Remembering department stores at the holidays

Perhaps like me, some of you watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade yesterday. This year's event featured all the pageantry we've come to expect from the Macy's parade, and it's amazing to realize this beloved event has been held 85 times. If you too have memories of a colorful holiday display at a store, whether at Macy's in New York or at your town's favorite department store, then you may wish to check out the book "Holidays on Display" by William L. Bird Jr.

The book discusses a variety of topics I wouldn't have thought to put together, but now I can see they are indeed related: store window displays, the new mechanical and electrical effects in window displays, outdoor Christmas lights, mechanized characters, parade floats, and the various Christmas villages in department stores of yesteryear. The book is packed with great artwork, ranging from stores' vintage Christmas souvenirs to period photos of store Christmas villages in the planning stages.

I can't believe I never knew the history of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," but fortunately Bird filled me in with the news that this tale was created by catalog copy writer Robert L. May of Montgomery Ward. The book includes a photo of the red "Rudolph" booklet the store gave to children in 1939.

For many Baby Boomers today, a department store Christmas display is one of their earliest memories. One of the more memorable displays in retail history was at Marshall Field in Chicago, where Bird writes of "the store's magnanimous public gestures at Christmastime. These included the celebrated Walnut Room restaurant accommodating the largest natural indoor tree in America, decorations for the store's main aisle under two multistoried light wells including the famed Tiffany dome, and thirteen State Street show windows." Field's also was home of the popular display village known as "Cozy Cloud Cottage." For those of us who wax nostalgic about the loss of these and other stores at holiday time, "Holidays on Display" will be a happy reminder of what this retail season used to look like.