Holt Howard Santa Mugs & Candle Plates
A parade of changing Santa faces across Holt Howard’s individual holiday mugs and candle plates.
Holt Howard produced an unusually wide variety of Santa mugs during the late 1950s and 1960s. Some designs appeared for only a single season, while others remained in production for several years, and more than one Santa design could be offered during the same year. Several mugs were also coordinated with larger pitcher and serving sets, while others were sold independently or in small boxed groups.
The surviving markings are nearly as varied as the Santas themselves. Some examples carry dated Holt Howard backstamps, others retain only the company’s familiar gold foil label, and still others are completely unmarked. Comparing multiple surviving examples is therefore often necessary when establishing production dates and relationships between designs.
The second half of this page will turn to Holt Howard’s ceramic Santa candle plates, which carried the same habit of continual redesign into another small, functional Christmas form.
Santa Mugs
Winking Santa Mug — Type A
This compact handled mug uses the same cheerful Winking Santa design found in the Type A pitcher-and-mug set on the preceding page. Santa winks beneath a broad white hatband while the open eye is picked out with a gold accent.
Surviving examples are documented with both 1960 and 1961 copyright dates, showing that the design remained in production for at least two Christmas seasons. The example illustrated here is backstamped 1960.
Winking Santa Mug — Type B
This 1959 mug belongs with the green-eyed Type B Winking Santa pitcher-and-mug set shown on the preceding page. Its taller sculpted face, drooping red cap, and vivid green open eye give it a very different personality from the Type A mug despite the shared winking expression.
The Archive does not currently hold an example of this mug. The photographs shown here document a surviving secondary-market example whose underside retains both the 1959 Holt Howard backstamp and a retailer label.
Bigfoot Santa Mug
One of Holt Howard’s more unusual Santa mugs, this rounded design sits on a pair of small sculpted black boots that give the piece its descriptive Archive name, Bigfoot Santa. The narrow eyes, curled mustache, tiny red nose, and low red cap create a compact figure quite unlike the more conventional face-shaped mugs.
No dated example has yet been documented by the Archive. Many surviving examples examined retain a rectangular gold Holt Howard Japan sticker on the back or underside, but the example illustrated here has no surviving label or backstamp. Until a securely dated example turns up, its production year remains undetermined.
Cloud Santa Mug
This 1967 mug uses the soft, rounded Santa face commonly known as Cloud Santa. The broad yellow cheek area, simple black eyes, bright red nose, and compact handle give it a lighter, more graphic appearance than Holt Howard’s heavily sculpted Santa mugs from the previous decade.
The same Cloud Santa design was used across a broader group of Christmas ceramics, including the egg nog pitcher and handleless cups shown on the preceding page, as well as salt and pepper shakers and several candleholder forms.
Gold Eye Santa Mug
Backstamped 1959, the Gold Eye Santa mug combines a conventional red-and-white Santa palette with one of Holt Howard’s more stylized facial treatments. Gold-painted pupils, long black lashes, a delicately outlined beard, and rosy cheeks give the face an almost theatrical expression.
The gold eyes are the easiest diagnostic feature and help distinguish this design from other late-1950s Santa faces that can appear superficially similar in secondary-market listings.
Merry Whiskers Santa Mug
This 1959 mug matches the Santa design used on the Merry Whiskers pitcher-and-mug set shown on the preceding page. Its single large green eye, tiny pink nose, and deeply sculpted flowing beard make it one of the easiest Holt Howard Santa faces to recognize.
The design also illustrates the loose terminology surrounding Holt Howard’s Christmas wares: surviving company packaging for a related miniature mug/table-favor set identifies this same Santa face as “Winking Santa.”
Jeweled Eye Santa Mug
This winking Santa mug substitutes a small green rhinestone for the open eye, turning a painted facial detail into a sparkling three-dimensional accent. The surviving underside mark identifies Holt Howard but does not show a production year on the example illustrated here.
Original packaging provides unusually good evidence for how the mugs were sold. The box identifies them simply as “Santa Mugs”, emphasizes the jeweled-eye feature, and states that they were packed two to a box. A surviving boxed pair confirms the original presentation.
Candle Plates
Holt Howard carried the same willingness to reinvent Santa into its ceramic candle plates. These low, handled forms pair a saucer-like plate with a sculpted Santa candle well, and surviving examples show several distinctly different faces, handles, and decorative treatments. As with the mugs, dated backstamps survive on some examples while others are known only with foil labels or no surviving mark at all.
Winking Santa Candle Plate — Type A
This broad red-and-white candle plate centers a smiling, winking Santa head within a shallow saucer form. Its open eye is accented in gold, while the looped white handle ends in a jaunty pointed flourish.
The example illustrated here is backstamped 1960.
Winking Santa Candle Plate — Type B
This smaller winking design has a more elongated Santa face and a distinctly different expression from Type A. The sculpted head rises from the center of the red plate, while the white loop handle repeats the curling pointed form seen on several Holt Howard candle-plate designs.
The example illustrated here is backstamped 1958.
Gold Eye Santa Candle Plate
This candle plate carries the same Gold Eye Santa identity seen in the mug above. The solid gold pupils, delicately painted facial details, and green line tracing the beard distinguish the design.
The example illustrated here is backstamped 1959.
Cloud Santa Candle Plate
This candle plate uses the same softly rounded Cloud Santa face found on Holt Howard’s later Christmas beverage wares. Its simplified expression, rounded cheeks, compact red cap, and curling white handle give it a noticeably more graphic appearance than the late-1950s candle plates.
No dated candle-plate example has yet been documented by the Archive. However, dated backstamps on related Cloud Santa pieces consistently point to 1967, making that the strongest current production-year attribution for this form.
Holly Santa Candle Plate
The Archive name Holly Santa refers to the small green sprig tucked into the brim of Santa’s cap. The face is more conventionally modeled than several of Holt Howard’s other candle-plate Santas, with bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and a full curled white beard.
Despite an extensive review of surviving market examples, no dated backstamp has yet been documented for this design. The example illustrated here retains a Holt Howard foil label but no production date, so the Archive currently leaves the year undetermined.
Mustache Santa Candle Plate
The smallest of the non-Starry-Eyed candle plates documented here, this highly stylized design reduces Santa’s face to a few bold features: narrow eyes, a bulbous red nose, and dramatic sweeping red mustache flourishes. The exaggerated simplicity gives it an especially strong mid-century modern character.
The example illustrated here is backstamped 1958.
Taken together, Holt Howard’s Santa mugs and candle plates show just how freely the company reworked a familiar holiday subject. Different faces could appear in the same year, certain designs returned across multiple seasons, and related Santa motifs were adapted from mugs to pitchers, candleholders, and other Christmas wares.
Surviving backstamps, foil labels, original packaging, and repeated examples make it possible to sort many of these variations today, but they also reveal how inconsistent later collector and seller terminology can become. The next page turns to one of Holt Howard’s most distinctive and heavily collected Christmas designs: Starry-Eyed Santa, including the three mug styles and two candle-plate versions referenced here.