>Ideally, we would want a society in which people could clearly identify
>their own needs without outside pressure.
>--
>Michael Perelman
The Toronto Star, December 10, 1994
How merchants got children to buy Christmas
BY WILLIAM LEACH
Christmas is for children, so current wisdom goes. In this excerpt from
"Land of Desire, Merchants, Power and the Rise of a new American Culture,"
cultural historian William Leach traces how merchants - department store
merchants in particular - created the modern myths of Christmas to build
themselves an ever-expanding children's market for toys.
---
FOR MOST of the 19th century, children were enclosed within the adult
society and economy. Unless removed from their homes to serve as
apprentices, they usually worked alongside their parents or with other
adults, nurtured or exploited within these relationships.
But after 1880 or so, growing numbers of children were separated from
adults. New kinds of adult labor (professional, technical, and corporate)
required extensive schooling, and compulsory-schooling laws pulled children
out of the work force.
The growth of wages and salaries, coupled with greater reliance on birth
control, made it possible for many parents to devote more time and money to
individual children. Psychologists and philosophers started to write about
children as a distinct group.
At the same time that their parents were becoming intimately involved in
their welfare, children found themselves cut off from adults in new ways.
They also became vulnerable to the stresses and exhilarations of new needs
and expectations that children of former times barely had the occasion to
imagine.
Retail merchants recognized and exploited this trend. In 1902, Marshall
Field's inaugurated its "Children's Day," because, as Harry Selfridge,
Field's manager, said to his staff, "Children are the future customers of
this store, and impressions made now will be lasting."
Five years later, the store converted its entire fourth floor into "the
Children's Floor." Then, in 1912, Field's advertisers announced in the
Chicago dailies:
"The vast unfolding of the modern child-world is important to this
mercantile institution. Not every person realizes that there is a
children's demand for merchandise and service. Yet there is, naturally.
Little people's interests, their desires, their preferences, and rights to
merchandise are as strong and as definite as those of any adult portion of
the community. An ever-growing attention is being given children and their
requirements at Marshall Field and Co."
Today, toy sections in department stores have shriveled; but in the early
part of the century, they emerged almost out of nowhere to become the
golden goose of holiday merchandising.
They were not simply selling spaces but fantasy places, juvenile dream
worlds where merchants started to place the "child world" on a par with the
adult in strategic marketing importance.
Nurturing this budding consumer desire helped impose heavy market pressures
on adults, creating another channel for the flow of money.
"It was paradise in the toy department," remembered Hughston McBain,
president of Field's in the 1940s, whose mother brought him as a boy from
Grand Rapids, Mich., to Chicago on shopping tours in the early 1900s.
"What a change there has been," said another merchant in 1912, "in the
method of making toy displays, and what a revelation to children.
"Now we have a horde of attractions that were not even dreamed of 10 years
ago."
Merchants transformed the interiors of toy departments. They radiated
display areas with diffused colored light, hung globes of color, and
decorated with "incandescent starlight."
"Give your toy store a name," suggested one proponent of color, "preferably
with color attached. How about At the Sign of the Red Rabbit, Pink Pig, or
Purple Cow?"
Toy departments became among the most visually "pleasing" and "fantastical"
parts of the stores, expressing "the real romance of the fairyland of
toys," and, most profitably of all, the home of Santa Claus.
Before the mid-1890s, Santa Claus seems to have been an icon unattached to
any single institution except the private bourgeois home and hearth (but
even there, he was a relatively new fixture).
But when the large department stores first began to overshadow retail
districts, Santa Claus' status also started to metamorphose. The big
merchants laid claim to him and to the imagery of the Christmas holidays.
The commercialization of Santa Claus would have its most impressive
flowering in the 1920s. But long before then, retailers were groping for
ways to exploit Santa Claus for commercial purposes.
In the 1890s, stores put him in small, out-of-the-way sections. Then other
strategies were tried, such as bringing him from the North Pole to town on
railroads, meeting him at train depots, and depositing him with fanfare at
the central stores.
In the big urban toy departments, Santa Claus sat on lavishly decorated
thrones, often working busily away promising children the presents they
asked for, attended by elf-workers in green and red.
When a minister complained that the focus on Santa Claus seemed out of
keeping with a Christian Christmas, merchant John Wanamaker reassured him:
"Young people very early grow to understand that (Santa Claus) is a mere
pleasantry and tradition," Wanamaker said. "I do not believe that it
detracts from the story of the coming of Christ."
Wanamaker already had a large children's business in the 1890s in his
stores in New York and Philadelphia, but his toy section then was small,
plain, and "just a sort of holiday thing."
By November, 1912, he had decided to "eliminate the business atmosphere" in
his children's sections and to redesign the toy stores "in a manner really
theatrical in its appeal."
He dressed the walls with decorative murals, hung semi-circles of varied
colored lights from ceilings, and planted "terrifying" green dragons and
huge plaster heads of comic figures across the floor, where mirrors
reflected flashes of colored lights.
In December, 1914, he moved the New York toy department from the basement
to the fourth floor. Nov. 9 to Christmas Eve, every morning at 10:30, the
lights were turned off in Wanamaker's toy department and thousands of
children watched a parade, heralded by trumpets and drums and led by a
uniformed brass band of Wanamaker employees.
A stream of storybook characters from Jack the Giant Killer to Chanticleer
and the Funny Clown flowed by, and finally Santa Claus appeared, seated on
a royal palanquin (a kind of raised platform) and carried regally by four
Eskimos to his Royal Red Theatre in Santa Town.
New features were added to the 1919 parade - little girls dressed as
snowflakes and little boys as silver stars and tinkling bells, and a
five-metre locomotive "seemingly self-propelled" and drawing a flatcar with
a big packing box marked "Handle with Care."
Santa Claus occupied a rainbow-colored balcony behind a blue and gold
railing, looking like an Oriental deity surrounded by his elves and gnomes.
He passed out little dolls to the children who sat on his lap and whispered
their desires.
Even the parade, a fixture of holiday life in cities, was turned into a
merchandizing tool.
The department store pre-Christmas circus parade, with floats, clown,
marching bands, reindeer and Santa Claus didn't originate at Macy's famous
Thanksgiving Day Parade. Gimbels in Philadelphia had been moving in this
direction for many years, as had Eaton's in Toronto.
Santa Claus, then - and the whole spectacle of Christmas itself - belonged
to the new constellation of interior enticements that formed a crucial part
of modern merchandising: the determination of businessmen to merchandise
virtually every moment in the human life cycle, from the cradle to the
bride's prenuptials.
Louis Proyect
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