email will be cherished by someone who will be sharing and showing them off a hundred years from now.