Welcome to the Another Kind Of Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, I’ll be posting a little something unexpectedly Christmassy for you in honour of the festive season. It’s been the weirdest year, so let’s have a bit of fun…

So, do aliens believe in Santa Claus? Do little green men hang their little green stockings up on Christmas Eve? Is Santa’s sleigh actually a UFO (Unidentified Festive Object)? Can Rudolph spacewalk on all four hooves in zero gravity?

According to these fab American pulp sci-fi magazine covers from the late 1950s, the answer to all these questions would seem to be a resounding yes. After last year’s visit to the Christmas celebrations on the ISS, I thought it would be fun to see how fictional spacefarers enjoyed the festive season – so I turned to the pages of one of the most well-known science fiction magazines of the immediate post-war era.

Galaxy Science Fiction may have been somewhat pulpy, but it was also hugely influential and did great Christmas covers (as you can see in the slideshow below). It ran between 1950 and 1980, and was known for publishing work by classic writers like Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, and Harlan Ellison alongside specially commissioned and distinctive cover artwork.

I love the contrast between the determinedly traditional appearance of Santa and the space-age setting in most of these festive cover images – in a lot of ways, this is a reflection of the uncertainties of the period. Post-war reconstruction and the desire for peace and familiarity butted up against the beginnings of the space race and the technology of the Cold War to create something new and perhaps a little unsettling by the middle of the 20th century.

Put simply, these illustrations were bringing our Mr Claus bang up to date, the old and the new neatly combining to create a different take on Santa – something that was already often a feature of 20th century representations of everyone’s favourite seasonal gift-bringer, as we have seen before (at least the reindeer get a look in this time!).

One hopes this space-age, up-to-date Santa manages to get round the whole galaxy on Christmas Eve, and that the aliens remembered to leave out a mince pie or two to fuel his journey…

If you’re feeling festive, you can find lots more Christmas reading and watching from me here – there are now over a decade’s worth of seasonal posts to explore…