Customs: But Once a Year

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“Ho! Ho! Ho!” laughed Santa, holding his tummy. “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” chuckled the shopkeeper, listening to the jingle of the cash register. “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!

“Haah?” grunted shoppers as they pounded their way into thickening throngs that filled the stores. “Ooops!” they said, and “Oof!” “Aughh!” and sometimes “Bah!” and sometimes “Oooh!”

These are some of the tones in the season of sounds. There are others: the soaring nobility of Handel’s Messiah; the cheerful beauty of carols that somehow sound best in the snow outside somebody’s front door at night; the tinkling bells on the live sheep in the village créche, and the clink of coins in the kettles set up for the poor; the thousand different squeals of joy that children invent.

Hash & Cash. These sounds are the obbligato to that great rite of Christmastide, the buying and giving of gifts. The sounds began before the Thanksgiving turkey had flaked into hash, and last week they were swelling in the annual crescendo. Across the U.S., people were throwing money around as if it were going out of style. The nation’s department stores, glittering with tinseled trees and holly wreaths, were braced for what promised to be the biggest Christmas sales in history. In Detroit, Hudson’s added 5,500 extra employees to handle the crush and the cash. Los Angeles’ Vendome, specialists in wines, liquors and imported gourmandiana, was counting on $300,000 worth of Christmas business—nearly half of its annual take. In Boston a merchant estimated that “the busiest day of the Christmas season is 18 times as busy as any other day of the year.” Amarillo’s shopkeepers figured that the Christmas rush accounted for 25% of their annual gross. New York City stores reckoned it at 30%. Said a Salt Lake City jeweler: “If somebody abolished Christmas, I’d go out of business.” All told, the nation’s merchants will have rung up better than $5 billion in sales before the last tyke has crawled, all goose flesh, into bed on Christmas Eve.

The seasonal zeal for gift giving is not confined to the U.S. Taking their cue from the U.S., stores and streets all over Western Europe are decked out in Christmas trim to lure affluent buyers. In officially atheistic Russia, where the authorities frown upon the “bourgeois” tradition of Christmas, citizens still crowd into department stores and exchange gifts around the “New Year’s trees” while children babble about “Grandfather Frost.” In Hindu India, gifts and greetings are exchanged, and on Christmas Day the shops close and liquor prohibitions are relaxed. In Islamic Morocco, seven-year-old Princess Amina, daughter of the late King Mohammed V, will give a Santa Claus party for 2,000 children and present them all with gifts. In Japan, whose 700,000 Christians account for only .0075 of the population, canny retailers are decorating their stores with Christmas trees in the hope of inspiring a splurge of holiday purchases.

Palmistry. Santa Claus, after all, is not the symbol of Christmas Past or Christmas Future but of Christmas Presents. And in the U.S. he has never had a better year. Some 3 billion greeting cards will load down the nation’s patient postmen on their appointed rounds, and some $200 million will be spent for ribbon and fancy wrapping paper alone. The tide of Christmas Club deposits has swollen to an all-time peak of $1.5 billion, and employee bonuses will make millions more available for last-minute purchases. Corporate Christmas giving, somewhat subdued in recent years because of the payola scandals, is back in fashion to the tune of more than $300 million, up about 5% from last year (many companies have turned their what-to-give problems over to antiseptic gift services that send the giftee a brochure from which to select his present; he checks off his choice on a postpaid return card).

In this season of generosity, nobody will be ignored. In the suburbs, the early-morning clatter of the garbage cans is suddenly muted; the garbageman is making sure that, come Christmas Day, he can count on the usual discreet envelope. So is the normally glum elevator operator (so suddenly cheerful), the postman and the paper boy. Nor will the needy be forgotten. Already newspaper charity columns are spread open for the willing reader; churches and hundreds of welfare agencies are preparing a Christmas bounty that will surely reach into record millions—not because the number of the needy has risen particularly, but because there are more prosperous givers than ever before. In Detroit the Goodfellows will provide a complete set of new clothes for 50,000 needy children. Across the nation the Salvation Army will collect about $1.2 million to help 1,533,000 people. In most cities Christmas baskets have been done away with. Recipients were embarrassed to have the neighbors see big cars drawing up in front of their doors, and parents felt humiliated before their children. General current practice is to send a check, which parents can use to buy presents or food.

Honeyed Things. Inevitably, the ring of the Christmastime cash registers also rings in criticism. The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano recently denounced the commercialization of Christmas as an “insult to the poor” that is turning “the birthday of Christ into a pagan bacchanal.” The Rev. Edgar S. Brown Jr., director of worship of the United Lutheran Church in America, has proposed flatly that the churches simply do away with Christmas services and “say to the business world, ‘We don’t need your greedy, selfish celebration.’ ” Most consumers, in moments of ill-humored desperation, agree with the critics—but don’t know what to do about it, put up with the crassest of sales gimmicks as long as they get what they want.

And when all the tinsel and touting are swept away, what they want, after all, is the pleasure of giving, a tradition and a need that is older than Christendom. Pagans celebrated the winter solstice with bonfires to strengthen the sun in its course, exchanged wreaths and candles and crowded their streets in noisy processions. The Romans celebrated the Saturnalia (Dec. 19-25) by giving presents to the poor and in return received garlands, tapers or grains of frankincense. On the Kalends of January (Jan. 1-3), Roman men gave one another “honeyed things” to ensure a year of sweetness, lamps to symbolize light and warmth, and money, gold or silver objects as talismans of wealth.

Though the Magi brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Infant Jesus, the early church for centuries forbade or at least discouraged gift giving at Christmas; the Puritans, for example, banned both religious and secular Christmas celebrations as pagan in inspiration. Even today the seasonal exchange of gifts in many lands is made on Twelfth Night (when the Magi reached Bethlehem) or on New Year’s Day. Still the early symbols—the pre-Christian gift giving, the evergreen as a mark of enduring life—became stubborn concomitants of the Christmas observance.

Soft Words & Statues. From these beginnings, Christmas in the new world has become something more than a religious celebration of a single day. For children it is the beginning of a gift-wrapped tradition, to be opened and savored every year for as long as the years go on, mellowing in the mind—an ineffable memory of warm-lighted places, soft words, laughter, and the mantle of family life.

In the old days of smaller towns and more frugal ways, Christmas was a simpler and a quieter time. In Indiana everyone cut his own tree in the woods and decorated it with strings of popcorn, gingerbread men, chains of red and green paper, and small colored candles (it was a worrisome thing for Father, who planted himself in a nearby chair with a bucket of water at hand). On Christmas Eve the whole town went to church to see the tableaux of the Nativity performed by the Sunday School children, draped in tablecloths, piano covers and nightgowns. Next morning came the presents (usually clothing); some, such as heavy coats and shoes, were store-bought, but a lot—scarves, gloves, caps and dresses—were homemade. And for the children there were dolls, jumping jacks, blocks, marbles, checkers, Hans Christian Andersen.

In Michigan, Christmas was hay rides, throaty caroling and hot chocolate. In New England, it was plum pudding and frosty trees. In the German immigrant towns of Wisconsin, the old men drank cognac and Löwenbräu and listened damp-eyed to old recordings of long-gone Rhineland carillons. In Georgia, the holiday mornings began with bacon, eggs, red-eye gravy, biscuits, grits, deer sausage, fried catfish, cornbread, buttermilk, waffles, French toast, hotcakes and heaps of fruit. In the afternoon the womenfolk gathered in the big kitchen to prepare scalloped oysters and smoked turkey, fried chicken and black-eyed peas (cooked 24 hours), pot roast and cracklin’ bread. The men strolled outside with their cigars, their vests unbuttoned, and examined the flower beds, kicked the tires on the model T, or organized a game of “touch” with the youngsters. Later, firecrackers blazed in the night.

Seasonable Start. In many places, today’s Christmases are still rich with those old homey flavors—though White Christmas threatens to supplant Silent Night, Christmas trees glitter with baubles, bangles and winking lights that Grandfather never dreamed of, and, for some, dinners at Howard Johnson’s have replaced the huge old feasts.

Being family men themselves, U.S. retailers yield to no one in their appreciation of Christmas tradition. But like the caterer at a banquet, they must keep a steady head and a calculating eye. To them, Christmas, whatever its sentimental and religious significance, is also the most important financial event of the whole year. For many stores, it spells the difference between showing a profit for the year or merely breaking even.

In the major department stores, Christmas planning starts just about the time that the kids are breaking their first Christmas toys—the day after Christmas past. The long preparations begin with studies of sales slips, to determine what sold well, what proved a bomb. After that come committee meetings, buyers’ meetings, salesgirl meetings. By mid-January, buyers are packed and jetting off around the U.S. and to faraway countries to find merchandise and to place orders. When shipments arrive, some stores slip a few new items on the counters to see how they sell; if customers pick them up, the items are reordered in quantity; decorators get to work designing store-window displays and interior dècor, order mechanized window spectacles that cost as much as $80,000. Christmas-card makers send instructions to their artists. The word this year: go easy on the kooky wisecracks and stick to religious sentiments with “direct clean statements.”*

By September the four-color catalogue has been sent to the printer with its glossy display of tempting gifts. Before Thanksgiving, the trees are installed, the lights are hung, the animated displays are cranking. In the big department stores, where several Santas are needed to handle the throngs, intricate mazes are set up so that the tots will never see that there are more than one. Said one hard-working Santa in Boston’s Jordan Marsh: ‘The important thing in this job is production. You don’t have time for waving and all that ho-ho-ho stuff. It just scares the kids away. What they want is to sit on your lap and tell you what they want for Christmas.”

Children Only. Some stores, notably Hudson’s in Detroit and Rich’s in Atlanta, have established special departments for children (no adults allowed ) where tots, clutching their coins, shop for presents for parents, aunts, brothers, sisters and pets. The children are led about by matronly salespeople who help them select gifts from simple displays on low-low counters.

Other innovations are less admirable. In Hollywood, for example, the retailers kicked off the season with a mighty parade starring Robert Stack and his TV “Untouchables.” In one west Texas town, Santa popped up on TV on Nov. 9 and got parents so riled up over the early showing that many of them boycotted the store that sponsored the appearance. Good for a laugh—and little more —is a new service inaugurated in Dallas by Neiman-Marcus. Patrons who want to send gifts to maharajahs, prime ministers and other heads of state without any fuss need only call “Officer G7” at the store. G-7 assures the buyer that his order will be handled personally and confidentially, and that the billing (by phone) will be kept top secret.

And then there is “Mrs. Santa Claus.” In Albuquerque, she is a short, slim woman with a “sister”‘ named Merry. In San Francisco’s White House department store, she stalks the aisles in spangles and bustles, looking vaguely like a turn-of-the-Barbary-Coast matron. Explains one store official: “This Mrs. Santa Claus thing is going to grow and grow. The idea is that Mrs. Santa Claus gets tired of staying up there in the North Pole. After all, Santa Claus is gone every Christmas, so she gets fed up. She decides to come with him. Well, you can imagine all the new avenues this opens for us . . .”

The Cowards. Even more peculiar at times than Mrs. Santa are the shoppers themselves, and the oddest of these are the men. Says Associate Merchandiser Edith Grimm of Carson, Pirie, Scott: “Men are basically insecure shoppers. They’re cowards.” For one thing, a man rarely will return a gift for exchange; even the man who doesn’t have everything seldom will take the time and the trouble to exchange, say, a mink-trimmed nail file for a couple of neckties. Women, on the other hand, are sharp shoppers, generally know what they want and, furthermore, believe that returns and exchanges are part of their birthright, much to the dismay of the store managers. A man invariably shops late, frequently does not know his wife’s hose or lingerie sizes—or the color of her eyes, for that matter. Last year, a woman returned a size 12 housecoat to Carson’s for exchange. “You know how it is with men,” she explained. “My husband just couldn’t tell you how large I am.” She took home a size 20.

To make things easier for male shoppers, some stores have set up Christmastime “For Men Only” departments that are staffed with knowledgeable (and pretty) salesgirls. There, the shopper can relax in an armchair, sip a free drink and make his selections from items that are displayed for him. Unless he has a specific gift in mind, a husband is apt to buy his wife a slinky black negligee, which she almost invariably exchanges for bath towels or sensible underwear. Says a Cleveland merchandise manager, “Practically all the lingerie this time of year is sold to men. It’s the kind of thing we can’t ever sell to women. But the guy buys it because he pictures how his wife, maybe, is going to look in it. Christmas is a time for dreaming.”

Slips & Buttons. But the stores are consoled by the realization that these male romantics spend more money for Christmas than their wives. And together, the men and the women this year are spending money on anything that has a price tag.

For men, women buy shirts, gloves and salmagundi for the hobby chests. About 95% of all men’s dressing gowns and slippers, which men rarely buy for themselves, are sold at Christmastime. Cowed by decades of jokes, few women buy ties any more.

For their wives, men buy perfume (60% of all perfume is sold in December), costume jewelry and fancy lingerie—in general, things that women would not think of buying for themselves but are delighted to get. Though men generally stay with the standard white or blue (pink has long been out), the trend in slips and nightgowns is to printed designs and new colors—fuchsia, green, coral.

Unlike men—who have everything because they are content to keep what they have for years—women never have enough. “You can always hang another piece of jewelry on a woman,” says one man. She needs more than one pocketbook, for example, while a man seldom changes his wallet; the only thing she doesn’t need more than one of is her wedding ring.

The market this year is also loaded with gifts for those who are on the make for the unusual. Neiman’s, whose glamour item last year was His and Her airplanes, this year is featuring an ermine bathrobe ($6,975), and Manhattan Jeweler Harry Winston has a nice diamond and emerald necklace for $275,000. An Albuquerque blood bank is selling a $5 gift certificate that is good for all the emergency transfusions a family might need in a year. Abercrombie & Fitch has a beer-can launcher ($24.95) for men who like to combine their shooting with their drinking and do not want to bother with clay pigeons; A. Sulka & Co. is selling men’s handmade leopardskin gloves lined with beaver ($125). His and Her vicuna lounging robes ($1,100 a set), and an ebony walking stick topped with a solid gold handle ($550). Rocking chairs, popularized by the President, are moving well. For the bewildered male, Cleveland’s Halle Bros. provides a Pandora’s Box of women’s things for any amount the buyer wishes to spend.

A gallery of other good sellers (many of them imports) for this Christmas:

∙HOUSEWARES: Old French decanters ($7 up), chafing dishes (from $15), wine racks (from $10), English pewter, Danish salad bowls and cheese boards. There are plenty of electrical gadgets for pushbutton minds; electric can openers and knife sharpeners (around $29.95), bun warmers ($9.95), silver polishers ($29.95), even electric pepper mills ($6.50).

∙FURS: Mink coats always sell well for Christmas, but the trend this year is to small evening pieces, such as ascots ($80), short jackets ($595-$895) and stoles ($695). Lord & Taylor has a French sheared rabbit that is made to look like chinchilla ($695) and a sheared rabbit dyed bright red that looks like a sheared rabbit dyed bright red ($350).

∙BAGS & GLOVES: Partly as a result of the Jackie Kennedy influence, long kid gloves are the big fashion ($10-$25). Even bigger are handbags, which women seem to require in huge numbers. French beaded evening bags are in demand ($25-$125), and alligator is the latest thing for evening wear ($150). If a woman already has alligators, try antelope ($170).

∙JEWELRY: Last year’s leader was beads. This year it is pins, particularly in textured fake gold. Link bracelets are out, bangles are in. Rhinestones, which went out in 1953, are back. Buddha pins in fake jade are selling at Lord & Taylor, and so are necklaces of uniform-sized cultured pearls.

∙BOOKS & RECORDINGS: Next to clothing, wine and liquor, these are about the safest presents for the men on the shopping lists. To the annoyance of the old-time bookstores, discount stores around the country are buying up bestsellers and selling them at cut rates. But the emphasis is on the heavy, special (and higher-priced) gift books (TIME, Dec. 8). The newly translated French food classic, Larousse Gastronomique ($20), has proved the bestselling sleeper of the season. As for records, the rule is, when in doubt, buy a collection (selected opera arias, the nine Beethoven symphonies, etc.) rather than single issues.

∙TOYS: The toy industry rakes in 60% of its billion-dollar-plus business in the Christmas season, and small wonder: most of last year’s toys are rubble by now, thanks partly to a child’s built-in facility for destruction and partly to the built-in destructibility of many modern toys. Electric trains, construction sets, Monopoly-style games, and books still have a worthy durability, never go out of style. Gilbert’s old reliable Erector Sets now include the materials to build rocket launchers and satellite trackers. Scientific toys, regular catalogue items for four years at F.A.O. Schwarz and other big stores, are even bigger this year. Latest entrant: General Electric, which is aiming at the pre-teen market with a variety of advanced do-it-yourself kits (analogue computer, transistor radio, electricity lab). Two big sellers are Ohio Art’s Magnastiks, a construction toy that utilizes a magnetic field, and Etch A Sketch, an updated and challenging version of the old magic slate idea.

The nether world of toys this year succeeds in making monsters more monstrous and expendable than ever before. The Great Garloo (Marx) is a sort of teen-age monster who picks things up and carries things around under remote control. Ideal’s Robot Commando will fire rockets by voice command. War toys, too, are more realistic than ever. There are aircraft carriers that catapult planes from their decks, tanks that advance relentlessly until a well-aimed stone hits a vulnerable spot. One Civil War set comes with a firing mortar, exploding bunker and battle sound-effects record.

The population explosion in dolls this year is the best argument yet for birth control at the toy bench. They kiss, they suck thumbs, they wet, and of course talk, laugh, cry, wink, blink and nod. One specimen has three shifting faces: one with measles, one in a convalescent state, and one in smiling health.

∙MEMORIES & NIGHTS. As the calendar tolls off the last shopping days before Christmas, the real Christmas begins once more. In the Old Mexico district of Los Angeles, the fiesta will start and shattering piñatas will shower candy on shrieking children. The inevitable office party, despite reassurances of reformed dignity, will end when an overspirited employee tells off the boss—but not before someone has kissed the stenographer. In Yellow Springs, Ohio (pop. 4,167), the mayor and an aide will distribute 10 lbs. of flour and sugar each to every “worthy widow” in honor of ex-Slave Wheeling Gaunt, who left a small trust for that purpose 65 years ago.

Texas cowboys will fashion their Christmas trees from paint-sprayed tumbleweed, and in towns throughout the country prizes will go to the families with the best Christmas decorations. In Seattle derelicts from Skid Row will have their Christmas dinner at the “Millionaire Club” and exchange “gifts”: a pack of cigarettes, a half-emptied pint of whisky, a thumb-worn magazine, some tongue-worn memories. In Long Beach, Calif., the whole town will turn out for the annual parade of Christmas floats on the canal. Little schoolchildren will come home brimming with gaiety, to show their flour-and-water pasted Christmas cards to the family, and countless little boys will shuffle into the 5 & 10¢ stores looking for “a diamond ring for Mommy.”

In the suburbs of El Paso and Austin, householders will set out liminarios—sand-weighted paper bags containing lighted candles. The street and house lights will be turned off, and families in unlighted cars will cruise through the streets slowly to see the familiar transformed. And in a million other homes in a thousand other places, the carols will ring and the Christmas trees will shine for the season of giving and the ineffable memory of warm, lighted places.

*Last week Jackie Kennedy defied the isolationist D.A.R. by ordering ten boxes of Christmas cards from UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Fund). Jackie’s choice, a splashily primitive drawing by Andre Francois (see BOOKS), was not one of UNICEF’s best, which are generally bright, well done and inexpensive, have long been a staple money-raiser for UNICEF.