12 Days of Mrs. Claus, the Real Heroine of Christmas

While Christmas celebrations always mention Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus has for years been relegated to an afterthought.

Just think: Christmas without Santa is almost impossible to imagine. 

Whose lap would our little ones sit on at the department store?

Who’d be making their lists and checking it twice?

Who would we be leaving milk and cookies out for Christmas Eve?

No matter how you slice the figgy pudding, Santa’s presence (and bowl full of jelly) tends to dominate the Christmas cultural landscape.

Yet we all know that there is someone else that deserves more shine. 

Someone whose efforts allow Santa to take the stage for his taxing one work day a year.

Someone who keeps the North Pole running like clockwork.

We’re talking about Mrs. Claus, the inspiring female figure of the North Pole (who may or may not have a first name).

To celebrate this legendary lady, we’re following in the Christmas tradition by sharing 12 days of Mrs. Claus. 

Below you’ll find 12 days of stories, books, movies, and music to help you celebrate Christmas’s leading lady, and really get into the holiday spirit.

Let’s start our list off with a bop! This ode to Mrs. Claus is exactly what we’re after in celebrating the Lady of the North, and Idina Menzel and Ariana Grande put to music what most of us have been thinking all these years.

“I'm not complaining, I'm sure it's very draining

Pulling off a Christmas Eve world tour

My point in this is it's his marvelous missus

Who gets it done the other three-six-four

Who's really checkin' all those lists

And fillin' all them shelves

She's a mister multitasker who works faster than the elves

Who keeps the North Pole hot 'till winter thaws?

The answer's clear, it's Mrs. Claus.”

This fitting tribute to Mrs. Claus is from Idina Menzel’s 2019 album “Christmas: A Season of Love.”

As if this song weren’t special enough, it gets a little seasonal boost from its co-writers Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. 

Regonize their names? Then you may have seen the credits for Frozen and Frozen II a few too many times!

In Carol of the Coin, our Christmas coin and Christmas story book, Mrs. Claus finds out that her beloved Santa Claus has been more tired than usual lately, so tired, in fact, that it’s threatening his Christmas Eve delivery. Part of the reason for his exhaustion? Having to stay up late each night reading the Naughty and Nice Reports.

With the help of the head elf Herb, Mrs. Claus jumps into action and leads this story about the origins of Christmas cheer. Get our "North Pole Delivery" bundle of Christmas coin and story book to read what happens next!

For our first Christmas story, we wanted to put Mrs. Claus right at the center of the action - and from the hundreds of you who helped us bring this magical fairy tale to life, we can see we weren’t alone!

In this Hallmark Entertainment classic (predating the legendary Hallmark channel by just a few years!), Mrs. Claus - played by Angela Lansbury - is tired of being cooped up at the North Pole.

With just a week to go until Christmas in 1910, Mrs. Claus hitched up the reindeer to the sleigh and takes a trip on her own. 

Forced down in NYC, she then becomes friends with the locals from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and helps them with a whole range of era-specific issues, including women’s suffrage and child labor issues.

Plus, it’s a musical!

For this writer’s money, the original Santa Clause has to be considered one of the finest pieces of Christmas entertainment ever made.

Does the acting age well? Who cares! We can’t judge nostalgia.

With those high expectations, the sequel - which features a plotline about Santa needing to find and marry his Mrs. Claus - is another Christmas hit. Beyond the starring role for the to-be-Mrs. Claus, this movie also adds more lore to the character by giving her a first name: Carol.

If you’re looking for a children’s story that features a gung-ho Mrs. Claus showing that she can do anything her husband can, Mrs. Claus Takes The Reins has you covered.

The impetus for her action? A sniffly Santa Claus who can’t get out of bed to do his yearly delivery.

Fortunately, the reindeer are ready to take Santa Claus’s better half and deliver presents throughout the world - even when some errant ducks get in their way!

In order to fully appreciate the legend of Mrs. Claus, we’ve got to go back to where the legend began.

In this case legend is a fitting word, as it is with James Rees’s “A Christmas Legend” that Mrs. Claus was introduced to the world in 1849.

The story itself is about an American family that is visited by a strange couple one Christmas Eve. That couple, it turns out, are Santa Claus and his… wife! Though this is not the first reference of Mrs. Claus or Mrs. Santa Claus (that would come in 1851 in the Yale Literary Magazine), this story is still celebrated for introducing the caring lady who would come to be synonymous with the good cheer of the season. 

You can read the whole story here.

Another testament to Mrs. Claus’s importance to the season? She is a primary character in the Christmas classic “The Year Without A Santa Claus.”

Throughout the film, she works to show Santa that there’s still Christmas spirit left in the world. All Santa wants to do is sit at home in the North Pole and mope. 

Though Christmas movies are far from the Marvel Cinematic Universe of interconnected plotlines and universes, this depiction of Mrs. Claus as optimistic, bright, and supportive clearly laid the groundwork for her solo adventures in the years to come.

Though not perhaps an all-ages story about Mrs. Claus, this Cheech and Chong sketch is famous not just for being the duo’s first single, but also for Mrs. Claus’s, shall we say, entrepreneurial activities.

In this re-telling of the tale of Santa Claus, Cheech recounts the lovely couple as his neighbors, including a particularly memorable story about Mrs. Claus’s special brownies.

Far from the only substance reference in the piece, we’ll mention again that this might be a Mrs. Claus origin story best kept for when the kids are in bed waiting for Santa Claus to come on Christmas Eve.

While it may seem odd to share an advertising campaign about Mrs. Claus, it’s actually quite appropriate. Given how successful Coca-Cola has been with their Santa Claus campaigns, it’s about time Mrs. Claus got the same love.

With this campaign by British company Mark & Spencer, we see a more modern Mrs. Claus, one who’s game to ride snowmobiles and pilot helicopters in the name of saving Christmas. 

Plus, she has a more alluring, secretive side that’s only fitting for the family known for sprinting around the globe and delivering presents in the dead of night!

Perhaps one of the classiest odes to Mrs. Claus, Nat King Cole’s “Mrs. Santa Claus” lists out all of the good that Mrs. Claus does around the North Pole in that classic, Christmas song style. 

From keeping the reindeer fed to reading notes from the world’s girls and boys, Nat King Cole and the song’s writers (Hazel Houle, Jack Fulton, and Lois Steele) let us know how much Mrs. Claus means to Christmas.

One of the joys of tracking down movies and media about Mrs. Claus is trying to pin down just what her elusive first name is.

In Mistletoe Over Manhattan, another Hallmark masterpiece, Nick Claus’s wife Rebecca Claus is concerned about how much he’s been working. This is a far cry from other holiday pieces that portray him as a one-day-a-year wonder. Given that we’ve all experienced firsthand that Christmas takes more than one day to pull off right, anyone can identify with Santa’s feeling a bit exhausted by it all.

In the film, Rebecca Claus heads to New York where she ends up working a Christmas miracle of her own, rediscovering the holiday spirit that she’s worrying might have been lost.

We’ve saved the weirdest for last and queued up the clip above so you can see what’s so significant about this otherwise extremely campy movie:

Mrs. Claus’s first appearance on film!

Though potentially one of the worst films ever made, it is not without its merit. That’s because the Christmas Specials Wiki lists it as the first known representation of Santa’s wife on film. While this story may not actually be centered on her, it is a trailblazing tale in its own right. 

(And in case you’re curious, that is a link to the whole film, so try not to get sucked in!)