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| Detail from a 1926 ad |
Christmas trees were – not surprisingly – a popular news subject in the
Lorain Journal over the years beginning in November. The arrival of the first load of Christmas trees on the train was big news each year and often warranted a photo.
It's interesting reading about where the arriving trees were from.
Once the trees hit the market, however, there weren't a lot of ads advertising their sale, at least in the oldest online Journal archives from the early 1920s. And it seemed that many different businesses sold them, including grocery stores. Eventually there were even early versions of 'pop up' stores selling them.
By the time of the 1950s, there were many more ads for Christmas trees for sale, including both real and – gasp! – artificial.
What follows then is an ample sapling sample of articles and ads about Christmas trees that I collected from the pages of the Lorain Journal.
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| Dec. 1, 1923 |
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| Dec. 6, 1924 |
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| Dec. 19, 1924 |
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| Dec. 17, 1926 |
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| Dec. 11, 1930 |
This article is kind of cute. It features a group of talking Christmas trees that are discussing what it was going to be like to be sold in Lorain.
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| Dec. 23, 1931 |
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| Dec. 20, 1935 |
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| Dec. 15, 1939 |
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| Nov. 26, 1940 |
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| Dec. 20, 1940 |
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| Nov. 14, 1951 |
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| Dec. 11, 1952 |
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| Dec. 17, 1952 |
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| Dec. 5, 1953 |
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| Dec. 1, 1955 |
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| Nov. 30, 1957 |
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| Nov. 22, 1958 |
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| Dec. 17, 1958 |
Lastly, this article from November 23, 1961 nicely sums up the Christmas Tree market, with information about the number of artificial trees sold at that time.
It's interesting how many of the ads are selling trees about a week before Christmas. That seems to be the timeframe that my parents adopted towards putting up and trimming the tree. We did it a few days before Chistmas. Nowadays, many people see it as a chore to get out of the way as soon as Thanksgiving is over.
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I wrote about the arrival of the first load of Christmas Trees for 1949 on the B&O railroad back here.
You knew when you saw the little pop-up tree sellers Christmas was near. Our tree would come back from WV w or wo a deer in late November, early December and stood in the garage in a bucket of water until my mother deemed it time.
ReplyDeleteThru middle- and high-skool, every Thanksgiving weekend, a bunch of us used to go with the Kiwanis Club ("old men") to get the Christmas trees they sold in town. They used a huge, open, panel truck from a local lumber store. We'd ride in the back to a tree farm about 10 miles out where the old men would cut the trees and us kids would haul them to and stack them in the truck. Then, *we'd ride on top of the trees* on the way home to keep them from blowing out of the truck. One year, one kid (not me) got so scared he had an asthma attack and the rest of us thought he was going to die. You wore your rattiest clothes because they'd likely be ruined by pine sap and when you took a shower, after, it felt like you were being jabbed by millions of little needles. What fun!
ReplyDeleteMy family was an early adopter of fake trees, but at least ours was green. Our 'cross the street neighbor had one of those silver tinsel trees with the rotating disk light to change it different colors. Fancy.
The tree prices in the 1950s were getting higher. No wonder my parents opted for an artificial tree when they came on the market. This was one of those aluminum monstrosities, which they decorated with all red ornaments. I was not a fan of this look.
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