Department Stores & Christmas Movies

As I was watching Bill Forsythe's Comfort and Joy, one of my favorite Christmas movies (one of those I have to watch every year), my wife pointed out that like so many Christmas movies it began with a scene set in a department store. Of course, she's right; and this got me thinking of some of those other scenes. Obviously, there's Miracle on 34th Street (1947), set principally in Macy's, but there's also Holiday Affair (1949), in which Robert Mitchum is a somewhat ineffectual department store clerk who gets involved with Janet Leigh who plays a comparison shopper. And, although it may not be a department store, I can't leave out Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) in which Jimmy Stewart is the lead salesman in a little gift shop in Budapest where he falls in love with Margaret Sullavan, who plays his somewhat difficult co-worker Miss Novak.

Even The Bishop's Wife (1947) begins with Cary Grant (as the angel Dudley) strolling along a snowy street observing shoppers and children looking at storefront holiday window displays. That opening scene sort of suggests the similar opening sequence in Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story (1983), in which Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) gazes longingly at that iconic Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle. Later, of course, he returns to the department store to see Santa and make his official request. That may be about as far as I can go with this particular meme. But I don't want to leave out National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989) which has a crucial scene set in a department store where Chevy Chase (as the inimitable Clark Griswold) has a significant encounter with a sales girl selling lingerie with no visible panty line.

There may be more that I'm either forgetting or not aware of, but I find these examples particularly telling, since they are some of my Christmas favorites. Does that mean that for me Christmas is all about department stores? Well, isn't it for nearly every American? Department stores are our modern equivalent of temples or cathedrals. That's where we invest our hopes and dreams of glory, or where we used to before they were replaced in our hearts first by enormous shopping malls and more recently by the ubiquitous big box stores. But the problem with malls and big box stores is they lack the grandeur of the old department stores, which were built on a much more epic scale. Over the years I've visited some of these ancient temples, Carson, Pirie, Scott and Marshall Field's in Chicago; the original Macy's in New York; and Wannamaker's in Philadelphia (now another Macy's store, but it still has Christmas programs on that glorious pipe organ and a spectacular in store Christmas light show).

But in my own memory nothing can compete with the grand old downtown stores of San Antonio. When I was a kid we always shopped at the large Sears and Roebuck's store, but at Christmas we also visited Joske's, San Antonio's greatest store, right next to the Alamo. These enormous, multi-story temples, with escalators and elevators (still using elevator operators when I was a boy), were magical at Christmas, just as they were for Ralphie, with gigantic displays of toys beyond even the power of a kid's imagination. My favorite were the electric trains running in circles on room-size setups. The only thing that even came close was Ann and Tom Brown's Toy Store, which at Christmas time truly was a temple filled with every kid's favorite toys. I thought of it as Santa's warehouse, and I always made sure my parents saw which toys I coveted, especially among the Lionel trains.

And so, yes, department stores and toy stores were a big part of my idea of Christmas. I loved the carols and the decorations and going to midnight services on Christmas eve. And my parents were always diligent in pointing out to me that the true meaning of Christmas was "peace on earth and good will to men." And all of these things are part of those Christmas memories I have of being a kid growing up in San Antonio, where Christmas was usually warm and sometimes wet, but never as far as I can recall actually white, except for that fake snow my mother sometimes sprayed on our window panes. But it always seemed like every year Christmas season really began with a trip to Sears downtown, where we kids would make immediately for the toy department while my Mom attempted to interest us in the new clothes she had in mind for our more practical gifts.

Later, when we started dating and after we married J and I always included marathon trips to some of these stores, most of which were now in San Antonio's mammouth suburban shopping malls, on the day after Christmas when they all kicked off their after-Christmas sales. One way or another it seems that you just can't really have Christmas in America without the stores. We might as well accept it and celebrate it. And anyway, it's good for the economy. I guess I'll go shopping.