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  Buffalo Times, December 18, 1921. To compensate for not being able to visit Buffalo anytime soon (thanks Omicron!), I'm settling for flipping through the pages of the city's newspapers during the holiday season a century ago.  OK, that's not the entire truth. Awhile back, I spent a few days down a rabbit hole leafing through the Sunday editions of the great selection of early 20th century Buffalo papers found on Newspapers.com. There was a plan to begin a regular series of posts on Sunday papers of the era, focusing on a century ago, but the time wasn't there. File this idea under "projects for 2022." Still, material like this awkward shot of Santa hovering over a sleeping girl didn't deserve to be left in the can this holiday season. Illustration by Dan Smith, Buffalo Times, December 18, 1921.  A children's kingdom of toys and fairy tales, with characters ranging from classic comic strip character Krazy Kat to dolls that are inappropriate to own a c...

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...

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...

 Hamilton Times, December 24, 1909. Click on image for larger version. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the 1909 version of a holiday-themed zombie movie, where Santa is under siege from children transformed into the living dead who think jolly old St. Nick would make a good Christmas dinner. The expression on Santa's face suggests his effort to fend them off may be doomed.  Do you think that in their efforts to diversify their Christmas movies, Hallmark would consider a heartwarming holiday zom-com? This odd drawing, combined with last post's odd Inuit stories , lead us into an odd mixture of holiday items presented by the Hamilton Times, a Liberal-leaning paper which published from 1859 to 1920. Canadiana has a sampling of issues, primarily from 1907 to 1909 .  Hamilton Times, December 24, 1909. When a man is in pain and misery, you don't leave him (literally) hanging from wires just so you can run and grab a disbeliever.  Half-an-hour passed before Tommy return...

Hamilton Times, December 24, 1909. In 1909, the Arctic was the exciting frontier of North America, thanks to Robert Peary's still-contested claim of having reached the geographic North Pole. The Inuit living in the region were treated as an exotic species, to the point that, in the 1890s, New York's Museum of Natural History asked Peary to bring back "specimens" for study .  By this point, the myth of Santa Claus residing in the North Pole was established, which led to an obvious question: how did people in the far north actually celebrate Christmas? The answer: not in any way which pleased close-minded people to the south. The questions "disturbing young citizens" might not be the same ones which would disturb them today. This piece feels like a Christian missionary's wet dream. Look at these poor creatures who don't know the happiness everyone else experiences on December 25! It's cold! All they do is sit around joylessly on blocks of ice as ...

Don Mills Mirror , November 22, 1972 Yorkdale Shopping Centre has earned more than the usual publicity for one of its Santas this year -- " Fashion Santa ," a sartorially-smart take on the jolly old elf. While this take on St. Nick is designed to appeal to adults, kids can still find a traditional Santa at the mall much as they have since the 1960s. Yorkdale was among the North York malls the Don Mills Mirror visited in 1972 to talk to the men behind the beards. While I mentioned this story in a "Vintage Toronto Ads" column for Torontoist , here is the full article. Don Mills Mirror , December 13, 1972. Click on image for larger version.

Source: the Mirror , December 13, 1972. Click on image for larger, readable version. Now that my apartment has more or less been cleaned up, time to sift through the mess of files on my computer. Buried in folders with titles like "Future Story Ideas," "Toronto Ads," and the vague "Misc.," are loose ends I've collected over years of research, waiting for their moment in the spotlight. Sometimes, the news cycle rewards the long waits these .jpg and .pdf files endure in the bowels of the Warehouse-o-matic 3000. Others are useless until the right time of the year rolls around. Take the story above, a 1972 profile of North York's finest Santas. I suspect that any jolly old St. Nick 40 years on who gently but firmly tells a kid they're a greedy brat would receive a warning at the minimum, an escort by the security guard elves at the maximum.