Santa at Work in His Toy Workshop

About this drawing

Oddly enough, the Santa toy workshop appeared much later than Santa himself. For a long time, nobody asked where his gifts came from. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, American stories and poems began to imagine a home base and a crew of helpers who actually built the toys.

The cartoonist Thomas Nast gets much of the credit. His Christmas drawings for Harper's Weekly showed the old man at his bench, reading letters and keeping track of good and bad children. Nast also gave him a North Pole address. Explorers were racing toward the Arctic then, and readers saw it as a remote and mysterious place. Nobody could prove he wasn't there.

The idea of a workshop also fit the times. Many toys still came from small craft shops, where someone carved a horse or painted tin soldiers by hand, and factories were just beginning to take over. Santa's bench preserved that old-fashioned world of makers. Others have since staked their own claim to his address. Rovaniemi, a town in Finnish Lapland, sits on the Arctic Circle and welcomes visitors from around the globe to a Santa village open year-round. Letters still arrive there by the sackful, proving that an idea from a Civil War-era magazine has come a very long way.

• santa
• workshop
• toys
• tools
• presents