As the deadline approaches for ordering last-minute gifts online, most of us must finish our Christmas shopping the analog way—walking into stores and picking things out by hand. If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with an old-fashioned department store, you might get a glimpse of their fantastic holiday displays, packed full of animated elves and artfully piled gifts. But in most places, such scenes are extinct, remaining only in childhood memories.
For over 150 years, familiar brands like R.H. Macy’s invested heavily in over-the-top store displays. Dr. William L. Bird, Jr., a curator at the National Museum of American History and the author of “Holidays on Display,” says that Macy’s made its name in seasonal decor when the New York City store revealed an animated shop window in 1883. “They had what they called a ‘panoply window display,’ where they took over all of the store’s front windows, installing a circular track with a mechanical sleigh. It would move around the window as if Santa were in a parade being pulled by reindeer.” Word spread of the Macy’s miracle, and shoppers would come from across town to marvel at the scene.
By the 1890s, all major department stores, like Selfridge & Co. in London or Marshall Field’s in Chicago, were committed to the Christmas display tradition. Each company attempted to outdo its rivals with more complex holiday displays, making particular use of their new plate-glass windows, a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution.
When Lord & Taylor opened its Fifth Avenue location in New York in 1914, the store took window dressing to new heights by installing hydraulic lifts that would raise displays from a basement studio up to the street-level windows, allowing for dramatic overnight reveals. Other display innovations led to new products, like the first Lionel model train, which was invented in 1900 when the company founder, Joshua Lionel Cohen, began tinkering with ways to make a more lively toy store display. After a customer bought the first prototype right out of the window, Cohen knew he had a winner.
Prior to World War II, many stores were already threading a single narrative across all of their windows, often relating to a particular fairy tale or holiday theme. Marketing departments even created their own Christmas myths, as with Montgomery Ward’s “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” who first starred in a free coloring book given away during the 1939 Christmas season. Most shops aimed these tableaux at children, filling them with colorful candy containers overflowing with chocolates, doll-sized villages amidst miniature snowy mountains, or stacks of bicycles and games stretching up to the ceiling.