World war II had struck the American Christmas "Putz" a mortal blow. For about a decade it struggled valiantly - through the late '40's...up to about 1954 - the year when just about everybody had TV. And in other ways, Christmas was going strong! Bubble lights! The greatest -now "classic" movies were made -like It's a Wonderful Life - Miracle on 34th Street -The Bishop's Wife - Christmas in Connecticut and several others - all in the same year (1947).Great songs, too - and lots of them! White Christmas and The Christmas Song came into being during the war.Merry Little, Frosty, Rudolph, Carol of the Bells and dozens of now-indispensible songs continued to be written well into the '60's. Up until about the Viet Nam War. Since then - none have really stuck, have they? Lionel Trains had changed from toylike prewar charm to stark realism and built up to their pinnacle year in 1954 and 3 years later - practically bankrupt - sold out to an impersonal corporate amalgam that all but ran Lionel into the ground in the '60s. Kids just lost interest in trains. In the early 50's the aluminum Christmas tree appeared and Rock 'n Roll in 1954. By '54 nobody put up putzes very much. It took a lot of time - both before and after - and we were glued to the TV. There were the Cold War. The Korean War. Bomb shelters. McCarthyism and commies under every rock. Madison Avenue imposing terrible role models on women and conformity on men. Marlboros and materialism and the Grey Flannel Suit. What room for Christmas reveries amid all this? The little houses got smaller and ever less interesting. Perhaps Japan would have revived them back to their old glory - if anyone was buying. But our prewar childlike naiveties were gone. We were a nation on speed -still pumped full of adrenalin from the Great War, but drianed of dreams except of full garages and empty hearts. In many ways - we lost that war .....especially where the Christmas decorations and the little houses were concerned. They never again acheived the charm and imaginative artistry that we had taken for granted from prewar Germany and Japan.

Plastic Town Lightcovers


I remember seeing a lot of these hard-plastic lightcover houses around in Johnstown, PA just at the end of the war '45/'47. Not sure who made them -Possibly RayLite, the people who made those plastic lite-up churches and altars that were also big at the time. Postwar America was nuts about plastic; we thought it was a great thing.I include them because they're Christmas houses and because I've seen them used not only on the tree, but as little villages beneath little trees. They are basically awful. The whole house glows when the light is lit and the back is fully open. There are 8 different (just as with the NIPPIES of the '30's,) enough to accomodate the standard 8-lite C-6 string. Each can be found in 4 basic colors. There is also a series of 7 larger versions to fit the C-7 110 volt lights, but I haven't enough of those to show. They tended to melt with the heat of the larger 7 1/2 watt bulb.

The covers were held to the neck of the bulb by this sliding stamped-metal piece, which is often missing.



From Sears Christmas Wishbook 1949

In 1949, Sears is offering only this small "9" piece Colmor or Dolly Toy set. 8 nondescript houses and a 2-dimensional standup cardboard Santa and sleigh. The hard-plastic fence was extra.


The "FIFTIES"

Next we come to typical larger grade houses of the 1950-'55 period. It was suddenly possible to find large and elborate Japanese things again - close to the prewar richness - a brief period I think of as -

The "LAST HURRAH"


A bloom of larger, more interesting things appears ...

This series of 2-tiered bases with excessive landscaping, for example, somewhat recall the "Pagoda" house seen in the 1920's section.


Sears Christmas "Wishbook" - 1955:
This is typical of what was available in the mid-'50s, Better, larger things in the same style could be had in the 5&10s and department stores. Not since the early '30s had mailorder houses offered even the moderately large and fancy sets. I think they limited themselves to what was safe and easy to ship. Christmas "wishbooks" are disappointing for this reason, though they do explain why we find so many of these uninteresting little things why they are so common. It's the same with many toys and trains sets. If you could buy it from the Sears or Ward's catalogs, you are liable to find it anywhere! But note the bases on these: no matter how fancy and desirable or complex the house, if it has a two-toned wash around edge of the base it is mosty likely POSTWAR. It's most often the white of the base top with a band of color around the bottom, or a solid but contrasting color from the top. A similar treatment appears on some of the PreWar Hacindas, but in harsher colors. The fifties houses are usually more pastel. But not always. After a while, you just get a feel for it. Experience is the only way.
Spiegel Christmas "Wishbook" - 1955: p. 181

Here are some better ones from the period. Not quite PreWar, but very nice. 1955 seems to have been the pinnacle of the "Last Hurrah" ,because it's a downward spiral from there into the 60s where they become pathetic shadows of all that had gone before.


The COTTON-TOPPERS

Some of the largest and nicest pieces of the "Last Hurrah" are the COTTON-TOPPERS. These are definitely postwar, but harken back to some of the sizes and earliest structural features of the prewar - and also especially the figures and cotton-batting roofs which were commonly found on '20's candy-boxes . Some of the churches are remarkably large and resplendent and some are of wholly new design. The huge church rear center is 15" tall! The Cotton-Topper group is very heavy on large churches. I am not sure of the exact year, but it's a big part of that "Last Hurrah" of the mid '50s. Right now I'm betting on 1955.


Ward's Christmas "Wishbook" - 1956:
It's apparent that it made a big difference where you shopped for houses. Ward's was always the low-end of the mailorder lot. Compare the prices on these village sets. In the '50s, you pretty much got what you paid for. But here in 1956, already, the quality seems to have just tipped over the rim of a cliff.




The M & K PRODUCTS COMPANY
of Mogadore,Ohio




I don't know how to classify these. I kind of have a hunch they predate the Japanese "Last Hurrah" discussed above. I've got a '40s feeling. This is a remarkable set in many ways - including UGLY! The pieces are quite large, extraordinarily sturdy and somewhat nicely designed, but somebody 's aesthetic taste switch was definitely in the "off" position when they chose to cover most of them in black glitter! If you wanted to capture the sooty filth and grime of a typical American mill town, these were the houses for you! Tom Hull has suggested the glitter was originally silver that has blackened over time, and I'm inclined to think that could be the case. They would have looked SO much better! These are definitely rare. A market failure for sure, and it's sad, really. Whoever designed them was selling extra-durable quality, making the mistake we made back then that the Japanese houses were just flimsy junk that could never last ....



Each house has a metal clip, screw-mounted on a wooden block to hold the socket of a C-7 sized candelabra bulb in firm position. This is the only example of such a thing I've ever seen in the world of cardboard Christmas houses. This clip had come loose from one of the houses but was fortunately still in the set box, so I took the opportunity to photograph it before gluing it back.



























The set was also provided with it's own string of 5 C-7 lights (7 is the standard string) . The fact that the wire is plastic insulated sways my assessment of the time period to the postwar period. Three of the houses had numbers stamped on the bottom : #2,#3, and #6. Whether this means there were more types of these houses, or that there were 6 elements to the set (the light-string being one of them) - I do not know. I have seen individual houses like this on eBay, but they were one or another of the 5 types shown here.

















A second boxed M & K Products set has recently (March, 2005)come to light. This one with 3 buildings.















This smaller set had it's own string of 3 C-7 lights. In both cases,the boxes are extraodinarily rugged; double-weight cardboard. Compartmentalized. Total overkill. One wonders what they were anticpating. They seem designed to be airdropped from a C-130 "Flying Boxcar" into a battle zone.



A very odd and curious chapter in the Christmas house history. I doubt the company was in business for very long. They seem to turn up mainly around eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, and not have acheived a very widespread distribution. If anyone has further knowledge of this company and it's history, I'd certainly like to hear from you! These were absolutely new to me when I stumbled across them.



The 1960's:

This is where it ends - in the 60's-
-like one of those rivers that runs out into the desert , growing thinner and thinner-
- and finally just disappearing into the sand..........
I guess when you think about it, they didn't fit with Eammes and Danish Modern furniture. "MOD" clothes and all that slick, urbane stuff on TV. They were anything but "cool" as it was thought of then.


Typical of the last of the Japanese ca. 1960. Very light construction, light coating. Oddly, Japan exports a number of these very large churches with a built-in C-7 110 volt bulb and line cord around this time, as well as those odd mirror and glass shrine-like things with a single bulb inside. I have none to show you; they don't interest me. There are a lot of these tiny flat-card types, at the end, that usually came in cellophane baggies of two or three - sometimes small boxes of a dozen. ... virtually devoid of charm and detail. The dark-red glitter edging seen on second church and the gold on the apartment style house are also charactistic of the dying days. Oddly, a distant vestige of the Printies is seen again in the brick work of it's foundation.


Novelty Light Sets:

Probably the hottest new thing to hit Christmas in the '60's were the tiny lights. Some of the old C-6 series strings were still being sold up into the early part of that decade, but were rapidly displaced by the tinies, with so many on a string and burning so much cooler. I like them! (But I like the old types better: FAR more mystery and variety!)Still, the takeover by the "fairy" lights influenced just about everything to come.

The "ALPINE VILLAGES"

There is a long succession of light-string villages beginning with the cardboard "Nippies" of 1936, and after WW II becoming numerous variations of what are called Alpine Villages up to the present day.

The original "ancestor."

The complete boxed set of what I believe to be the first of a series of lighted village sets known as "The Alpine Village," versions of which are still available today, includung those godawful open-backed white plastic things that no collector wants.



The very late '50s into the early '60s, these actually have considerable detail and charm, considering their late position in the age. Probably fond childhood memories for late "Boomers" now in their 50s, I still see individual pieces in the flea markets quite often. We have Jana Pumbtree to thank for sending in these photos.
















Later Version:






































This is a later version, the last of the cardboard types before the plastic came in. Far less interesting - almost no detail. Individual houses from the set are still found easily at fleas and thrift shops.

Italian:

From the mid 60's into the '70's, the Italians - in particular - came out with a great number of novelty light strings in every imaginable shape - basically as plastic light covers with the 10 or 12 light strings illuminating them. Lights and houses have been inextricable bound up from the beginning - back to the latter 19th Century with European train buildings and doll houses that had little oil lamps and even candles inside. The Italian village set shown below is remarkable in that the covers are all light cardboard- not plastic, the tiny buildings quite interesting and well detailed in and of themselves. But the box says "Genuine Italian Novelty "Lights", not "Village", though they do make a cute little town under a small table-top tree. The only problem is that the buildings are so light that the stiffness of the wire makes it difficult to set them level and looking right and have them stay that way.




















I show the plug marked "MADE IN ITALY" because there is a virtually identical set of Japanese manufacture called The Sleepy Village. I think the same people made both and put them in different boxes, haven't had the chance to examine the Japanese set to see if it has a "made in Japan" plug.


West Germany? Japan? US?

















These tiny,curious and very delicate little exquisitely detailed houses came as a set of 12. You could get them either as ornamental covers for the modern "fairy lights" to put on the tree, or with a molded plastic scenic base, complete with pond, trees and figures that held 12 "fairy" lights of a 20-light string under the houses. A complete little "putz" for a mantel or sideboard display. (See the scan of the magazine or cataolg ad below.) These have to be from the '60s, though I am not sure who made or marketed these kits or exactly when. The largest among the little houses is barely 2" high. They are SO lightweight that they could hold no wiring down. SO delicate one is afraid to handle them! You don't see them very often. They're quite hard to find, especially the complete set. What's exceptional is the detail - running counter to the declining direction of Asian varieties of these times.

This entire little world is just 17" wide by 13" deep.

I have included these partly as a continuance of a thread of house-type lights that runs throughout the history, and because they're probably the only two items of any quality and interest that come out of the '60's. I'd like to see a complete boxed set of these little "German" covers sometime - just to satisfy my curiousity as to who made them. Were they also ready made or only a kit? I've heard both versions.





The Magic Window

My daughter read what I said about the "death of the American Christmas" and disagreed. She said "I dunno, Dad - I was born in '62 (I knew that) and Christmas was just magical and wonderous for me." And, of course, it was. There is but a very brief window in early childhood for us all - a period of time that lasts from birth until we are cast from the nest and into public school - a time while we still have one foot in Heaven and all about the world is new and good. A time when we are so open. A time when we take things so deeply in that they will form us ever after. So we imprint upon the Christmas of our time, and what that was is what it will be for us
always.

The Christmases we've always had were always shaped by Christmases that came before - from the Christmases of parents and near family, always trying to remake the magic for us that they had known... hoping to see again through our new eyes and re-enter - if just in little flashes - the now closed Window. Of course, people don't throw out all the decorations after Christmas every year and buy everything new the following. Who's trunks of trimming treasure was not filled with items that were lost friends found anew each Season? - which elicited the same annual remarks such as "My FAVORITE!!" - and -"This was my grandmother's and her mother gave it to her.... So - much is carried forward year by year and generation to generation.

Had I one magic ticket to traverse Time and relive one decade of the 20th Century, I'd choose the Thirties. I was born in '41 - 6 months before Pearl Harbor. Christmas practice s had not yet changed. The Christmases of my Magic Time were very much the Christmases as they were from then, from my mother's time: the '20s and the 30's. The Thirties fascinate me. They call to me to know them...the most complex and paradoxical of times .. the Great Depression and the Duesenbergs - bread lines, Labor Wars and the most fabulous Christmas things that were ever made. The largest and most luxurious electric trains and toys... locomotives so large a small child could not lift one from the track! Hobos! The rise of radio. Art Decco. The Empire State Building and the great zeppelins. The talking movies. Aviation. Whole regions of the country getting electricity and indoor plumbing for the first time.An unquestioned faith in the future of technology at a time when many had an outhouse in the back and the most menial of jobs if a job at all. My Mom and Dad lived those times. I had the Christmases they made. I heard their talk. There were qualities about them that made me want to be where they had been see what they had seen. Qualities you rarely see in postwar people ....

I think that that is what collecting is about, especially for those who collect for love and not for sterile speculation. This is most true of the toys and trappings of Christmas. Artifacts. Actual, tangible contacts with our Special Time. It is true that we forget nothing. The power that an object unseen in decades can have to transport us in mind and spirit back to a specific period or moment of our lives - to unlock long-closed doors in the mansion of our memory - is the true value that it has. We can hold such an object in our hands and know those times were real, and welcome back whole parts of who we were into who we are ...and let the inner child in each of us out to play again - to live as part of us and help us see again through our own Magic Window .

So, God bless us every one, and AMEN! Reality be damned! This is CHRISTMAS! You will find that those old objects will take you back in time, but never listen to those fools who say that you are "living in the past." We are what we are because of our pasts. We cannot live in them. Would that we could! But we can bring them forward, to live within us as we face the present and the future. Those pasts taught us everything we know.

Never be ashamed of your nostalgia ...it was, and is, your reverence for the life you had,
- the path that you have traveled
. "Papa" Ted

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