Stopping by a shopping mall to visit and take a photo with Santa Claus is a yearly tradition. While he started out seated in a throne-like chair with a simple backdrop, nowadays, Kris Kringle is typically stationed in an elaborately decorated winter wonderland, complete with elves and Mrs. Claus. The tradition started as far back as the 1800s in cathedrals of commerce—better known as department stores.
Origins of the Department Store Santa
The American tradition of Christmas shopping began to take root in the 1820s and 1830s with people purchasing confections, keepsakes and gifts for children, and stores advertising their wares as presents. Meanwhile, in 1822, an Episcopal minister named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a narrative Christmas poem for his daughters entitled “An Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas”—better known today as “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.” The popular poem’s description of the “jolly old elf” with his “broad face and a little round belly” helped create the familiar image of Santa Claus we’ve known for the last 200 years.
Unlike some of the more intimidating folk versions of St. Nicholas and Kris Kringle first introduced in the United States, this iteration of Santa Claus was kind and friendly-looking—someone children wouldn’t be afraid to approach. So, when store owners decided to incorporate Santa into their establishment’s festivities, they opted for the jovial version, Leigh Eric Schmidt explains in his book Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays.
Santa Arrives in Stores
Several stores claim to be the first to have a live Santa on the premises, but Philadelphia confectioner and dry goods store owner James Parkinson appears to have beat other retailers to the punch, hiring a man to play Kris Kringle in 1841. By 1846, at least three other Philadelphia merchants had their own Santa Claus, one of whom had his own “saloon” in the store where children could pay him a visit.
Confectioners and toy stores—which were already well-versed in appealing to children—were among the first to offer customers a chance to meet Santa. Next came department stores, which opened in urban centers throughout the country beginning in the 1860s and 1870s.
“Early department stores were so much about the experience of visiting the space—the theatricality of it all—so having Santa to create lifetime memories for shoppers was a perfect fit,” says Alessandra Wood, a design historian and author of Designed to Sell: The Evolution of Modern Merchandising and Display.
The First Department Store Santa
Some suggest that Santas began wandering department stores as early as 1861, says Wood. Others credit James Edgar, the owner of Edgar’s Department Store in Brockton, Massachusetts, for originating the tradition in 1890, when he put on a Santa costume to appeal to children shopping with their parents.
Edgar’s store portrayed Santa with the round belly, similar to Thomas Nast’s 1862 illustration for the cover of Harper’s Weekly. At this point, while retailers employed friendly Santas, the character’s look didn’t universally consist of the now-familiar red suit and hat, black boots and long white beard.
Early department store Santas also didn’t necessarily have their own workshop or winter wonderland within the retailer. According to Alexandra Lange, a design critic and the author of Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, some Santas were positioned as “roving greeters” in the store.
Others were part of live window displays, or were stationed in a particular area. “Santa often sat in the toy department, visited by shoppers who could clearly point to the toy they wished Santa would bring,” Wood says. “Today we might consider Santa's presence within these stores experiential marketing—seeing and meeting Santa was like meeting a celebrity for visitors and it created life-long customers.”
Tradition of Theatricality
By the turn of the century, department store Santas had become a firmly established retail tradition. Holiday decorations became more elaborate, and some larger department stores began holding parades during the holiday season. Gimbel’s was first, holding a parade in Philadelphia in 1920, followed by Hudson’s in Detroit in 1923 and Macy’s in New York City in 1924. Santa was a key player in these holiday events, typically serving as the master of ceremonies or grand marshall of the parade.
It was also around this time that Kris Kringle’s image became even more standardized, thanks to special Santa “schools.” Here, prospective Santas learned how to dress, apply their makeup and make the right gestures when interacting with children and parents, Schmidt explains. Founded in 1937 outside Rochester, New York, the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School was one such institution. Howard established the school after seeing Santas in frayed suits and cheap beards who didn’t look the part. Howard, himself, portrayed Santa at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from 1948-1965.
Photos with Santa
Today, many visits to Santa end with a photo opp, but Lange says that in the early days of the mall Santa, photography was too rare and expensive to be part of the ritual. While there’s evidence that kids were taking pictures with Santa as early as the 1930s, the tradition as we know it today took off in 1943. That’s when Art French, a photographer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, noticed a line of children across the street from the newspaper’s office, waiting to get into a department store to see Santa.
Seeing an opportunity, he grabbed his camera, crossed the street, and started snapping photos of kids as they were telling Santa what they wanted for Christmas. They were such a hit that French took a leave of absence from his newspaper job the following year and sold his Santa photos to parents for $1 each—earning him $10,000 in five weeks. This idea quickly caught on.
Santas That Broke the Mold
With the exception of some elves and Mrs. Claus, Santa’s workshops have been predominantly male workplaces. But for a brief period during World War II, shoppers may have come across women dressed up as department store Santas. When many men were off at war, women stepped in to fill their jobs.
Around the same time, people of color began to portray Santa in stores. In 1943, Blumstein's department store in Harlem hired a Black Santa, reportedly making it the first retailer in the country to do so. By 1946, at least one other department store, located in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood had their own Black Santa.
Following the postwar white flight to the suburbs and proliferation of shopping malls, some downtown department stores and standalone retailers hired Black Santas to cater to their new customer base. Amid the civil rights movement in the 1960s, there were economic boycotts of department stores and shopping malls that refused to employ Black Santas. In 1970, Macy’s flagship Herald Square location in New York City employed three alternating Santas—one of whom was Black. The same year, Brooklyn department store Abraham & Straus offered shoppers the option of seeing either a Black or white Santa, separated by a partition.
'Miracle on 34th Street' Solidifies Tradition
Like many Christmas songs and traditions, shopping mall Santas, as we know them today, are a creation of the postwar era. This was thanks, in part, to the 1947 release of the movie Miracle on 34th Street, which Wood says “really solidified the relationship between Santa and retail within popular culture.”
There were also big shifts in the American retail landscape towards the middle of the 20th century. “Post-World War II American spending power surged as the middle-class boomed, as did competition among retailers to get visitors to their store,” Wood explains. “Santa stunts were quite common, including Santa arriving by helicopter to Butler Bros. Department Store in San Francisco in 1953.”
As the suburbs boomed, department stores first opened smaller, branch locations to cater to these areas, followed by shopping malls, anchored by two or three large department stores and community space within the mall, Wood notes. “Malls acted like a community gathering space, hosting many events around holidays and sponsored by local organizations,” she says. This is when we saw Santa move into the central mall court.
"Winter Wonderland" and "Santa's Workshop" settings for Santa in the body of the mall have existed as long as malls themselves, Lange says. In fact, the country’s first indoor shopping mall, Southdale in Edina, Minnesota, hosted a "Winter Wonderland" in 1956, the year it opened. As always, Santa played his part interacting with children—and increasing foot traffic to stores.
