Selling Santa: "Colonel" Jim Edgar, Parkinson's Dry Goods & the Story of the First Department Store Santa in History

 “You just can’t imagine what it was like.  All of a sudden I saw Santa Claus!  I couldn’t believe my eyes...it was a dream come true!”

-Recollection of a man in his 90’s on first seeing Santa recorded in 1976

It is December of 1890.

Packed trains from Boston, Hartford, Providence--even from as far away as New York City--are piling into the small station in Brockton, Massachusetts.

Brockton is an industrial, working class city located south of Boston in Plymouth County.  In the future this rough and tumble blue collar town will become famous as the home of heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Marciano, but in December of 1890 it has been suddenly put on the map as the home of Santa Claus!

Each day hundreds of children and their parents walk down Main Street in Brockton, Massachusetts and head straight for Edgar’s Department Store.

Edgar’s Department Store is owned by wealthy local philanthropist and entrepreneur James Edgar, who earlier that year had traveled to Boston and commissioned a tailor to make a Santa costume for him to wear in his store to entertain children in the days leading up to Christmas that year.

And now, in an age when most kids can only read about Santa in storybooks, or see drawings of Father Christmas in illustrated magazines, thousands are flocking to Edgar’s Department Store to see the Big Man himself.  

No longer will kids have to address letters to the faraway frozen tundra of the North Pole and hope against hope that Santa even gets their letters let alone fulfills their Christmas wishes.  Now, in December of 1890 right in Edgar’s Department Store on Main Street in Brockton Massachusetts, kids are able to walk right up to Mr. Claus and tell him (if they can summon the courage) exactly what they want for Christmas.

        With Santa’s in every mall and on every street corner today it is hard for us to imagine the excitement that children felt at the end of the 1800’s when they first laid eyes on Kris Kringle.

An eyewitness to that first Santa in Edgar’s Department Store in 1890 recorded years later, at the age of 91 in 1976 the excitement he felt as a child of only five.  He said, “You just can’t imagine what it was like.  I remember walking down an aisle with my mother, and all of a sudden, I saw Santa Claus!  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  And then Santa walked up and started talking to me.  It was a dream come true!”

James Edgar is an immensely popular figure in Brockton, Massachusetts.  He will die only fourteen years later of a stroke in 1904, but not before he is credited with being the first department store Santa Claus in American history.

Edgar has his Santa costume specially designed to look like the Santa Claus characters created by famed cartoonist Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly in 1862.  

In those drawings, which became immensely popular throughout the world during the American Civil War, Nast had based his representation of Father Christmas largely on the figure described in British poet Clement Clarke Moore’s legendary verse The Night Before Christmas.

Thomas Nast's depiction of Santa Claus 1862

        When James Edgar, the man they called “Colonel” Jim in Brockton, had his costume designed in 1890 he took details from Moore’s poem such as a big white beard, a wooden pipe and a tiny sleigh pulled by eight reindeer and refined them a step further by adding red velvet trimmed in white fur and an iconic Santa hat to his costume.

In essence, department store owner James Edgar inspired by American cartoonist Thomas Nast and British poet Clement Clarke Moore created the first truly modern representation of Santa Claus, one that we would all recognize today, in December of 1890.

Edgar’s costume proved so popular that by the very next year, in 1891, red suited Santa’s sitting atop sleighs filled with toys started popping up in stores all across the United States and they have continued to do so to this very day!

“Colonel” Jim Edgar was a wealthy successful man with a soft spot for kids.  He is said to have wondered why Santa, “chose to stay in the North Pole year round so far away from all the children.”

Edgar would become famous around New England as “the man who was the first department store Santa” and in Brockton a city park would be named after the man everyone lovingly called “Colonel” Jim Edgar.  In 2008, one-hundred and eighteen years after the first appearance of Old Saint Nick at Edgar’s Department Store, a plaque would be placed in Brockton, Massachusetts that officially recognized James Edgar as the man who first played Santa Claus in retail.

But is that plaque, and the story of the Santa Claus of Edgar's Department Store, correct?  Was James Edgar truly the first department store Santa Claus in history?

Well, maybe not.

The city of Philadelphia might have something to say about James Edgar’s claim to be the first department store Santa.

In 1841 a man named James Parkinson, who owned a combination dry goods and confectioners store in Philadelphia, hired another man dressed in a supposed Santa costume to climb down the chimney of his store, once each day in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and to pop out of the fireplace to the amusement and astonishment of shoppers as they bought candy canes and sugarplums.

James Parkinson's Dry Goods Store 

Parkinson’s Santa Claus proved wildly popular as well and children from all over Philadelphia flocked to his dry goods store for a chance to catch a glimpse of a soot covered Kris Kringle crawling out of the chimney.  

Even today, many people in the Philadelphia area will still tell you that it is Parkinson’s dry goods store which should rightly receive the honor as being the first store to host that most illustrious visitor from the North Pole.

However, though the tales about what occurred in Parkinson’s store in 1841 are undoubtedly true, there remain a few problems with that very first early Santa.

For one thing, the identity of the man who was actually paid to dress up like Santa and slide down the chimney so long ago has, I believe, been lost to history, so that without a name, it is much easier to identify James Edgar as the first ever department store Santa.

Also, Parkinson’s Philidelphia store was more of a local shop and less of a department store in the modern sense of the word than was Edgar’s Department Store in Brockton.  

Plus, it appears as if the Santa Claus which thrilled children in Philadelphia in December of 1841 would be almost unrecognizable to us today and may even appear slightly unsettling to our eyes if we were to catch sight of him coming out of the chimney this Christmas season.

In the The Night Before Christmas written in 1823 Clement Clarke Moore describes the figure he calls Saint Nicholas as a, “right, jolly little elf.”  He refers to Saint Nicholas as being covered in “ashes and soot” and he describes him as a “peddler opening his sack”.

Pre-Victorian era representations of Santa Claus would have been very alien to our eyes.  Classical representations of Father Christmas accentuate the elfish, almost mischievous aspects of the character, with Santa creeping into people’s homes in the middle of the night to alternately deposit toys, candy or coal in the stockings of unsuspecting children based solely on his whim.

Early Santa’s, like the one that appeared in Parkinson’s Dry Goods Store in Philadelphia back in 1841, had pointy ears, were dirty and small and may have looked more like indigent dwarfish hobos than the jolly red suited plump grandpas we all know and love.

Colonial Era Santa Claus ca. 1750 (Looks like a drunken man in a hat!)

Only later on, during the second half of the 19th century, as attitudes towards raising children began to change in Victorian England and America did the image of Santa Claus begin to soften.  Victorian parents first began to better appreciate the innocent side of childhood and started to look at the positive value of play and recreation.

With the publication of stories like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and depictions of Christmas family celebrations like Thomas Nast’s drawings in Harper’s Weekly during the 1860’s Christmas first truly became the child-centered family holiday that most of us celebrate today.  Before that time Christmas had a lot more drunken New Year’s Eve than Silent Night in it!

Officially, maybe, James Edgar was not the first department store Santa Claus in history.  Macy’s also attempts to lay claim to having hosted the first department store Santa in 1864, but it kind of sounds to me like their claim simply smacks of retail opportunism, and I simply chose not to compare the historicity of the Macy’s claim to those of Edgar and Parkinson in this article.

There might be many claimants to the title of “the first” in store Santa Claus in American history, but I think that by being the first representation of Kris Kringle who actually spoke to children and seemed genuinely concerned about their Christmas wishes, that what James Edgar, the man they called “Colonel Jim” in Brockton Massachusetts first did back in 1890 helped put just a little magic in our modern Christmas.