A Hundred Years Ago, Christmas Started With a Catalog

In November 1926, a crate arrived at the White House from Mississippi. Inside was a live raccoon. The sender meant it for the Thanksgiving table, which wasn't as strange as it sounds. Raccoon was ordinary eating in plenty of the rural South.

The Coolidges didn't eat her. Grace Coolidge named her Rebecca, and by Christmas the raccoon had an embroidered collar reading "White House Raccoon." She lived there for years, sometimes on a leash, sometimes riding on the First Lady's shoulders.

That one story tells you most of what you need to know about the holidays a hundred years ago. Families made do. Plans changed. And the best moments usually weren't the ones anybody scheduled.

Thanksgiving was a whole day, not a meal

By the mid-1920s, Thanksgiving had a shape that would look familiar to you, with a few surprises.

Macy's held its first parade in New York in 1924. It wasn't called a Thanksgiving parade yet. It was the Macy's Christmas Parade, and it featured live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo, with Santa riding in at the end to open the holiday shopping season. The giant balloons didn't show up until 1927.

Football was already part of the day. On Thanksgiving 1925, Red Grange, the most famous college player in America, made his professional debut for the Chicago Bears just days after his last game at Illinois. Roughly 36,000 people packed Cubs Park to see him. The game ended 0-0. The Cardinals' punter kicked the ball away from Grange all afternoon, which is about the most 1925 way imaginable to handle a superstar.

But for most families, the day wasn't about New York or Chicago. It was about the table. Dinner came off a wood or coal stove that somebody had been feeding since before sunrise. Relatives came in on the train or drove over roads that were often still dirt. And nobody arrived empty-handed. You brought a pie, a jar of preserves, a sack of nuts from your own trees. Showing up with nothing simply wasn't done.

The catalog was the mall

If you lived on a farm in 1926, Christmas shopping happened at the kitchen table with a pencil.

The federal Parcel Post service started on January 1, 1913. Before that, mailing a heavy package to a rural address was expensive or impossible. After it, the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs could put nearly anything on your porch. Kids wore out the toy pages by December.

And the toys were good. A.C. Gilbert had been selling the Erector Set since 1913. Lincoln Logs, created by John Lloyd Wright (son of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright), had been around since the late 1910s. Johnny Gruelle's Raggedy Ann doll was a decade old. Lionel electric trains were the gift every boy wanted and most families couldn't swing.

Notice something about that list. You had to build most of it. A train needed track laid out on the floor. An Erector Set came as a box of girders, bolts and a booklet. The gift was really a project, and the project usually involved a father on his knees beside his son on Christmas afternoon.

The other thing catalog shopping forced was waiting. You ordered weeks ahead. You watched for the mail carrier. Anticipation wasn't a marketing strategy. It was just how long things took.

Light came in small doses

Picture the tree in a 1926 farmhouse parlor. Glass ornaments, many of them from Germany. Strings of popcorn and cranberries. Paper chains the kids made. And quite possibly real candles clipped to the branches.

Candles on a dried-out evergreen were exactly as dangerous as they sound. Families lit them for a short while, watched them closely, and kept a bucket of water or sand close by. Fire departments and insurers warned about it every year.

Electric lights existed. The first electrically lit tree dates back to 1882, the work of Edward Johnson, a partner of Thomas Edison. But wired strings were pricey, and in 1925 a group of manufacturers banded together as NOMA to make them more affordable. They'd become common over the next decade.

The bigger problem was that most rural Americans couldn't plug anything in. Around one farm in ten had electricity by 1930. That didn't change much until the Rural Electrification Administration arrived in 1935. For a sense of how fast that world turned over, the people who wired it are worth reading about in The Men Who Built Your Ordinary Tuesday.

In the cities, it was a different story. On Christmas Eve 1923, Calvin Coolidge walked onto the Ellipse behind the White House and pressed a button. A 48-foot balsam fir from Vermont lit up with 3,000 electric bulbs. It was the first National Christmas Tree, and the tradition has run ever since.

The radio in the parlor

Pittsburgh's KDKA began commercial broadcasting in 1920. Within a few years, families who could afford a set were pulling chairs around it in the evening.

That's a detail worth sitting with. The first mass entertainment to enter the American home was something you did together, in one room, at one time. Nobody had a private screen. If the music was on, everybody heard it.

Families also read aloud. The New York Sun reprinted its 1897 editorial answering eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," every holiday season, and plenty of fathers read it at the table. Santa, by the way, was already wearing red. Thomas Nast had been drawing him for Harper's Weekly since the 1860s. The soda company that gets the credit came along later.

The hard parts

None of this was a postcard.

A lot of tables in 1926 had an empty chair. The flu pandemic of 1918 killed an estimated 675,000 Americans. More than 116,000 American servicemen died in the First World War. Families who were setting out an extra place for Christmas in the mid-twenties often weren't doing it for a guest.

Children died of diseases that are rare today. Diphtheria was still a killer of kids. Tuberculosis was common enough that Americans had been buying Christmas Seals since 1907 to fund the fight against it, sticking the little stamps on their holiday cards.

Money was tight for plenty of families even in the so-called Roaring Twenties, especially on farms, where crop prices had crashed after the war. That's why an orange in the toe of a stocking shows up in so many people's memories of the era. Winter fruit shipped by rail cost real money. A single orange meant somebody had sacrificed for you.

And yes, the country was officially dry. Prohibition ran from 1920 to 1933, so the holiday table was supposed to be all cider and coffee. The record shows plenty of people ignored that. But a lot of families genuinely didn't, and the holidays went on just fine.

If you want to hear these years in the voices of the women who ran those households, The Pioneer Women Who Wrote It All Down is the place to start. Their diaries are blunt about the work behind every warm memory.

What's worth stealing

You don't need to put candles on your tree. Please don't. But a few things from 1926 still hold up.

• Give one gift that has to be built. A model, a train set, a birdhouse kit. Then sit on the floor and build it with them.
• Make the wait part of it. Order something early and let the kids watch for it. Anticipation is half the fun, and an instant delivery robs them of it.
• Read the same thing aloud every year. "Yes, Virginia" still works. So does a family letter you add to annually.
• Never show up empty-handed. Bring a pie. Then stay after dinner, wash the roasting pan and leave your host's kitchen cleaner than you found it.
• Set the empty chair if you've got one. Name the person. Tell the kids who they were.

The year after Rebecca the raccoon arrived, Coolidge issued a short Christmas message to the country. "Christmas is not a time nor a season, but a state of mind," he wrote. "To cherish peace and goodwill, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas."

He wrote that in a house where Thanksgiving dinner had turned into a family pet. Plans go sideways. The good part survives anyway.