One of the great things about working in downtown Washington, D.C., at this time of year is the Macy’s Christmas window display. For those of you who aren’t in the U.S., Macy’s is one of our largest upscale department stores. Their original New York location (worth a visit should you be in the City) is the setting for Miracle on 34th Street, they host the famous Thanksgiving Day parade, and outposts can be found in every major city and many suburban malls across the country.
R.H. Macy is supposedly the mastermind behind the animated department store holiday window display, having created one in 1883, in which Santa’s sleigh was mechanized and moved around a track set up across his New York City’s store’s front windows. After that, department stores in major cities would compete informally to see who could create the most talked about windows of the season. While that tradition has faded from most places with the disappearance of the standalone department store, Macy’s (and their New York City competitors) keeps it going.
Here in D.C., Macy’s unveils their windows the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Since I like to be surprised when I return after the holiday, I alter my path from the metro station to my office to avoid spoilers.
The first and the last windows are Macy’s-themed staples, highlighting their underwriting of both the Thanksgiving Day parade and the 2010 animated Christmas special, Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus. The ones in between, however, change every year or so.
This year, the second and the fifth windows are the ones to pause in front of. In the second window, swirls of snow magically manifest themselves into a variety of wintry creatures. In the fifth, Santa and an elf are making their lists and matching kids up with their perfect gift. The North Pole has moved to a database system, which tracks incidents of good and bad behavior, children’s likes and dislikes, and scanned copies of their letters to Santa. (I’ve included a slideshow at the bottom of this post so you can see some of the details of these two windows.) They’re really cool window displays.
The audience for these windows is varied. Gaggles of very small kids from the downtown day care centers parade past on their daytime excursions, pausing in their trolley push chairs and duckling lines to exclaim over details. Office workers out to grab a bite to eat tend to give the windows a sideward glance while remaining in motion, rather than stopping to take in the windows as a whole. In the evening, it tends to be older folks, probably mostly tourists staying at the downtown hotels, who stroll past leisurely, conversing about past Christmases while the Muzak that’s set to be heard over the daytime bustle swells around them theatrically.
Stop back tomorrow for the next stop on the Virtual Advent Tour. And if you’re interested in taking part in the tour, details and sign-up info can be found here. We’d love to have you participate.
I’ve changed my mind. Let’s do the Virtual Advent Tour after all.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Virtual Advent Tour (hosted here last year and previously on Blogspot) has its roots in the paper Christmas accessory. Daily, you’d open a numbered door that corresponds to the date, revealing a picture (or bit of chocolate) beneath it. In this case, instead of a tasty morsel or drawing, every day between Dec. 1 and Dec. 24, you get a blog/vlog post from around the internet. These posts share how their authors celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, solstice, and/or other winter holidays with favorite customs, memories, songs, foods, photos, books, events, and other traditions. To make sure everyone knows where to go, every day I’ll post with the address(es).
Does this sound like fun? Would you be willing to compose a post or two to make this successful this year? What you share is completely up to you, and you don’t need to let me know the topic ahead of time. All that I ask is that you have your post published by midnight your time the evening before the date(s) you pick.
If you’d like to participate, please leave me a comment on this post telling me what date(s) you’d like. I’ll update this post as people claim days. And I’ll work on creating a badge for those who want it tonight. For those who want it, you can find three sizes of the badge after the jump. (more…)
I really wanted to run the Virtual Advent Tour again this year, but I wasn’t able to garner the number of participants we’d need to make a go of it. I sincerely apologize, and will give organizing it a shot again next year.
In the meantime, may I offer you a Christmas cookie? My mother made them and I decorated them today.
Seeing Tasha pop up in my comments yesterday reminded me that I’d like to give some thought to the Virtual Advent Tour:
For five years, I took part in a Virtual Advent Tour, where bloggers, predominantly of the bookish variety, composed posts about their holiday season and, throughout December, we’d go to their blogs to read about favorite holiday customs, foods, songs, celebrations, movies, books, memories, and traditions (from the past, as well as current ones).
After a year of there being no tour, last year I decided rather at the last minute (like, on December 1) to run a version myself, and some people — like Mikaiya, raidergirl3, Tasha, and others — were kind enough to pitch in to help me out. But, I started late and didn’t get the word out enough and there were neither enough people to really help with the writing nor with the reading of the posts to make it feel like a success. What I discovered is that while it’s challenging to come up with the topic for one day, it’s exhausting coming up with 18 or so. And, by the end, I’d put out six or so good quality posts, republished all my previous holiday posts, and thrown together six crappy ones that I felt bad about publishing.
So, I’m going to put out feelers now to see if we can get a bigger pool of people interested in participating this year so that it’s fun for everyone. My hope is that other bloggers and vloggers (bookish, knitterly, personal, etc.) would like to take part and that you will be willing to share your own winter holiday post one day next month. You’d know the date ahead of time (and can request one if you’d like), your post can be as simple or as complex as you’d like, and there’s no need to tell me what you’re going to write about in advance. (In case you’re wondering what one might share, during the first five years I took part, I wrote about an annual tuba concert, a Christmassy book, a weird Canadian cartoon from the ’70s, a cookie recipe, making a Christmas mix, and D.C.’s Christmas scene.) Also, despite the name and the associated tradition, this isn’t restricted to those who celebrate Christmas: if you celebrate a different winter holiday or have a another December festivity you’d like to share, you’re welcome to participate, too. I love reading about others’ celebrations.
If this sounds like a fun thing you think you’d like to take part in, please leave me a comment below letting me know. I’m going to see what sort of response we get between now and November 15November 18. and will make a call at that point. If we have enough interest, I’ll go forward with organizing it in the latter half of the month. Also, if you like the idea of the Virtual Advent Tour, even if you don’t want to commit to writing a post yourself, please circulate a link to this post to your social networks over the next 10 days to help spread the word. I hope to have good news for everyone later this month. Thanks in advance!
Welcome to Day 1 of the Virtual Advent Tour! 
