Christmas 100 Years Ago

Another lobby display for the Main library that I got to help put together.  I was asked to find some historical holiday items from our periodicals collection - I decided to focus on Christmas 100 years ago and looked for items in magazines from 1912 (and a few from 1911 and 1913).  Of course, not everything could fit into the display case, so I'm also including some extra items here.

Before narrowing down the dates, I did find some very pretty covers for Ladies Home Journal, one from 1897 and another from 1902. 

Also in the December 1902 issue of Ladies Home Journal were some interesting ideas for decorating in a feature called "The Christmas Room: Showing Six Novel Ways of Decorating It." 

They suggest a "Jacob's Ladder" as an inexpensive alternative to a Christmas tree made from a step ladder covered in cheese cloth with evergreens, candles, cranberries and popcorn decorations and presents arranged on the steps.

Another of the "novel" ideas is a Christmas ship starting with a wooden frame, draped with muslin and hung with cotton for the sails, surrounded with cotton batting for icicles and sprinkled with "diamond dust."  The presents are placed inside the ship.

Fashion ideas for the holidays were also popular in the 1902 issue of Ladies Home Journal and included "Christmas Party Dresses for Girls" and some caps, collars, and scarves for "The Grandmother at Christmas Time."

Moving forward a few years, the 1911 and 1912 issues of Ladies Home Journal include Christmas poems, stories, songs (with sheet music), and articles as well as ideas for holiday decorating, cooking, dressing and gift-giving (with patterns for gifts to make).  Just a couple of the gift-giving and/or gift-making ideas include some cut-out cards to attach to Christmas presents and a pattern with cut-out decorations for a toy shop, made from a shoebox, where a little girl's dolls can go shopping.

The "Christmas Editorial" from 1912 offers a plea to make Christmas less about materialism and more about children:

"To put your hand in your pocket and extract a coin or a banknote, that is one thing.  Some folks buy grand pianos and diamond tiaras that way.  But to put your soul and heart into a gift that makes it an expression of your thought and your love, that is Christmas giving: that is of Christ and like Christ.  That is as near as we can come to God when He made to this world His Christmas present: His only begotten Son.  If, instead of stabbing Christmas to the heart with our frantic eleventh-hour rush for presents bought from a sense of duty, we would make it a children's day, what a warmer, happier Christmas it would be for us all."

Each year seems to feature a color spread of ideas for the Christmas table, like this one from the 1911 issue featuring "Christmas Baskets from the Farm" and "The Christmas Table and its Dainties." I especially liked the wishbone cake (see close-up) with chocolate frosting and actual wishbones stuck to the sides. 

Here are some more Christmas table pages with pretty color pictures of christmas cakes and other home-made dishes:

Finally, in the 1913 issue of Ladies Home Journal, I found a very nice two-page color spread of  Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol retold in pictures by Arthur I. Keller.  Keller actually illustrated a volume of The Christmas Carol, which came out in 1914, as well as many other books, and contributed to most of the popular magazines at the time.  He even illustrated a Sherlock Holmes story in its first printing in an American magazine. 

 More to come in a future post about Christmas issues of other magazines from 1912!