An Old-Fashioned Christmas

There’s no way to think about Christmas without thinking of past Christmases. Our point of reference for the holiday itself forces us to look back a year or two—maybe that one time when it snowed, or when you received a special present—or even decades, which meld into centuries. For me, it is the cultural history of the holiday that I find especially interesting, and this is reflected in popular, “disposable” art such as greeting cards and magazine advertisements. 

One of my favorite time-capsule images of Christmas was created by Haddon Sundblom (1899-1976), an artist best known for his advertising work. (Whether you know it or not, you are most likely familiar with Sundblom: he created the iconic portrayal of Santa Claus for Coca-Cola in the 1930s.) My favorite Sundblom image is an advertisement for 7-Up from 1957. Prominently in the foreground, a table is spread with a tempting feast, including an “only from the 1950s” concoction of shrimp, fresh vegetables, and wieners, and of course, prodigious amounts of 7-Up. The light from the candles illuminates two men and a woman and throws shadows on the back wall. The image glows. The man on the left reaches for a green bottle while the featured couple laughingly holds their own: the woman herself resembles the beverage, festively dressed in a green party dress with pearls and red lipstick. Her gold bracelet catches the candlelight and glints. Farther back to the right, and through a doorway, we see an older man in a green tie sitting comfortably with a Christmas tree being decorated in the background. The ornaments shine, the ham glistens. Everything about the scene radiates warmth, laughter, and happiness. How I would love to be a part of it! 

Haddon Sundblom for 7-Up (1957)

But of course, this is physically impossible. “Nostalgia” is spelled in the shadows that fall from the word “Christmas.” Much of what we deem to be the most classic elements of Christmas are filled with melancholic longing, such as the songs sung by Bing Crosby in the 1940s—“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know,” and “I’ll be home for Christmas/If only in my dreams.” The cycle of nostalgia repeats itself across the decades, and for me always ends up somewhere in the period of American life easily summed up as “mid-century,” as we see depicted in Sundblom’s 7-Up advertisement. 

Another artist, Eulalie Banks (1895-1999), called upon bright colors and enticing compositions to charm the viewer into her world, though in a different, but similarly underrated, format—children’s book illustrations. Her illustrations filled my eyes as a child: anthropomorphized, chubby animals, cherubic children, flowers you could almost eat, peaceful scenes of domestic life. Eulalie, as she called herself, was born in London and later adopted Southern California as her home. She painted many murals in the area, both in private and public spheres. In 1983 she was asked to remove gnomes, elves, and fairies from a mural in Pasadena—unsurprisingly, this upset her:

"They told me the children didn't know what they were," she told The [Los Angeles] Times afterward. "It's cruel [how] children don't read anymore. . . . Now they sit and watch television." Asked what she would say to a modern child, she said: "Do believe in fairy tales. Hang on to the magic. Never lose your sense of wonder and whimsy, or you'll lose a part of your soul." (Taken from The Times’ obituary from 1999, written by Myrna Oliver; emphasis mine.)

The whimsy in Eulalie’s illustrations for the poem “The Sugar-Plum Tree” by Eugene Field (1850-1895) in The Gateway to Storyland fairly jumps off the pages. The opening lines of Field’s poem are a type of heaven, to be sure:

Have you ever heard of the Sugar-Plum Tree?
‘Tis a marvel of great renown!
It blooms on the shore of the Lollipop sea
In the garden of Shut-Eye Town…

Eulalie's illustrations for Field's poem in The Gateway to Storyland. (The first known usage of the word "sugarplum" was in 1627, according to Merriam-Webster.) 

Though not specifically Christmas in subject matter, the word “sugarplum” recalls Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (“Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”) and Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“The children were nestled all snug in their beds;/While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads”), two bastions of holiday music and poetry. “The Sugar-Plum Tree” tells of a tree covered in candy that falls for children when a chocolate cat jumps upon the branches, pestered by a gingerbread dog below. The pastel-colored scenes remind me of the pinks, turquoises, and light greens of Shiny Brite ornaments popular in in the 1940s and 50s.

A box of old ornaments in Forestwood Antique Mall, Dallas, Texas, 2016. 

The first design I did is an ode to mid-century Christmases. You’ll find the plummy purples and orangey warmth in the Sundblom image reflected as actual plums and oranges, an old-fashioned treat, rings of pineapple with maraschino cherries, so beloved by housewives in the 1950s and 60s, and three candles throwing too-perfect circles of light. 

The second design I did is a nod to Eulalie and Field, mid-century pastels, and old-fashioned holiday accoutrements: pink and turquoise aluminum bells, bubble lights, and vintage candies, including ribbon candy, peppermint sticks, lemon drops, and black licorice. I also placed the design against a paper sack to emphasize the “general store” quality of the treats. 

Both of them overlap in the subject matter of Christmas nostalgia: the smaller, more modest things, such as banged-up books, forgotten magazines, and the ephemera of material culture. We can escape to a time which we can’t return to, a place which doesn’t physically exist, but perhaps is more vivid than anything real, for it exists in our mind. And that is eternal.