SILVER BELLS ABOVE THE BUSTLE.

Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien correctly suggests, "Christmas was never Christmas without Downtown."

Well, yes.

Yes, with the kids making their list and checking it twice.  "Some of that was still in place in the last days of The America That Worked^(TM), it being a family ritual, come early December, for everyone to scrub up, spiff up, and head Downtown to do the Christmas shopping, and enjoy a meal at the Boston Store restaurant."  Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings, schoolteacher, school gift exchange, check, check, check.

My boyhood Christmas shopping was in downtown Milwaukee, after the streetcars. Mr O'Brien's Pittsburgh still had its Pennsylvania-gauge PCCs.

Pittsburgh never had actual street vendors, but Downtown was filled with these small, warm places that would kick their doors open and even crack the windows to let some of that wintery cool air in, and the beautiful smells of a griddle and a coffeemaker out. Add to that, ubiquitous cigarette and cigar smoke, and the ever-present overcast, courtesy of the town’s steel mills, and you had air that refused to be a bit player in the Downtown experience. All was not sugarplums and lollipops, but it didn’t get any more real.

Red Christmas bells lit up every pole along every street in Downtown. Everyone was going somewhere in a hurry, and they were happy. You could feel it. My mom was happy, I was happy, my brother was happy.

Where your bus stop or streetcar stop was determined whether you were a Gimbel’s family, a Joseph Horne’s family, or a Kaufmann’s family. The department stores were the anchors of Downtown retail and were located in such a way that those of us from the east side of town got off the streetcar closest to Gimbel’s.

The toys were on the 11th floor, and the way to get there was on a narrow (even for a kid), rickety wooden escalator. Once you got to the 10th floor and stood at the base of the escalator to the 11th floor, you could look up to the top and see an overhead miniature train track. If the train was operating, that meant Santa Claus was in the house. If not, he wasn’t. That’s how the store communicated.

I was conditioned. Just like Ralphie and his little brother in the film A Christmas Story. The Downtown department store Santa was the only Santa. At no other time in my Christmas season did I ever cross paths with the man in the red suit. Only in Gimbel’s, so for me, that was like a visit to the North Pole.

Milwaukee's Gimbel's had the same sort of narrower, wooden-step escalators on the upper two or three floors, including to the toy department on the top floor.  No overhead miniature train.  There was a kid-sized monorail orbiting above the Boston Store toy department.

Since then, the Festive Season has changed, and, Mr O'Brien urges, not for the better.

At Christmastime, Downtown really came alive. It had an energy that I’ve only seen replicated in other downtowns in other cities.

Eventually, the malls stole Santa’s thunder, along with his department stores, and that’s where a different kind of bustle arose. This one was climate-controlled, without that feeling of a raw, wild city that only a Downtown could produce. People were in less of a hurry, and you couldn’t see your breath. You didn’t have to worry about stepping in slush-filled potholes, and as an adult, I liked that. But I did wonder if Christmas lost something along the way with the shift to the suburbs.

Since the 1990s, the internet has done to the malls what the malls did to downtowns. That evolution hit hyperspeed five years ago when the pandemic turned the retail economy into online shopping and home delivery-everything.

Well, yes.

In fact, the big department stores of The America That Worked^(TM) might have sown the seeds of their own destruction by setting up branches as anchor stores in the suburban shopping centers, later enclosed malls.  The branch stores had fewer square feet of retail space, thus the likes of the furniture and appliance departments served more explicitly as order-takers, look at the demonstration model or leaf through the catalog, and arrange delivery, and the food courts took the place of the "elegant tea rooms" at the downtown stores (fashion shows during the week, opportunities for the kids to have breakfast with Santa come Christmas), and maybe mall management would consent to have a suitably wholesome musical act in the central space.

That the malls became a sort of hangout for unsupervised teens simply made shoppers of all ages more willing to transact business on-line.  If you're going to have to arrange delivery anyway ...

And yes, there might still be animated display windows at Macy's on Herald Square and Marshall Field's Macy's on State Street.  The smaller department stores in places smaller than Pittsburgh or Milwaukee used to feature them.  Now, you might find them in a museum.

Those are original working displays from the long-gone H. C. Prange of Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Paul Scott shared similar sentiments about the nostalgic displays.

"Oh, I just remember going to the Prange's window displays when I was a little kid. It was always the big thing you did on Thanksgiving day. You eat Thanksgiving dinner, and then we'd all hop in the car and drive to Sheboygan and we'd look at Prange's windows," he said.

The 'Holiday Memories' exhibit started in 1991. For the first 10, it was more or less a regular Christmas display. Then in 2001, the museum began to put out the original Prange's pieces which became an instant success.

The exhibit serves two purposes: providing nostalgia for older visitors while introducing younger generations to Christmas traditions of the past. Holiday Memories has become the museum's most popular annual exhibit, drawing thousands of guests each year.

There are sufficient Prange's window display components in the museum's collection to allow them to offer a different tribute each Festive Season.  Without the snow crunching and the kids bunching and the Salvation Army silver bells ringing, it's not the same, preservation efforts notwithstanding.