Flying, exercising, and dancing Santa automata

Christmas: The Pre-Reindeer Era

Over the years, I have made two automata featuring Santa Claus. Why? Well, he's a great royalty-free character and one that seems tolerant to being modified. The first one I made (shown above) is titled Christmas: The Pre-reindeer Era. It depicts Santa in those early years before he could make the down-payment on that expensive sleigh with all those reindeer.

The second one I made was for a holiday issue of a woodworking magazine. Yup, you can get plans to build this Exercising Santa. The automaton depicts Santa building his upper body strength in preparation for the big night. This one is called Training for Christmas:

Training for Christmas

Here's a new addition to the genre, but I didn't design this one. The Dancing Santa was created by Shawn Cipa -- an award-winning Santa Carver. He made this neat Santa automaton for this year's holiday edition of Woodcarving Illustrated magazine.

Here is a link to Woodcarving Illustrated's Santa Automaton page.

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