The Truth About Santa Claus is our fourth title in our series on mythic figures, using old pictures to perhaps discover something new of their natures.

We have had great success with this book’s predecessors – The Truth About Easter Rabbits, Snow-People, and Jack-o-Lanterns. We now turn to the most elusive and ancient of them all, Santa Claus. We have assembled from our library hundreds of pictures of Santa, and then deduced from this material much about him.

Such subjects as Santa’s dress, character (weaknesses and strengths), home life, marriage, and work habits are explored. We look at his relations to his helpers, his reindeer, the children he sometimes meets on his miraculous journeys and even his activities outside of the Christmas season.

Every assertion is supported by pictorial evidence, all in splendid color.

We think we know Jack-O-Lanterns, they just sit on front porches with glowing and mysterious faces. In truth, there is far more to them than that. They are very different from one another, and some of them join our human Halloween festivities in a variety of ways.

This book has been compiled by a diligent search in a century’s worth of images, including postcards, calendar art, book illustrations, posters, window decorations, ephemera scraps, and more. Readers will admire Jack-O-Lanterns even more after reviewing the revelations in this book.

“The Truth About Easter Rabbits”, which we published in 2005, was so attractive and so popular that we follow it up with this survey of snow men, snow women, snow children and snow animals. Like the Easter Rabbit book it uses a great variety of illustrative sources to provide a comprehensive view of how snow people are created, how they vary in personality and appearance, their recreational preferences, their family lives, and what happens to them after they melt. Most of us love snow people already, but after looking at this book one will enjoy them in a more profound way.

Sources drawn upon for this project include: old postcards, Victorian scraps, children’s readers, antique picture books, and magazine covers and illustrations.

This title describes the many Easter Rabbits that live all around the world, their family life, the decorating of eggs in preparation for Easter and the methods they use to deliver them as gifts to the world’s children. Illustrated with a rich abundance of imagery from old children’s picture books and Easter postcards, “The Truth About Easter Rabbits” is sure to delight all children and the any adults who appreciate the simple pleasures and customs of the Easter season.