Roberta McKern
If fantasies about museums came true, in the quiet and darkness around midnight or early morning as we wait, from a display case we might hear the high, sweet voices of children singing Christmas carols any time of the year.
If little china figurines could come to life, that is.
A group of angels and two children in red and white stocking caps comprise a collection of Christmas knick-knacks among the toy collection. Santa, with a bag of toys, waits among them and behind stands a Victorian lady with presents who is also a planter, or maybe she once contained silk poinsettias.
Bizarrely, a mug fashioned from Santa’s head adds to the ensemble, plus a snowman candle. We might wonder at leaving out cookies and a cup of cocoa for Santa which would allow him to drink from his own cheerful image but Christmas is a time for suspending reality and all of the figurines rest on a copy of “The Night Before Christmas.”
Among volunteers, they have caused some controversy.
There are those who think they are not old enough to qualify for the collection at the East Linn Museum because they are figments from our childhood in the mid-20th century. However, the opposing contingent, which argues that the group is old to many coming in, is likely right. And, besides, time passes and in around 20-some years, these knick-knacks will have reached a hundred, the age proper for antiques.
More importantly, children visiting the museum identify with them, making it Christmas the year around.
Many of the toys in this section, too, likely were once a part of Christmas. Children, after all, can only acquire toys as gifts, ones not made in their imaginations, anyway. And there are two times children are more likely to receive gifts: at Christmas and for their birthdays.
About one china-headed doll we need not guess at all, for she is labeled as having been given to Lela Ann Paddock for Christmas in 1916. A very similar china-headed doll is one of the oldest toys, a gift presented to Alice May Goldsmith in 1865. A more recent, curly-headed, childlike doll dates to 1972.
She, of course, has eyes which open and shut. Oddly, small girls viewing the dolls find those with painted-on eyes disturbing. Starry eyes, the girls complain, but from the wear the dolls display, we can see their owners once upon a time did not feel the same, as they named the dolls Annie or Molly or Jane and offered them echoes of Christmas in tender mercies.
Well-aged toys, of course, can raise reflections of Christmas for many of us when we see board games like Checkers, Bingo and Clue or striped glass marbles. Some of the toys predate us, however, and unquestionably are old enough to be in the museum, clay marbles for example.
Two tin toys, undoubtedly old enough, are a biplane possibly vintage World War I and the circus wagon with its team of black maned matching grey horses. Pictured on the side of the circus wagon, a snarling lion reaches up a clawed paw in keeping with one of the Big Little books about from the 1920s, ’30s and maybe 1940s.
One book is “Tarzan and the Apes” and another is “Lost Jungle with Clyde Beatty.” Beatty was a real person, a well-known animal tamer, at least of lions and tigers. Measuring from 6 to 8 inches in length and around 4 inches wide, Big Little Books could fit under any Christmas tree.
Other titles on hand at the museum are: “Moon Mullins and the Plush Bottom Twins,” “Pop-Eye in Puddleburg,” “Polly and Her Pals on the Farm,” and “Ken Maynard, Western Justice.” Some cartoon figures also featured include the pilot in Smilin’ Jack, Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat and Chief Wahoo. Unknown places to be investigated were still the wild west and African jungles.
Yet, if the Big Little Books strike us as naive, since they feature no anthropomorphic monsters or rocket ships to Mars, not that they couldn’t in the 1930s and ‘40s, they are sophisticated compared with the poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas” upon which the knick-knack choir of angels stands.
Returning to that choir and reflections on Christmas, some of us might remember experiences with choir singing from our earlier years, as echoes of “Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly” come to mind. Back then, each of us may have been meant to look cherubic as we performed in a Christmas school program. In smaller towns, a Christmas program acted as a highlight of the school year and practice for one often started in October before Halloween.
Some of us might recall, as second-graders, wearing what was supposed to look like a choir boy’s cape, a square of white fabric with a hole in the middle through which the head poked. With luck, the fabric fell in folds over the shoulders and upper body.
Depending on what fabric Mother used, these capelets could range from bright white to dingy. Often, a dish towel had been sacrificed, one made from the unbleached muslin of a flour sack. Still, they gave a uniform look of heads popping out of white snow and proud parents recognized the voices of their own children in the mix, especially if a kid could not keep up with the “Fa-la-las” of “Deck the Halls.”
When we reached high school, singing in the Christmas program became mandatory only if we opted to take choir. Then, about the time the school year began, we started on Christmas carols. Adolescent voices had begun to change and the instructor separated various choir members into the required sopranos, altos, tenors and basses by having students go through the scales two by two.
Each girl hoped to be a soprano worthy of a solo, but altos generally prevailed. Basses among the boys were rare, but many qualified as baritones, singing the deeper parts of the music. The choir instructor, especially if a lady, had great hopes of finding tenors among the guys, and perhaps, miraculously, a boy soprano.
No boy admitted to being a tenor, and if placed in that category, any chosen sat as close to the baritones as possible. Since there was usually a surplus of altos, the girls appear to have been numbered off, one-two-one-two, each of the even numbers shifted to sing tenor.
Woe to the freshman who thrilled the choir director and qualified as a boy soprano, falsettos not being popular 60 or 70 years ago. Even though he got to sit among the soprano cheerleaders and pep club girls, he likely saw the history of his short life pass before his eyes and he knew he was doomed, his reputation in ruins.
If he lasted out the school year as a boy soprano, unless his voice changed, he was not back the next fall to rejoin the chorus.
For many of us the Christmas spirit lies in the communal sharing of the Christian traditions of gift giving and singing carols. Not to be forgotten are renewals of old acquaintances and the pleasures of making cookies, candies, and presents to give others. We can take a look at one year, 1948, to see what a Christmas season was like as reflected by some of the Museum’s toys. Not that 1948 was a profoundly special year, but we can view it for Sweet Home by reading copies of The New Era at the Genealogical Society Library.
This was kind of a year in limbo. World War II had ended over two years earlier, but things remained rough for Europe and the Orient. Germany and Japan and other countries through which actual warfare took place were faced with massive destruction. In rebuilding them by financing much of what was to be done, the United States would roll into prosperity but that was just beginning to pick up. Sweet Home had a population of around four to five thousand depending upon whose estimate we read.
Logging and the milling of lumber made up its main industries and Oregon ranked as one leading timber producing state. The owner/publishers ofThe New Era, W.L. Dudley and A.E. Macoubrie, boasted of collecting contributions from 100 business and individual sponsors to make up a special edition of Christmas Best Wishes.
People listened to the radio or went to movies at the Roxy Theater for entertainment. Television was getting its roots in the east, but it wasn’t here yet. The J.C.’s put up a special decorated tree, and a Chamber of Commerce Santa was expected to pass out goodies to a thousand children, although not likely to host all of them on his knee.
The Sweet Home Union High School offered the major choral program, John A. Davis directing and Mrs. Harold Dishaw accompanying. A brass quartet performed and a girls’ trio sang “White Christmas.”
Some music appears ambitious. The band, for instance, played “Sleepers Awake! A Voice is Calling.” Various choruses, the Glee Club and a cornet solo relied on the traditional music of the season – carols. The boys’ ensemble worked its way through a piece by Tchaikovsky and the perils of “O Holy Night,” the latter being a carol tortured by many aspiring, often inept, singers.
The East Linn Museum’s little Christmas knick-knacks could have come from Cardwell’s Department Store or Sweet Home’s Five and Dime store.
White’s Furniture and Hardware offered a Motorola radio at $69.50 for $14.00 down and $5.00 monthly on time payments. And as a Christmas special, a home recording set, the Recordette, was available and came with the needed recording discs and needles at $89.95. (We don’t have one of those at the Museum.) Regarding popular Christmas music, Harmony Music store sold individual records at 69 cents each.
A fellow wanting to give his wife or girl friend a genuine gift of fragrance found what he sought at Grove’s Rexall Drugs.
By-passing a musical powder box at $6.95, he might settle for a set of “Blue Carnation” cologne at $3.75 or a more inclusive set of “White Mink” at $11.75 with both cologne and perfume. The ladies could give their men an inexpensive gift, a wood shaving kit, $.91, or aim high for an inclusive lavender scented outfit, “A pleasant fragrance for men,” at $23.90.
The New Era wasn’t running a lot of advertisements for stores although Lionel electric trains were mentioned. More ads featured refrigerators, a gift any household at the time could appreciate and one reflecting a switch back to domestic goods following the production of war time guns, planes, tanks and munitions which had dominated manufacturing until the 1945 end of World War II.
Yet, the Christmas season of 1948 was not altogether free from the austerities of World War II. However, food had become plentiful again and Christmas candy, oranges, mincemeat and turkeys could be had at a number of groceries, Safeway being one, but reserving a turkey in advance was important.
Doubtless, most households had as opulent a Christmas as they could or would afford, perhaps gathering around one of those Christmas trees which seemed to have appeared from nowhere with friends and relatives.
At the time, Christmas trees seldom came at a price, but volunteer growth along graveled country roads did receive some unofficial control, as we might recall.
Of course, The New Era was a weekly paper, and much went on in town it wouldn’t necessarily mention. However, by collecting 100 different business and individual sponsors, The New Era showed Sweet Home as being a bustling, self sufficient place dependent on local enterprises.
And in it, we can see how the Christmas spirit linked everyone in feelings of shared good cheer and fellowship. And if the cheer were commercially stimulated, it was still there carried on by faith in goodness and underscored by the music and lyrics of traditional carols.
And, if we think of carols, we can get back to the little choir of angels and other knick- knacks perched on “Twas the Night Before Christmas” at the East Linn Museum.
If any figurine dates back to 1948, the most likely candidate is the candle shaped like a snowman in a top hat, perhaps a “Frosty the Snowman.” Except for the figured Santas, each other figurine would qualify as a soprano because even the possible boys were far below the age of testosterone. One little angel does wear a blue gown.
We do know museum fantasies don’t come true, and in July, if we were to wait in the warm dark of a summer’s evening we would not hear knick-knacks singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” But because they encourage us to reflect on the Christmas spirit of friendship and giving, they serve as heralds in a minor way.
Like many objects at the East Linn Museum, they inspire echoes and memories of other times.
The East Linn Museum will be closed for the remainder of December, January and February, reopening March 2020 on the first Thursday. All volunteers want to thank those who have supported the museum, through the past year in spirit and by belonging as a member and making other contributions.
You’ve done well.