Our porcelain stocking gift ornaments are 5 inches tall. The ceramic stocking is dark coral red with heart patterns cut out and gold swirls. The toe and heel of the glass xmas ornaments are medium pistachio green with very light grass green checks. The cuff is beige with brown lines and a dark mauve bow. There is a small Christmas tree with a gold star topper, nicely wrapped gifts and a brown teddy bear with a red bow, peeking up over the top of the ceramic stocking Christmas tree ornament. The porcelain stocking gift ornaments hang from a gold cord.
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History of Santa Claus is Coming to Town.
The song “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was written on the back of an envelope in a bar in 1932 by Haven Gillespie, the music was written by Fred Coots. The song could not find a singer until Eddie Cantor agreed to perform it on his 1934 radio show and in Macy’s Thanksgiving parade that year. The most popular recordings have been by Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters and Perry Como. A total of 70,000,000 copies have been sold.
Santa of the Year Award.
In 1995 the Santa Claus of Greenland Foundation instituted the Santa of the Year Award to be given each Christmas “to an individual person, who is internationally recognized for humanistic views and deeds and who is committed to furthering awareness of the need for improvements in the welfare of children throughout the world.” That year President Nelson Mandela of South Africa was given the award by the premier of Greenland, along with $100,000 to be used for children’s charities.
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History of Silent Night.
The most widely sung Christmas carol in the world began as a poem called, “Stille Nacht” by Austrian priest Josef Mohr in 1816. two years later, preparing for the Christmas Eve service in Oberndorf’s St. Nicholas church, Mohr discovered that the organ was not functioning. Legend has attributed the failure to mice gnawing through he bellows, but it is more likely that the organ in the riverside church suffered from excessive moisture and rust in its works. Mohr asked the organist Franz Gruber to compose a guitar setting for his poem and the resulting composition was sung at the midnight service.
The song would probably have been performed only on that single occasion and forgotten had a visiting musician not seen the music in the church in the early 1820’s and taken it away with him. It was played throughout Austria and Germany for the next few years, growing in popularity. The authorship of the piece remained a mystery until 1854, by which time Josef Mohr was dead. The carols had been attributed to many different composers but the director of the Royal Court Choir of Berlin, where “Silent Night” had become the favorite of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, researched the origins of the carol and succeeded in having its true creators credited for their work.
The song has been translated into over 300 languages. American Episcopal priest John Freeman Young wrote the English version in 1863.
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History of Christmas Wrap.
Though most Christmas presents today are wrapped, this was not always the case. In the 19th century, gifts were placed under the tree, hung on its branches or placed in piles on the table. The children of the house would be kept out of the room in which the tree was being decorated on Christmas Eve and when allowed to enter they would see the tree and unadorned presents for the first time. In Scandinavia, gifts were thrown into the house after an anonymous person knocked at the door. It was not until late in the century that wrapping became common.
Why then wrap the gift? A very simple explanation is that some cultures set the tree up earlier than Christmas Eve and placed presents under the tree that had been sent from other family members. An unwrapped gift on Christmas morning meant Santa Claus had dropped it off in the night.
Hiding the gift also heightens the pleasure by prolonging the moment of revelation and perhaps disguising the contents. In many places, such as the Netherlands and Sweden, it is considered good fun to disguise a gift with deceptive wrapping or by placing it in an unlikely spot. In Victorian England, this trick was called a Yule Trap. Another reason for wrapping a gift in colorful paper is that it transforms a commercial, mass market product into a personal real.