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 this competition still exists in New York City, it has faded in many other places, at least among large retailers, who often find themselves in buildings without display windows.
Macy’s carries on, however, exporting their designs from their NYC flagship store to their other stores across the country.
This year’s windows celebrate some well-loved tv specials: A Charlie Brown Christmas (marking its 50th anniversary this year), Yes, Virginia, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
These windows in downtown D.C. attract a lot of attention every year. The local day cares trundle their wards out to see them, and I’ve seen people out in the evening taking them in, too.
It’s always very exciting to see what the theme for the year is, and the store holds a formal unveiling of their windows the week before Thanksgiving.
I’m still looking for bloggers who are interested in participating in the Virtual Advent Tour. You can sign up and request a date in the comments on the Dec. 1 post.
Welcome back! Thanks to everyone who left comments on yesterday’s post expressing interest in participating. I’m looking forward to reading your posts!
Today, I thought I’d offer you videos of songs released the year I was born and the years I turned 10, 20, 30, and 40.
Christmas 1974, “Lonely This Christmas,” Mud
I’ll be honest: I don’t think I’ve ever heard this song before, although I suppose if I had, I would have assumed it was Elvis singing it. Believe it or not, it spent four years atop the charts in the UK during December ’74–January ’75.
Christmas 1984, “You Make Me Feel like Christmas,” Neil Diamond
We were a Neil Diamond family when I was growing up, so this got a lot of airtime in our household. 1984 also marked the release of Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”
Christmas 1994, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey
It’s so hard to believe this song didn’t come out until my junior year of college. One of the few modern Christmas classics, the song serves as the text of Carey’s new Christmas picture book and helped cement Carey’s place on the list of best-selling musicians of all-time.
Christmas 2004, “Believe,” Josh Groban
2004 was not a particularly good year for Christmas music, but included the release of the sweet animated film The Polar Express, based on one of my favorite Christmas picture books, and “Believe,” which won a Grammy Award.
Christmas 2014, “Text Me Merry Christmas,” Straight No Chaser featuring Kristen Bell
This song was written by frequent collaborators David Javerbaum, the comedy writer behind the Tweet of God Twitter account, and Adam Schlesinger, bassist for Fountains of Wayne.
Today is December 1, the first day you’d open a door on an Advent calendar. For several 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).
I’ve decided to attempt to run a version of the Virtual Advent Tour this year myself. I’d hoped to be together enough to create a standalone site for it, but it just didn’t happen. Obviously, I also wasn’t together enough to share this information with anyone else prior to now. But I miss this blogging tradition too much to throw in the towel on the idea, even if it is a little late.
My hope is that other bloggers (bookish, knitterly, personal, etc.) would like to take part and that you will be willing to share your own winter holiday post sometime this month. It can be as simple or as complex as you’d like, and there’s no need to tell me ahead of time what you’re going to write about. (In the five previous 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, if you celebrate some other winter holiday or have some other December festivity you’d like to share, please feel free to write about that. I love reading about others’ celebrations. If you’d like to take part, please leave me a comment below letting me know where and on what date(s) you’d like me to send folks your way. If no one else wants to play along, then I guess I’ll just share my own 24 random holiday posts.
Today, we’ll start with one of my favorite holiday tv specials (and cast albums) ever, the 1979 John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together. In this very meta show, the cast of The Muppet Show and singer-songwriter John Denver develop their holiday tv special.
Here is Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Rowlf, Fozzie, Lew, Beaker, and various members of the Electric Mayhem performing “Christmas Is Coming”:
If you’ve never seen this special, or if you’d like to watch it again, here’s the hour-long special in its entirety:
