JB's Warehouse & Curio Emporium

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...

Clearing out some of the old scanned material before moving on to a fresh batch of recent finds. Let's just say I recently came into the possession of a stack of 70s goodness... We're setting the wayback machine to 1961 for today's presentation, discovered in the back of one of my father's high school yearbooks. For those of you new to these woods, Simpson's was a Canadian department store chain whose flagship store was located at Queen and Yonge, later used as the setting for Today's Special . They were partners in bringing Sears to Canada in the 1950s (the Canadian branch was known as Simpsons-Sears for years, a tag which remained on many Sears doors for years after the partnership ended). Hudson's Bay Company acquired Simpson's in 1978, gradually converting stores to The Bay moniker until the name was retired in 1991. Wikipedia lists where stores were located - I remember being excited when the basement of the Windsor store would convert enti...