Christmas special: Postcard Stockings galore! - Picture Postcard ...

STOCKINGS GALORE
continued from page 31
Some stockings
definitely held more than
others! Artist: T. Gilson.
Publisher unknown.
fun but rather different from
how things are done today.
Christmas as we think of it
was still taking shape.
Eleven years after the
appearance of Dickens’
famous ghost story a book
which was to prove another
best seller was published in
both New York and London.
Even though it hasn’t stood
the test of time, Susan
Warner’s ‘Carl Krinken: His
Christmas Stocking’ quickly
ran into several editions
after it first came out in
1854. As an American she
set this moralistic children’s
tale around her country’s
still evolving Santa Claus
who was, she wrote, kept
very busy filling half a million
rich little stockings.
Santa’s targets were children
who could reasonably
expect presents such as fur
tippets and rocking horses
‘and what have poor children
to do with these?’ Very
occasionally the poor
received some discarded
clothes or a mince pie
which had slipped, almost
accidentally, into his load
A modest stocking by
today’s standards perhaps
but some children weren’t
destined to receive one at
all. Flora Thompson, author
of ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’
was born in 1876 and
brought up in a rural
Oxfordshire hamlet. Of
childhood Christmasses she
wrote ‘Mothers who had
young children would buy
them an orange each and a
handful of nuts but, except
at the end house and the
inn, there was no hanging
up of stockings and those
who had no kind elder sister
or aunt in service to send
them parcels got no Christmas
presents’. An undivided
back postcard and publisher
unknown.
but that was about it.
Nevertheless, the
eponymous small hero did
hang up an old darned
stocking which, perhaps
with an eye on book sales
over here, had started life in
England. Not trusting to a
selective Santa, Carl’s poor
fisherfolk parents filled it
with ingenious trifles and
when Santa visited, merely
out of curiosity it has to be
said, he wondered at the
care taken with so few
Robins well provided for on a Tuck ‘Christmas’
Series postcard No. 162. Posted locally in Norfolk at
7.45p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1910. Alice probably received
it in time too.
32 Picture Postcard Monthly December 2009
Oh dear!
Auntie’s anti-wrinkle cream
and false teeth beside the
bed and her bedtime reading
being ‘Youth and how to
attain it’ and all she’s going
to find in her stocking is a
‘Kantleek’ hot water bottle!
Illustration by Albert Carnell
for Photochrom in their
‘Celesque’ Series.
resources. Deciding
to give Carl something
special, he gave him the
ability to hear the stories his
simple presents told including
that of the stocking
which had once belonged to
a country squire.
I wonder how many
English children began to
hang up stockings as a
direct consequence of this
book? But in spite of its
undoubted suc-
Looks like
a washing line on this
embossed Tuck ‘Christmas’
Series postcard No. C1033.
(below) Still some surprises
left on a lovely study of the
delights of Christmas morning
from A.L. Bowley. A
Tuck ‘Oilette’ No. C3782.
Postally used 1910.
cess, in the
days before television and
the instant transmission of
new ideas the stocking-filling
Santa moved slowly
into the general English
public’s awareness. An indication
of this is that as late
as January 1879 a puzzled
member of the Folklore
Society still didn’t know
who he was. Calling him
Santiclaus, it was then that
Edwin Lees contacted
An
advertising postcard for
Faulder’s chocolates designed by M. Morris. Publisher
unknown and postally used 1910.