#Christmas artoon full

In addition to repurposing the imagery of the Moore poem-reindeer pulling a sleigh, sack full of presents-Nast also found inspiration in his surroundings. As Halloran notes, Harper’s Weekly wasn’t just for serious subjects: “It provided political news and commentary on national and international events, but it also offered readers sentimental fiction, humor and cultural news.” What better place for Nast to bring his meticulously detailed image of Santa to life? And so, beginning with the January 1863 drawings, Nast began to immortalize the mythic figure of Santa Claus. Doing his first sketches as a teenager, he became a staff illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular magazines of the day, in 1862. It was into this world that the talented artist Thomas Nast arrived in the 1850s. The second of Nast's Christmas illustrations from January 1863. “In order to make it look as much like Christmas as possible, a small tree was stuck up in front of our tent, decked with hard tack and pork, in lieu of cakes and oranges, etc,” wrote New Jersey Union soldier Alfred Bellard. Children received homemade gifts due to the scarcity of materials, Union and Confederate soldiers swapped coffee and newspapers on the frontlines, and some did their best to decorate the camp. This was as true in the United States as it was in England, even with the Civil War raging. “From a season of misrule characterized by drink, of the inversion of social roles in which working men taunted their social superiors, and of a powerful sense of God’s judgment, the holiday had been transformed into a private moment devoted to the heart and home, and particularly to children,” writes Fiona Halloran in Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons. By the mid-1800s, Christmas began to look much more as it does today. Nicholas” (more commonly known by its first verse, “Twas the night before Christmas”) to Charles Dickens’ book A Christmas Carol, published in 1843.

Examples of the holiday began to appear in popular literature, from Clement Clarke Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from St. The wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution created a middle class that could afford to buy presents, and factories meant mass-produced goods. Several forces in conjunction transformed it into the commercial fête that we celebrate today. Prior to the early 1800s, Christmas was a religious holiday, plain and simple. He was a man with the right talents in the right place at the perfect time. But like so many inventors, Nast benefitted from the work of his fellow visionaries in creating the rotund, resplendent figure of Santa Claus. The artist responsible for this coup? A Bavarian immigrant named Thomas Nast, political cartoonist extraordinaire and the person who “did as much as any one man to preserve the Union and bring the war to an end,” according to General Ulysses Grant. “It gave Christmas to the North-gave to the Union cause an aura of domestic sentiment, and even sentimentality.” “In these two drawings, Christmas became a Union holiday and Santa a Union local deity,” writes Adam Gopnik in a 1997 issue of the New Yorker. At the center, divided into separate circles, are a woman praying on her knees and a soldier leaning against a tree. In his hands, he holds a puppet toy with a rope around its neck, its features like those of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.Ī second illustration features Santa in his sleigh, then going down a chimney, all in the periphery. Lest any reader question Santa’s allegiance in the Civil War, he wears a jacket patterned with stars and pants colored in stripes. The first drawing shows Santa distributing presents in a Union Army camp. Appearing on January 3, 1863, in the illustrated magazine Harper’s Weekly, two images cemented the nation’s obsession with a jolly old elf. You could call it the face that launched a thousand Christmas letters.

Christmas artoon