10/17/2026
Many of my clients speak of this place and every time it’s quality furniture!!
If you grew up in San Antonio, Christmas did not start on Thanksgiving. It started the Saturday before, when Santa Claus climbed up the side of Joske's.
For years the day went the same way. Santa flew into the San Antonio airport, where men from Joske's met him and he handed out gifts to children from the orphanages. Then he climbed aboard a San Antonio Fire Department truck and rode downtown, where the crowds packed Alamo Plaza for a show and a handful of candy. And then, with the whole plaza watching, Santa started up a hundred foot ladder to the roof of the store.
Waiting for him at the top was the other Santa. Joske's kept a mechanical Santa Claus about thirty feet tall up on the roof, waving a motorized mitten six feet long down at the street. The real one climbed up beside him and then disappeared down a chimney twenty five feet tall.
The children did not have to go far to find him again. On the fourth floor was Fantasyland. It opened in 1960, dreamed up by the store's display director, Wendell Potter, and built in Joske's own workshops. It was a whole little village called Christmas Lane, with more than a hundred animated animals running a bakery, a print shop, a candle shop, a post office, a toy shop and a sweet shop. A band played in a forest clearing with the lights moving in time to the music, and a little train carried twenty four children at a time around three hundred and fifty five feet of track through a snowy forest of silver trees.
Joske's had been part of San Antonio since Julius Joske opened it in 1867. Dillard's bought the chain in 1987, and in August of 2008 it closed the downtown store for good. The building is part of the Rivercenter shops now, and Fantasyland is gone.
But for a whole lot of San Antonio families, that roofline is where Christmas began.
