The Santa Claus Museum

A woman named Mary Elizabeth Youens Hopkins was given a Santa Claus figure in 1913, when she was six months old. Her parents noticed that she would play with nothing else and kept giving her Santas, and she went on collecting them for the next seventy seven years, stopping only when she died in 1990. Her family gave the whole collection, more than two and a half thousand pieces, to the Columbus Historical Preservation Trust, and a local benefactor donated a building to put them in. The museum opened later the same year, which makes it one of the few museums anywhere assembled from a single person's uninterrupted lifetime of collecting one thing. Because the family kept it together and gave it away whole, what is on the shelves is a complete record of one person's taste rather than a selection made afterwards by somebody else. It has grown considerably since. There are now more than five thousand Santas across eleven separate collections: figurines, music boxes, dolls, dishes, ornaments and needlework, along with Santa artwork by Norman Rockwell and Thomas Nast and a complete run of Haddon Sundblom's Coca-Cola paintings, which are the images that fixed the modern red suited Santa in the public mind. An expansion in 2019 added two collections and a gallery, and in 2023 the garage became a third gallery while the outside of the building gained a hand painted mural. The opening hours are narrow for most of the year and widen considerably in December, which is either exactly right or exactly wrong depending on when you are driving past.