Christmas: The Pre-Reindeer Era - automaton by Dug North

What better time of year to upload this new video of an automaton I made some years ago?

Titled Christmas: The Pre-Reindeer Era, the automaton depicts Santa making deliveries in that legendary time before he acquired the famous flying reindeer. Poor Father Christmas must do the flying himself -- arms flapping and eyes squinting in the cold wind -- with his bag of toys in tow.

The scene is tinted with a light metallic blue to create the effect of a frosty, moonlit Christmas Eve. The piece features a detailed house and landscape over which Santa flies. The roof of the house was covered with individual miniature wooden shingles. The bag is made of balsa wood to reduce weight. The internal mechanism employs a scotch yoke. Santa is mounted upon a blackened brass piston assembly.

Happy Holidays!

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The Incredible Dancing Santa automaton by Tim Donald

Tim Donald was born and raised in the beautiful countryside of the Welsh Marches, where he still lives. After studying art in college, and spending time working as an undertaker, Tim turned his love of making things into a career as a professional artist.

There appears to be a strong tradition among automaton-makers to make automata featuring Santa Claus. Tim Donald has contributed to this fine tradition with this lively automaton inspired by a traditional Folk Art design.

This dancing Santa is both hand-carved and painted. When the handle is turned the figure jumps, dances, kicks his legs, and swings his arms -- all in front of a hand-painted sign reading 'The Incredible Dancing Santa'.

Here is where you can get the Dancing Santa automaton and other kinetic work by Tim Donald.

If you have a mind to make something like this of your own, you can find designs for many dancing figures in Rodney Frost's books Making Mad Toys & Mechanical Marvels in Wood and Making Whirligigs, Whimsies, & Folk Toys. Full-size schematics and drawings, and detailed written instructions, guide woodwokers through the process building, carving, and assembling a variety of animated wooden projects.

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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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Laughing Santa Paper Automaton Kit Download

In time for the holidays, here is an paper animation kit you can download, cut-out, and glue together. This comes to us from the fine folks at Flying-Pig.co.uk who offer paper animation kits of every sort.

Each kit comes with instructions and requires you to have Adobe Acrobat (which is free). You can pay the modest price for the kit with Paypal or a credit card. Then download the file, print it on card stock, and you are ready to start building!

Check out the Laughing Santa Paper Animation Kit.