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Boston Globe, December 25, 1920 . Brooklyn Citizen, December 24, 1920 . Chicago Tribune, December 24, 1920 . Daily British Whig (Kingston, ON), December 24, 1920 . La Presse, December 24, 1920 . London Free Press, December 24, 1920 . Oakland Tribune, December 25, 1920 . San Francisco Examiner, December 25, 1920 . St. Louis Star, December 24, 1920 . Washington Star, December 24, 1920 . Season's greetings to everyone, and enjoy your holiday in the most satisfying-under-the-present-circumstances way possible.  PS : Wonder what was happening in Toronto during the 1920 Christmas season? Check out Tales of Toronto . 

If these two stories were any indication, some writers (or at least headline writers) had it in for New York City during the 1920 holiday season. Los Angeles Express, December 25, 1920 . Ms. Reed tried to portray the dichotomy between the rich and poor elements of Manhattan, but her views of the indigent and at least two ethnic communities come off like a visitor engaging in slum tourism ("The Ghetto" referred to here is the Lower East Side, then the centre of the city's Jewish population). Not that sunny California was immune to transient communities . Reed was a Los Angeles-based actress and playwright whose works bore titles like Bitter Bread and The Devil's Tattoo .  Toronto Star, December 22, 1920. The reason the reader could guess that Montreal hotels could charge more than New York's was that Quebec loosened restrictions on alcohol after an April 1919 referendum, while the Prohibition era had just gotten underway in the USA. Why not spend the holidays in M...

In this selection of editorial thoughts and hopes from across North America from a century ago, you'll find plenty of references to A Christmas Carol, hopes for an extended period of peace, belief that optimism could overcome pessimism, and a reminder to be kinder to one another beyond December 25.  Border Cities Star (Windsor, ON), December 24, 1920 . Brooklyn Citizen, December 24, 1920.  Edmonton Journal, December 24, 1920 . Los Angeles Express, December 25, 1920. Los Angeles Record, December 25, 1920.  Oregon Daily Journal (Portland), December 25, 1920 . Pacific Commerical Advertiser (Honolulu), December 25, 1920 . Vancouver Daily World, December 24, 1920 .

 Masthead, Boston Post, December 25, 1920. Click on image for larger version. While scrolling through papers for this series, the illustrations published by the Boston Post stood out in terms of quality and variety. It feels like they put extra effort in gathering material from sources ranging from already published prints to popular humour magazines.  With this lush masthead as our entrance, let's explore what was in the Post 's holiday editions. Boston Post, December 25, 1920. Thoughts from the front page on the state of the world that Christmas, one still emerging from war and pandemic (and one that sounds vaguely familiar to those who have lived through 2020), with a touch of American exceptionalism thrown in.  The following was also expressed on the front page: Christmas 1920! It will be a day of joy and gladness in Boston.  Out of the chaos of the world worries it will dawn filled with good cheer for rich and poor alike, for those that are well and those that ...

Los Angeles Express, December 25, 1920. While the editor thought this was an adorable page three picture, it can't help but come off as creepy these days. Is this child having a nightmare? Is Santa secretly a giant demon who takes on the form of a friendly holiday figure? Was Fred Coffey really angry at the Venice Publicity Bureau and decided to come up with the creepiest image possible? Elsewhere on this page, readers were told that Los Angeles "contributed to more Christmas dinners than any other city in the world" thanks to food harvested in Los Angeles County. "It has been told by a California traveler and adventurer that in the trading posts of the South Sea islands he found canned products bearing the labels of Los Angeles." At the Los Angeles County Prison, jailer George Gallagher declared that "the 375 guests in his hostelry had one of the finest spreads in the entire city - not only the entire city, but in all the region west of the Rocky Mountains...

 Buffalo Express, December 24, 1920.  While you may have to replace the family gathered inside this home with a mass Zoom call this year, the sentiment about discord is very relevant when it comes to 2020.  In the right-hand panel, the dude Santa is talking to appears to be wearing one of cartoonist Rube Goldberg's less successful inventions. Kids, don't don live candles as part of your gay apparel, no matter how cool it might seem for an Instagram post or TikTok video.  St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 24, 1920. Another Goldberg cartoon found in papers that Christmas Eve listed off things kids didn't want or want to do for Christmas. Please don't force your kids to recite in video calls, unless they really, really want to. 

This is the first of a series collecting odds and ends from the Christmas and New Year's holiday season 100 years ago. Ads, editorials, recipes, and anything else that caught my eye will be featured between now and January 1. Though not quite the dumpster fire 2020 has been, 1920 was still a turbulent time - the effects of the First World War, the upheavals of 1919, and the Spanish flu were still affecting North Americans. What you'll find in many of the items I'll feature is a sense of hope for the new year, that maybe things might be settling into a new sense of normal or are (finally) pointing toward a brighter future.  First up, a selection of ads from a sector that was doing far better in 1920 than 2020: department stores. Their Christmas Eve/Christmas Day ads generally avoided last-minute sales in favour of uplifting messages, wishes for peace on Earth, or cozy domestic scenes.   Border Cities Star, December 24, 1920. We'll start in Windsor, where Smith's th...