Galaxy magazine was founded in 1951 by H. L. Gold, who was its editor until 1961. For a number of years, Gold celebrated the Christmas season by commissioning covers from Galaxy’s regular artist Ed Emshwhiller.  This cover, from December 1960, shows a most unusual Santa (count the arms!) upstaged by a robot assistant decorating a Christmas “tree”.

In this imagined future, trees are obviously artificial, decorated with nuts and bolts and valves. Some people think that science fiction is about predicting the future: if so how would they explain the box of reel-to-reel tape underneath the tree? Perhaps it’s a present for someone who is fascinated by relics of that long-ago age, the twentieth century?