christmas 1920: season's greetings from your local department store
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...