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Story by Sharlee Plett 

Santa Claus came every year to my house when I was a little girl, flying through the night skies in Saskatchewan and later Alberta over the snow covered horizon. 

One year, when I was about five years old, I was laying awake on Christmas Eve.  I had been warned that I shouldn’t get out of bed, but I couldn’t help it, I just had to get up and look out the window, pressing my nose against the frost covered glass, hoping and praying to see the reindeer sleigh against the moonlight. 

As I peered out the window, the house was completely still except for the clicking of the furnace.  Then I thought I heard some shuffling downstairs.  I crept out of my bedroom and down the stairs as quietly as I could.  I was sure it was Santa Claus and I didn’t want to get caught peeking. 

Hiding in a corner and peering into the living room, I could see our Christmas tree.  My Mom and Dad had left the lights on the tree and the room was bathed in the warm glow of the Christmas tree lights.  To my amazement, Santa Claus came out of the kitchen.  Sure enough, he was all dressed in red and he was eating one of the cookies my brother and I had left out for him!  Frozen in surprise, I couldn’t move a muscle, just watched as he crossed the living room, turning his back to me to do something under the Christmas tree. 

I realized that if he turned around he would see me, and my Mom told me that little children who didn’t behave themselves might not have their stockings filled, so while he had his back to me I ran as fast as I could back down the hall, up the stairs and jumped into my bed.  I pulled the covers up and closed my eyes, just in case he came upstairs to check on my brother and me.  I laid there hugging myself, with a sense of wonder and delight.  Really, it was one of the best moments in my life!

I must have fallen asleep right away, for when I woke it was Christmas morning.  I ran downstairs and checked the milk and cookies we had left out for Santa Claus.  The milk glass was empty, the cookies had been eaten and my Christmas stocking was bulging with goodies.  

Then my Mom came down and I told her I had seen Santa Claus.  She smiled and said, “That’s wonderful darling!” So even she thought it could happen! 

Was it just imagination?  Perhaps.  But saying it was just the over active imagination of a small child doesn’t take away the reality of the moment, that precious feeling of magic and wonder that made that Christmas Eve so special that I remember it vividly to this day!

Article by Sharlee Plett 

I’ve always loved Santa Claus and I’ve always loved illustration art.  A few years ago, I was introduced to an amazing woman who is a vintage collector.  She showed me her vintage postcards and scrap collection, which included Santa Claus postcards from the 19th century and the early 20th century.  I caught the vintage postcard bug!

Now I have my own collection of Santa Claus postcards, most of which are 100 plus years old.  You can see from the the postcards that Santa Claus wasn’t always dressed in a red jacket, trousers and black boots.  He was dressed in red, blue, green, brown, long robes, short robes, and fancy robes.  Nor was he always jolly and fat!  Some of the Santa Clauses are downright forbidding looking.

I decided to do some research on Santa Claus and learn about his history.  As it turns out, the jolly ho-ho-ho Santa Claus we are so familiar with didn’t become “THE” Santa Claus until 1931, when Coca Cola published an advertisement portraying him dressed in a red jacket and trousers, fat, jolly and ruddy cheeked.  It seems that Coca Cola spent a great deal of money on advertisements featuring their version of Santa Claus and everybody grabbed their coattails and went along for the ride.  Next thing you know, Santa Claus is in department stores and everybody dresses him that way.  Wow - really makes you think about the power of advertising!

Looking back through history, it seems that Santa Claus has had a very long and illustrious career, and at times was held in disrepute and banned.  At heart, he is very much a European icon, starting out with the winter celebrations of Northern Europe and merging over time with Roman celebrations and Celtic celebrations, then with Saint Nicholas, a Roman Catholic Saint, shaped further by the new mass media of the 19th century.  The crowning touches in America were made by the Coca Cola company, the culmination of well over 2,000 years of continued folklore and tradition.

I’ve put up a gallery of vintage Santa Claus postcards you can go and look at - you’ll be amazed at the tremendous variety in what Santa Claus looked like around the end of the 19th century.

Here’s the link to the gallery:

http://www.24kvintageart.com/vintage-santa-claus/thumbs.html

Enjoy!

Article by Sharlee Plett 

As a website designer, I encounter quirky problems with various browsers.  Usually it’s some problem between the IE browser and the Firefox browser which leaves me with torn hair and a tired brain.  This time it was the form input fields that were misbehaving. 

The problem was that I would create a text input field in a form, and no matter what I did, two of the fields would turn yellow.  They turned yellow when I specifically set the background color, yellow when I set the background.  It was just plain weird. 

So I googled, looking for any posts where somebody else was experiencing the same problem.  After a daunting number of searches, I finally found a good hearted soul who had figured out what the problem was, solved the problem and written it up for the world to use. 

It turns out that I had installed a google toolbar and it was busy helping me, setting my form text input field to yellow whenever it found the word “email”, turning the form field yellow so I would know that I could autofill the field.  Incredibly it was able to override my HMTL and CSS settings!

There is a fix, and although it isn’t pretty, it will work if you really want the form input field to stay whatever color you set it to: 

Here’s the link to the fix and comments on the problem:

http://code.jenseng.com/google/.

Special thinks to Jon Jensen for sharing his knowledge on the Internet!

By Sharlee Plett

My blog is powered by WordPress, which they offer to the Internet community free of charge.  That’s pretty cool.  I decided that I should contribute back to the WordPress community and so I’ve made a whole bunch of vintage graphics headers for the WordPress default Kubric template.

I’ve created a blog on WordPress on which to display the headers and post the images so people can use them on their blogs. 

The name of my WordPress community blog is “Victorian Times” - if you’d like vintage headers for your Kubrick template on your WordPress blog, head over and check them out.  I just started on this at the end of November, I’ll be posting new ones each week. 

Here’s the link: 

Victorian Times Blog: http://victoriantimes.wordpress.com

Enjoy!