The Everything Family Christmas Book (49 page)

—From the foreword to The Christmas Book of Legends and Stories, a popular 1944 release

Enter Bing Crosby, Singing

There’s a lot to be said against a White Christmas. It is awkward, trying to fit an old-fashioned Christmas on a new-fashioned, hard-surfaced world, obliterating its familiar signposts, cunningly disguising its modern dangers, hiding its unpleasantness under a soft veil.

But here it is, the enchanted world you looked out on as a kid, white, mystic, beautiful, through which jovial creature half fat man, half spirit came riding, a transformed world in which anything could happen. All you had to do was believe hard enough that it could. Listen! Sleigh bells? Do you suppose there is such a spirit, after all?

—Providence Journal, December 24, 1947

Christmas Advertising in the 1940s

More than 3 million faces testify!

The Schick Shaver is a gift men really use!
Swell
for service men! Soldiers, sailors, or marines … because they can be plugged in at camp or on a boat—and work!

—Ad appearing shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

Christmas in the 1950s

Television became perhaps the greatest influence during the 1950s, bringing programs such as
The Honeymooners
and
Father Knows Best
into living rooms across the nation, first in black and white, and then in color. Rock and roll arrived on the music scene, as did a polio vaccine on the health front. Mr. Potato Head, Frisbees, and Barbie dolls made names for themselves in the toy departments.

Your Christmas Budget in the 1950s

With items such as slide projectors becoming more available, everyone could be treated to pictures of the family vacation!

• Slide projector: $43.95

• Men’s topcoat: $18.00

• Quilted rayon and taffeta robe: $8.95

• Pipe and lighter set: $1.94

• Television set with “lifesize seventeen-inch screen”: $229.95

• Donald Duck xylophone: $2.65

• Mickey Mouse train set: $1.59

• Musical milk mug: $6.95

In the News in the 1950s
A Message from Independence

“Our hearts are saddened on this Christmas Eve by the suffering and the sacrifice of our brave men and women in Korea. We miss our boys and girls who are out there … they are trying to prevent another world war. We pray to the Prince of Peace for their success and safety.”

—President Harry Truman in Independence, Missouri, December 24, 1951

Forsaking the White House tradition of sending formal Christmas cards, President and Mrs. Eisenhower commissioned cards that feature drawings of them in caricature, wearing bright red suits with white trimming and wishing the recipient a merry Christmas. Clearly, observers note, this is a First Couple that does not mind letting down its guard now and then.

The Choice

If Western civilization dies in a rain of nuclear explosions, it will be written in a later day that the tragedy of our century was the inability of man to apply to the problems of peace the genius that loosed a most fearful Armageddon. “Peace on earth,” the angels sang 2,000 years ago, but peace today is as tremulous as thin fog at dawn along the shore…. Today is a day for happiness … but we shall end by trading that happiness for horror if we cannot recapture the humility, the simplicity, the understanding, the faith, the affection, and the lack of fear that marked the shepherds who saw His tiny fists wave in the lamplight of a stable at Bethlehem.

—From an editorial in the
Providence Journal,
December 25, 1957

Christmas Advertising in the 1950s

Hectic Xmas Shopping Give You Gas, Indigestion, “Hurry-Worry Stomach"?

You shop too fast, eat on the run, worry. No wonder your stomach gets upset! But you can now get immediate long-lasting relief—with AMITONE! Only AMITONE contains GLYCINE, that automatically regulates excess stomach acids. Minty tablets melt on your tongue. At drugstores.

—An ad from the early 1950s

Christmas in the 1960s

A pivotal decade, the 1960s were marked by the Civil Rights movement, the rise of the hippies, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, and the race to be the first nation to reach the moon. Postwar baby boomers began to transition from teenagers to adults against a background of toys that included Easy Bake Ovens, the Etch-a-Sketch, and GI Joe.

Your Christmas Budget in the 1960s

Kitchen convenience was offered in style in the 1960s—never mind the refrigerator, check out the lazy Susans and the electric can openers!

• Lazy Susan: $4.76

• Electric can opener: $7.77

• Ladies’ stretch slacks: $3.97

• Aluminum Christmas tree and stand: $2.99

• Monaural copy of Ray Conniff’s LP
Memories Are Made of This:
$2.40

• Stereophonic copy of Ray Conniff’s LP
Memories Are Made of This:
$2.90

• "Your kiddie’s Polaroid picture taken with Santa himself”: 49 cents

• Viewmaster stereo viewer in “rugged, shock-resistant plastic”: $1.75

• Sled: $3.00

• “Poor Pitiful Pearl” doll and “change of clothes that makes her a princess”: $8.00

In the News in the 1960s
Trading Stamps to the Rescue

Mrs. Phyllis Stephens, 20, of Scotia, New York, said she faced a gloomy holiday when she learned that neither she nor her husband, Corporal Luther C. Stephens, could afford the $146 round-trip fare from his station at the U.S. Marine Training School at Memphis, Tenn. Then she remembered that she had collected 80 books of trading stamps. The young wife knew the stamps were redeemable for gifts and in desperation sent a telegram to the Triple S Blue Stamps company in Hackensack, New Jersey. The firm decided to play Santa Claus. It told Mrs. Stephens it would supply a plane ticket to bring her Marine home Friday and return him to Memphis Christmas night.

—United Press International report, December 21, 1961

The animated television special
A Charlie Brown Christmas
premiered in December 1965, with Charles Schulz’s memorable cartoon-strip characters and the sad little Christmas tree that manages to brighten up the whole season. Reviews and ratings were both excellent, and the show became a staple holiday broadcast in every following year.

A Christmas Greeting with an Interesting Perspective

… And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called He seas; and God saw that it was good. And from the crew of
Apollo 8,
we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.

—Message from
Apollo 8
astronauts, Christmas Eve, 1968

Christmas Advertising in the 1960s

If He Has Everything: Bottled Portable Radio, $35.00

Would you ever guess that there is an eight-transistor radio tucked inside this bottle of “Ballantine’s Whisky"? Its quality components give it a fine full sound and selectivity. Runs on penlight batteries!

—From a 1966 ad for a department store

Christmas in the 1970s

Protests against the Vietnam War increased as the decade opened; it would close with the capture of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, after seeing the end of the war and the resignation of a president. North American families took to the highways in station wagons, sporting mood rings and playing with Rubik’s Cubes, skateboards, and Matchbox cars.

Your Christmas Budget in the 1970s

Ah, the 8-track cassette player! Music technology has come a long way since the 1970s, but the 8-track was an innovation in its own time.

• Stereo set with turntable and 8-track player: $199.95

• AM radio mounted in headphones: $14.95

• Lava lamp: $45.00

• "25-function” calculator: $49.95

• CB radio: $89.95

• Bionic Man action figure: $6.66

• Baby Thataway: $8.88

• Ten-speed bicycle: $99.50

• Evel Knievel stunt cycle: $9.96

In the News in the 1970s
Pining for the PreWatergate Christmas

New York Times
columnist Russell Baker, writing in December, 1974—the first Christmas of the Ford administration—recorded his wistful observations of the gray holidays of his immediate Washington past. Baker wrote solemnly that, back then, white Christmases were out; gray ones were much more fashionable, because that was the color that could get you past security. “Several days before Christmas,” Baker recalled, “everyone in the Government seemed to leave town, and we would be left alone in the great empty city with only the wiretap police, the undercover CIA agents, and the holdup men….”

Understanding Santa Is Troublesome for Laotians on Their First American Yule

Khamchanh Chantarangsy was preparing about a dozen of his fellow Laotians for their first American Christmas … They had never heard of Santa Claus … Now that the refugees are in America, he said, “We try to do everything like American

Khamchanh interpreted [for his friend Xiong Ton]: “He says it is quite strange, quite interesting but quite impossible for this man to penetrate the roof of his house with such a large sack of toys.”

—From the
Providence Journal,
December 24, 1976

Christmas Advertising in the 1970s

Santa, Conserve Your Energy!

No need to shop around … just one stop at Azuma—thousands of gift ideas for everyone on your list—their huge selection will “sleigh” you!

—Ad for a New York store during the height of the oil crisis

Christmas in the 1980s

The beginning of the end for the Cold War marked the close of this decade, as the Berlin Wall fell in Germany. Here at home, the drive toward space continued with the first reusable space vehicle, the Space Shuttle, in 1981. Computers arrived in homes and schools, while video games such as Nintendo and Pac Man gained huge followings. Shoppers flocked to stores in search of Cabbage Patch Dolls, while other hot toys included Trivial Pursuit and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.