Toronto On The Day Before Christmas, 1853

Hello all! Hope you're having a wonderful, snowy holiday season. I'll get back to regular posts in the new year, but figured I'd quickly share this drawing by one of our city's most famous historical artists, C.W. Jeffreys. (Dude even has a high school named after him.) He drew this in 1944, but it shows King Street a block west of Yonge on Christmas Eve in 1853. You can see the headquarters for George Brown's Globe newspaper (they'd just started printing their new daily edition that fall) in the  middle of the image, along with George Brown himself right outside the office, a newspaper tucked under his arm and a top hat atop his head.

I'm not so sure about the shops next to the Globe, but Toronto's first Surveyor General was named D.W. Smith. He made lots of the city's earliest maps, provided one of the most famous early descriptions of York back in the late 1700s, and built one of the very first houses in Toronto, Maryville Lodge, sort of near Front & Sherbourne, in 1794.

I found this on the Toronto Archives site, here.

Photo: Eaton's Racist Christmas Display in 1955

Eaton's window, Christmas, 1955

Oh boy. So. According to the Archives of Ontario, Eaton's was pretty hesitant to start using religious imagery in their famous Christmas window displays. At first, they played it safe, sticking with Santa Claus and toys and gifts, worried that Christian church leaders would be offended if the department store mixed Jesus with commercialism. But in 1945, they were feeling ballsy: they added some religiously-themed Christmas carols to the mix, playing them over a loud speaker to accompany their displays. It was a hit. Church leaders, far from being upset, actively encouraged their congregations to head down to Yonge and Queen. After that, it was open season. There were nativity scenes and baby Jesuses all over the place.

And so it was that in 1955, with their fears of religious insensitivity far behind them, T. Eaton & Co. decided to decorate their windows with scenes of what it would have been like if other cultures around the world had been witness to the Christmas star. There were Africans in a thatched-hut village, Inuit in the frozen north and, dropping to their knees in prayer, aboriginals outside their tee-pees. (Also, for some reason, Dutch people.)

The Archives of Ontario have photos of each of them (Africans here, Inuit here and the Dutch here) as part of a brief history of Eaton's Christmas displays, which you can find here.

The Oldest Children's Parade In The World

Santa outside Eaton's, 1921

Christmas-crazed revelers (and sometimes their horses) have been pushing, pulling, dragging and driving weird shit on wheels through the streets of Toronto every year for nearly a century. And the earliest Santa Claus Parade actually goes back even further than that. In 1905, Santa arrived at Union Station by train and headed up to the Eaton's department store at Yonge and Queen with the Eaton's family. It would take a few years before they added floats and marching bands and got the idea for Santa to end the parade by climbing up a ladder from his float to hoist himself, stumbling and cursing, through an open window into Toyland, where, apparently, there was a stiff drink waiting. (That's what's about to happen in the photo above; you can see the 1918 version of the same thing here.)

The whole thing, of course, became crazy popular—a marketing coup for the Eaton's brand. For years, Eaton's made all the floats, expected every employee to help out on the day of the parade, and enjoyed the boost in sales that having Santa lead swarms of Christmas shoppers directly to your store will give you. There was a time when every Canadian child who sent a letter to Santa had it answered by Eaton's. Promotional films of the parade were given out free to schools and churches. It was shown live on TV not only here, but across Canada and the U.S. The Toronto parade was such a massive success that  it inspired Macy's to start their own New York version in 1924.

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The Archives of Ontario have an online exhibition of old photos of the parade here. Including this penguin from the 1931 edition, photographers filming the 1969 parade here, and the 1917 Santa making his way through the crowd on horseback here. There's a neat-looking Santa Claus from I'm-not-sure-which-year here. And there are a few more photos included in this Historicist column on Torontoist.

There's also a lot of old footage from over the years. The Archives of Ontario exhibit has some, and there's a YouTube archive here. There's film of 1928's parade here. And 1960, in four parts, starting here.

Finally, here are seven minutes of footage from the 1929 parade, including "Wiggly Waggly Pollywog", "Our Friend, The Tumbling Clown" and token racist entry, "The Crocodile With Moving Jaws And Flipping Tail Carried By Ten Little Zulus". Oh and, of course, Santa Claus riding another giant fish: