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In 2013, an archivist at the Oregon Historical Society came across a beat-up cardboard box of negatives marked “Santa Pictures Not Picked Up.” The box, which had been donated to the O.H.S. in 2001, contained hundreds of photographs taken in the nineteen-fifties and sixties by a man named Earnest Walter Rollins, a photographer in the town of Coquille, Oregon (current population around four thousand). One of the duties of this small-town documentarian, as the pictures evince, was to attend the community’s holiday events and parties to capture the perching of the local children on Santa’s knee. Rollins would develop his photos and notify the families when they were ready for pickup. These are the photos that were never claimed.

Maybe the children in the portraits that were picked up all have a delighted sparkle in their eyes, and are eagerly telling the jolly old man how good they’ve been this year. But most of the kids in these neglected pictures look terrified. Many of the smallest ones are simply weeping, their eyes glassy with tears and their chipmunk cheeks flush with distress. One boy, impeccable in his pea-green double-breasted jacket, clasps his screaming little sister’s arm to keep her in the frame; without parents in the shot, he’s taking his big-brother responsibilities seriously. Another big brother laughs gleefully over the cries of the horrified-looking baby his mother is offering to Santa. The Santas—one with severely arched eyebrows, one with heavy glasses, one with piercing blue eyes, but all peering through what appears to be the same curtain-like beard of flossy fake white hair—fruitlessly try to calm the kids with candy canes from bulk-sized boxes that sit undisguised beside the Santa throne, evidence of the factory-line memory making in which the bewildered children are reluctantly being enlisted. (The adults who occasionally appear in the pictures seem to be having much more fun. They pose coyly, snuggling up to Santa. A pair of young teen-age girls seem amused but uncomfortable, as though not quite sure if they’re fully in on the joke.)

These photos are of an era when candy canes cost five cents and children dressed like extras in “Leave it to Beaver,” complete with saddle shoes and saturated, Wes Anderson-like hues. But the Santas themselves—the red plush; the fake fur; the sloppy, boot-like shoe pieces—could have been photographed yesterday, as could this odd little ritual of coerced Christmas cheer. Children grow up and photos get forgotten, but American holiday traditions that never go quite as planned are forever.