Can Christmas be about gender? Apparently so, if the paucity of female Santas is anything to go by. There have, in fact, been cases of Australian women donning the secular red and white Santa attire as far back as 1930 and there is no reason why we couldn’t have more female Santas today.
In 1935, Queensland’s Daily Mercury reported on aviator Nancy Bird Walton, “The Angel of the Outback”, piloting a female Santa Claus into the north-western corner of New South Wales.
Daily Pictorial, Thursday 25 December 1930.
Bird was a volunteer with the Far West Children’s Health Scheme, flying nurses to remote parts of Australia, and transporting patients. “A girl was the first Father Christmas for the isolated area,” the article noted.