Here is a Santa Claus figure featured in an advertisement from the Canadian Illustrated News of 1883.
Being Canadian he is, of course, equipped with snowshoes and sled.
Here is a Santa from the same magazine in 1885.
You will note how distinctive this version of the Gift Bringer is. He is clean-shaven and wears no furs; instead he had a voyageur’s ceinture flechée sash, a floppy voyageur toque, and he is pulled by six reindeer. His sleigh has no runners (which would be useful on snowy roads) but is flat-bottomed like dog-powered sleds, good for deeper snow. Among the gifts he carries are a sword and a musket.
In 1819 the English town of Paignton produced a 900 lb. Christmas pudding in honour of the anniversary of their town charter. Despite being boiled in a brewer’s furnace for four days it remained uncooked, with the inside still raw. The townsfolk attempted an even more massive pudding in 1859 as part of a celebration of the arrival of the railway. This time it was cooked to perfection; made of 500 lbs of flour, 190 lbs of bread, 400 lbs of raisins, 184 lbs of currants, 400 lbs of suet, 96 lbs of sugar, 320 lemons, 150 nutmegs and 360 quarts of milk. The Monster Pudding (as newspapers referred to it) was over 13’ feet in circumference and rested on a wagon pulled by 8 horses. It was meant to feed 850 poor of the parish as well as 300 railway labourers but before that could happen a crowd of 18,000 sight-seers, well-lubricated by the local cider, rushed the pudding, swept aside its police escort and demolished the dessert in scenes of riotous disorder.
To this day residents of Paignton are called “Pudden Eaters” and pudding festivities are still observed with pride. In 1986 a giant casket containing 900 individual puddings on little pots was mounted on a wagon and pulled through the town by a steam-powered tractor. Mercifully, no rioting took place.
As monstrous as the Paington Pudding was, it would have been dwarfed by that giant Christmas pudding of over 3 tons made in Aughton, Lancashire in 1992. This confection was verified by the Guinness Book of World Records but there are stories of a 10-ton pudding created in 1931 in London.
