Posted on 12/12/2016 3:22:08 AM PST by BlessedBeGod
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Where’s the bowl full of jelly?
Awesome tats on the shoulders!
The story says the reconstruction is based on all the skeletal and historical material, but it’s not clear what that means. Do we actually have his skeleton? How much remains? How early are the surviving artistic depictions? What’s the evidence for the broken nose?
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Iirc, the fat Santa was a creation of Coca Cola. Most earlier depictions show him with normal weight.
A right jolly old elf!
I saw that guy at the mall yesterday.
No the first real written description for Santa were from “Twas the night before Christmas” originally titled “A visit from St. Nicholas”. In it we get the lines:
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
But Clement Clarke Moore also depicted St. Nick as an elf, a tiny, even miniature man. Yet today’s image is of a normal-sized man surrounded by worker elves, but the Boss isn’t one of them.
Surprising....Given the way “Scientists” operate now, I assumed it would be revealed that Saint Nick was a black Transgendered person.
Not all elf representations are small and pixieish. I always saw it as the largest of the elves by which he was surrounded. The poem to me has always read as shorter than average but very plump and rotund.
White guy?
I wonder if Dickens’ description of the Ghost of Christmas Present influenced the idea of the “fat Santa”?
In truth he never talks about his stature/height...only that he is broad and round. The only potential reference to height is in the very first mention where he is called a ‘little old driver’ (to me not much different than any reference to an older gentleman) and the term ‘elf’ (which as I noted can be of many different sizes).
Here is the complete description from Moore himself:
“With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
.......
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,”
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