Tuesday, December 16, 2025

Christmas 1975 – Part 2

For Christmas 1975, the Journal featured full-page advertising grids with each participating business sponsor occupying a square (or rectangle if you want to be specific) with a small, unique holiday graphic like the one shown above. I guessing these templates were largely ready-made, with only the company name and address to be added.

The December 24, 1975 edition of the paper contained three full pages of these ads, as well as one partial page.

The pages are all fun to look at, and contain businesses from all over Lorain County. I'm sure you'll recognize a few businesses that you may have patronized, but forgotten about due to the passing decades. The cost of appearing in these pages must have been very reasonable to achieve such incredible participation.

A look at the movie pages of that December 24, 1975 Journal really drives home the realization that it was a long time since the 1950s, and that the 1970s were half over.

On one hand, you have some traditional holiday fare. The Walt Disney Company was continuing its practice of re-releasing its cartoon classics every seven years to a new generation of kids with Snow White. (Who could have guessed that the classic would be pointlessly remade in live-action in 2025?)

On the other hand, the era of raunchy movies was well underway, with pictures such as Hooker's Revenge showing at the Lorain Drive-in, and the expected X-rated fare at the VL Cinema.
It was a time when disaster movies were big-big-big. Earthquake was showing at Amherst Theatre. 
On a positive note, there were still movies with such popular Hollywood stars as Charles Bronson, James Coburn, James Caan and Burt Reynolds. And the Monty Python comedy troupe's feature And Now for Something Completely Different was showing at Oakwood Twin Cinemas – along with Three Stooges and Mister Magoo shorts!
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5 comments:

  1. -Alan D HopewellDecember 16, 2025 at 3:44 AM

    To mouth a cliche, all this seems like yesterday!

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  2. AnonymousDecember 16, 2025 at 8:41 AM

    The above ad blocks were called Christmas greeting pages and were sold mostly by the phone room. When I started in 1980 I think they cost $20 per block.
    In 1975 they were probably $10-$15. The “phone room” now there’s a blast from the past! Todd

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  3. Don HiltonDecember 16, 2025 at 8:51 AM

    You think layout purposely placed the ads for lady's unmentionable next to the naughty movies, because I sure do.

    And I see a listing for "And Now For Something Different" with Monty Python. I went to it with a student friend from England --- we laughed at completely different things!

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  4. BusterDecember 16, 2025 at 10:42 AM

    I see in the Gold Circle ad that leisure suits were already a thing in 1975.

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  5. AnonymousDecember 16, 2025 at 2:32 PM

    Ah, I love it when you post 70s stuff! It’s nice to see Oakwood Twin Cinemas on there. I lived a short walk from there and I didn’t see it in a lot of the old listings. Maybe it wasn’t continuously open or something. Love that 70s font in the “after Christmas clear-out.” I’ve noticed Burger King using that kind of retro font lately.

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