In Search of Vintage Christmas Window Displays

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Canada|In Search of Vintage Christmas Window Displays

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/16/world/canada/christmas-window-displays.html

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The mechanically powered holiday scenes that once filled department-store windows in Canada are still humming. Here’s where to find them.

Ian Austen

Decades ago in many Canadian cities, Christmas saw department stores replace clothing and housewares in their display windows with fantastic holiday worlds populated by electromechanical figures animated by a series of hidden wires, chains, pulleys and motors.

Image

A figurine in a Christmas-themed window display.
Despite being over 70 years old, the display at McCord Stewart Museum remains in good condition.Credit…Ian Austen/The New York Times

In my childhood, I saw them when I was taken across the river from Windsor, Ontario, to the giant Hudson’s department store in downtown Detroit where windows filled with animatronic figures, arranged in sequence to tell a story, stretched on for a city block. More of them performed twelve floors up in a seasonally expanded toy department.

But such displays were also once common in larger Canadian cities, particularly those with a branch of Eaton’s, the nation’s once-dominant retailer.

The demise of Eaton’s, Woodward’s and other department stores — and the sector’s general shift away from toys — has gradually doomed the displays. As far as I can determine, the last stronghold was the Hudson’s Bay Company store on Queen Street in Toronto, formerly Simpson’s flagship store. But it is missing this year because the construction of a new subway line in front of the store’s display windows has meant that it is temporarily absent, a spokeswoman for the company said.

That does not, however, mean that the windows have entirely vanished in Canada.

Canada Place, a Vancouver event venue, fills six windows with Christmas displays that once lit up the windows of Woodward’s. In Saskatoon, the Western Development Museum sets up a display that previously made the rounds at Eaton’s stores on the prairies. The Manitoba Children’s Museum in Winnipeg hosts 15 displays with fairy-tale and nursery-rhyme themes that were created by Eaton’s in that city.


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