[Santa Claus with children and toys: Santa in his workshop talking on telephone and surrounded by toys] – Antique Print
![[Santa Claus with children and toys: Santa in his workshop talking on telephone and surrounded by toys], c1906. — historic photograph](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/ba/baa8cfec7db6-L.webp)
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: [Santa Claus with children and toys: Santa in his workshop talking on telephone and surrounded by toys], preserved in this historic photograph. The original is held by the Library of Congress, so what you hang is a true record of its time.
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[Santa Claus with children and toys: Santa in his workshop talking on telephone and surrounded by toys]
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Few holiday images from the early 1900s show Santa Claus taking a telephone call, but this stereograph does exactly that, placing him at his workbench among toys and the new technology of the day. Underwood & Underwood, a firm that produced large numbers of stereo cards for home viewers, issued it around 1906, when parlor stereoscopes were a common form of family entertainment. The joke of a jolly old figure keeping up with a modern telephone reflects how the holiday was being reimagined in the period, as Santa shifted from folklore figure toward a familiar commercial and domestic character. The record notes that its caption data is unverified, so the scene is best read as a window onto early twentieth-century holiday imagery.
| Created / published | c1906. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 photographic print on stereo card : stereograph. |
| Notes | Stereo copyrighted by Underwood & Underwood. No. U-87183-2. This record contains unverified data from caption card. Caption card tracings: Holidays; Santa Claus; Toys. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,299 × 1,536 px · prints to 4 × 5 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-149840 |
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