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    Christimas in Birmingham
    Christimas in Birmingham
    Christimas in Birmingham
    Ebook229 pages2 hours

    Christimas in Birmingham

    By Tim Hollis

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    About this ebook

    For decades, the Christmas season in Birmingham was not complete without the sights and sounds of the retail district. During the season, the Magic City made magic with elaborate light displays and the Living Christmas Tree in Woodrow Wilson Park. Many remember the battling Santas of Loveman's and Pizitz, each vying for the hearts of the community. The elaborate Enchanted Forest dazzled shoppers on the sixth floor at Pizitz. In the 1940s, more than 200,000 people lined the streets each year to make merry for the Christmas Carnival parade. Author and local historian Tim Hollis celebrates the happy history of Birmingham's holiday season, reviving the traditions and festivities, the food and shopping of days gone by.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 26, 2021
    ISBN9781625852380
    Christimas in Birmingham
    Author

    Tim Hollis

    Tim Hollis has published twenty-four books on pop culture history. For more than thirty years he has maintained a museum of cartoon-related merchandise in Dora, Alabama. He is the author of Dixie before Disney: 100 Years of Roadside Fun; Florida's Miracle Strip: From Redneck Riviera to Emerald Coast; Hi There, Boys and Girls! America's Local Children's TV Programs; Ain't That a Knee-Slapper: Rural Comedy in the Twentieth Century; Toons in Toyland: The Story of Cartoon Character Merchandise; and, with Greg Ehrbar, Mouse Tracks: The Story of Walt Disney Records, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

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      Book preview

      Christimas in Birmingham - Tim Hollis

      Chapter One

      CITY SIDEWALKS, BUSY SIDEWALKS

      For each person who lived in Birmingham or in the suburban area stretching for miles in all directions, there was a particularly fond memory of the Christmas season. In the pages that follow, we will be revisiting many of those memories created by the malls and shopping centers, radio and television programs and churches and hospitals. But it cannot be denied that when most people of a certain age—maybe past forty—think of Christmas in Birmingham, it is the downtown retail district that most immediately comes to mind. And it follows that the two stores that loom largest in those memories are those behemoth mercantile establishments Loveman’s and Pizitz.

      Fortunately for the limited space we have in this book, the stories of how these two titans cornered the Christmas market in Birmingham have already been related in two other titles: Pizitz: Your Store (2010) and Loveman’s: Meet Me Under the Clock (2012). Therefore, here we will try to hit on some topics that were not included in those volumes and simply summarize a few others.

      Loveman’s, known formally as Loveman, Joseph & Loeb until the 1920s, had been in Birmingham since 1880, with Louis Pizitz opening his rival store in 1899. Actually, in the beginning, Pizitz was not considered much of a rival to the grander, longer-established Loveman’s, but within fifteen or twenty years, the two were practically carbon copies of each other.

      By the time of this Christmas 1913 ad, Loveman, Joseph & Loeb had been in business in Birmingham for almost thirty years and had obviously established itself as the city’s first choice for holiday shopping.

      We can get a fascinating picture of Christmas at the beginning of the twentieth century from a newspaper ad Loveman, Joseph & Loeb ran on December 1, 1900. In those days, ads consisted of more words than graphics, reading much like the news articles that surrounded them. Thus, Loveman’s editorial began like this:

      Retrospect for a minute. Remember it has been customary in Birmingham during past years to do the Christmas shopping after the 15th of December? Indeed, buyers crowd most of the shopping into the week prior to Christmas. This is wrong. The way it ought to be and why, we here tell.

      We ask as a special favor that you help us carry out this idea: Begin your shopping Monday, December 3. It is to your advantage to do so.

      The idea of waiting until December 3, much less the fifteenth, to begin one’s Christmas shopping may seem like it belongs not just in another century but on another planet considering that most stores today have decorations appearing in mid-September. It is just as surprising to learn from those ads of 1900 that stores did not close on Christmas Day; Loveman’s was open until 1:00 p.m. on the holiday, and nearby Drennen & Co. kept open from 8:00 a.m. until midnight on Christmas Day. But over the next several years, other changes would take place that illustrated the evolving cheerful visage of Christmas downtown.

      The Drennen department store was one of those early businesses that did not survive into the period most living people remember. It is interesting, though, to note that this ad from 1900 depicted Santa Claus in an early automobile; the Drennens eventually left the store business to open an automotive dealership that lasted for a century.

      There is something priceless about the expression on young Carolyn Ritchey’s face as she encounters Loveman’s Santa Claus in the early 1950s. It just may be longtime Loveman’s Santa Dave Campbell under that beard and wig. Carolyn Ritchey collection.

      Most historians agree that while a few department stores in large cities began having their own Santa Claus on the premises in the late 1800s, it was not until the 1920s that the custom became widespread. Thus, it is fitting that a Loveman’s ad from November 21, 1920, seemed to feature a certain novelty aspect:

      It is being whispered among the younger set that there is a real live Santa Claus after all. And they are as right as can be. The dear old fellow is here to prove it with his bright red suit and his long white beard. He comes every afternoon at two and remains until five. Three joyous hours for the kiddies. Then he hastens back to his workshop to catch up on back orders for toys for good little boys and girls.

      So, jolly old St. Nick was taking time out from his busy schedule to hang out in Loveman’s fourth-floor toy department each day, huh? But wait—what was this? A week later, the newspaper began featuring daily missives from the bearded one that said nothing about him being at Loveman’s. Instead, these epistles stated that Santa would arrive on the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) train on Saturday afternoon, December 4, and he wanted all the kids to be there to meet him. Huh?

      Then, the day before Mr. Claus’s expected arrival, he sent another letter to be printed—and this one made the whole situation as crystal clear as an Arctic icicle:

      I will arrive Saturday afternoon at 4 o’clock on L&N fast train. Meet me at the station. I am bringing some little things that I am going to give away as long as they last when I arrive.

      I have accepted Louis Pizitz’s offer of his store for my headquarters during my stay in Birmingham. I accepted his offer because of the splendid proposition made me. But, greatest of all, because Mr. Pizitz thought so much of the Birmingham children, he traveled more than 3,000 miles this past summer to see me and my wonderful toy shops in England, France, Switzerland, etc., where he bought great lots of toys for me. Then Mr. Pizitz offered me the entire freedom of his big store in which to display my gift things and to meet all my children friends. He told me I could have them all here to meet me, and I want you to come to the Pizitz store and shake hands with me and tell me what you want me to bring you.

      And so began the annual battle of the store Santa Clauses, which would not end until Loveman’s went out of business forever in 1980. And what Pizitz and Loveman’s started, the other stores gradually picked up, with the result that, by the 1940s, there was a Santa on duty at most of them.

      Not to be outdone by its older rival, the Pizitz store moved into an imposing new edifice in time for Christmas 1925. Notice the tree set up on the corner to celebrate the season.

      This did not sit well with some parents, and in 1947, a group of them tried to champion a One Santa Claus idea through the Birmingham News. They insisted that seeing a Santa in each and every toy department was confusing their youngsters; trying to convince them that the red-suited horde was Santa’s helpers instead of the genuine article was hard to do when stores (namely, Pizitz) sponsored radio programs that got across the idea that their Claus was the one and only. One mother of unspecified age, but who no doubt grew up in the years prior to 1920, spoke for her generation: Personally, I’d like to go back to the idea that Santa is seldom seen. We rarely saw him when I was a child. Many anxious Christmas Eves I’ve scanned the sky for signs of the reindeer. The imaginary personage was much grander than the sorry figures now seen.

      What was the suggested solution? That during the season, Santa set up his headquarters at one specified site, with all the different stores pitching in to sponsor their own events in conjunction with it. Well, obviously that never happened, although it is interesting to see that eventually the rise of the shopping centers and malls did produce somewhat the same effect, with each one having a single Santa rather than multiples in all of their stores. That still did not help kids who visited Santa at Eastwood Mall in the morning and Century Plaza in the afternoon—they couldn’t understand why he did not seem to remember talking to them or what they wanted for Christmas. How was such an absent-minded old geezer supposed to keep up with their requests all the way until Christmas Day?

      Loveman’s display director, Joe Apolinsky, was known for decking every inch of those halls when it came time for Christmas. This close-up view gives a hint of the many layers of detail his decorating entailed. Harold Apolinsky collection.

      Photographs showing any department store display windows, or even the exterior decorations, are almost nonexistent. We must content ourselves with advertisements, such as this one from 1954 promoting Pizitz’s Great Candles theme for that year.

      Besides their battling Santas, Pizitz and Loveman’s had other ways of competing, and those included their lavishly decorated show windows. Ask those who shopped downtown in the 1940s and 1950s, and they will wax poetic about the joy those windows, with their animated animals and other mechanical figures, brought each year. For all of that, though, there seem to be no surviving photographs of any of them. There are photographs of the store windows displaying various types of merchandise for Christmas gifts but none showing the beloved animated scenes that live on in memory after memory.

      In 1964, Pizitz’s sales promotion department hit upon an idea that would prove to be its ultimate ammunition in the annual yuletide war. Some smart elf had the brilliant idea that if window displays could draw immense crowds to the sidewalks outside the store, a similar feature inside the store could be more than worth its cost in the numbers of shoppers who would be passing through the doors. And, he or she reasoned, putting such a display on the sixth floor would ensure that customers had to pass through the lower five levels before getting to it! And so was born the Enchanted Forest, the story of which occupies an entire chapter in the aforementioned Pizitz: Your Store book.

      These renderings of some of the Enchanted Forest’s original scenes were used on the covers of a 1965 Pizitz catalogue, the second year the walkthrough display appeared on the store’s sixth floor.

      The initial approach was quite simple. Display director Joe Dultz purchased a set of secondhand animated scenes meant to depict a village of bears. These figures were placed in a small, walled-off area of Pizitz’s sixth floor amid a setting of

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