The Funnies - All the Little Santas (1914)

Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus and the Little Santa Clauses

Life Magazine, December 3, 1914

(NOT on) The Christmas List - General Electric Vacuum

I'm sure there's a woman who would love to get a stove, refrigerator, vacuum, radio, or alarm clock for Christmas. I'm also sure that, if I got any of these for my wife, she'd brain me.

The Phillip Morris Monkey and His Knee Breaker

I've always thought the Phillip Morris boy resembles the monkey that clings to every hard-core smoker's back, I think this is the first time I've seen him pictured with knee-breaker Santa, though. Less holiday spirit has never appeared in a Christmas ad.

Murray and Lanman's Florida Water (1904)

Here's an interesting ad for a company that's still in business today and a product they're still producing! Murray and Lanman (now Lanman & Kemp-Barclay & Co.) started out in 1808 in New York, NY though they've moved to New Jersey since. They produced an assortment of beauty aids, everything from hair tonic to soap as well as the oddly named Florida Water. Put simply, Florida water is the American equivalent of Eau de Cologne with an emphasis on sweet orange, lavender, and clove. According to Wiki the name is a reference to the Fountain of Youth though, as too often is true, they provide no citation for this dubious sounding statement.

The ad is a little creepy, especially with all the color robbed from it by the scanning process. Santa, descending by rope from his Santa Claus zeppelin to deliver crates of cologne to the residents of some country home. You can almost see his revulsion in his face, "Jeesh, these people reek! Send down another three cases, Giggles, four won't be enough!" I also find the ad copy a little less than convincing. "An acceptable gift at all Seasons but especially appropriate as a Christmas Box". Acceptable? I don't want acceptable gifts. I want spectacular gifts, thoughtful gifts, marvelous gifts, not ones I'll look at and think "well, it doesn't offend me." Also the term "Toilet Perfume" is a little off-putting. When I hear "toilet perfume", I'm thinking it's an euphemism, not a gift.

Texcel Tape (1949)

Want to feel old? Dig into the magazine archives and find something that you remember. Not as in, "oh yeah, I've seen that ad before." No, a product you remember from your own life. Now, to be honest, I'm not sure if it was Texcel tape that I remember, but it was some type of Christmas-decorated tape. The little aluminum dispenser dwelled in the box where my mother stored wrapping paper and bows and I saw it each time I sequestered myself in the bedroom to wrap gifts.

The ad's from a  November 28,1949 issue of Life Magazine features the requisite, pre-fifties freckle-faced kid and wasp-waisted mom dressed in evening wear and a pearl necklace to wrap the family's gifts. Notice the package for Dad? Doubtless a carton of Camels.

The Christmas List - Motorola Record Changer

Hipster culture has helped foment the resurrection of the vinyl recording. My youth started out with albums, with their artwork and detailed liner notes encouraging me to buy a lot of really crappy music. My first album was The Village People, a Christmas present from my grandmother. Soon after I got a second hand portable RCA player and started exploring the stacks of records my mother had brought home when she worked as a clerk at G. C. Murphy's in downtown Indianapolis. Long before my disco disk Christmas, Americans were eating up recordings of every sort and players and albums became a staple on holiday wish-lists.

In 1939 when this ad for a little, portable Motorola with the advanced feature of an automatic record changer. My parents had a console RCA unit equipped with a similar changer. It consisted of an L-shaped arm that held disks in place until the right moment when the play arm would retract and the next record would fall onto the turntable. Not bad for 50's tech.

A part of me misses the vinyl era, but not enough to want to go back. I've got no room for the stacks of disks, no desire to pay a premium for music, and no patience for the often finicky nature of disks and needles. But I still can appreciate the 30's kitsch ad artwork and the somewhat angry looking Santa!

A Little Christmas Music - Say it with Carols (1931)

I thought I'd kick off this year's Christmas Music series with an artist many of us here in the US may think of as obscure. Billy Mayerl made his name in the UK as a pianist and composer of novelty and music hall tunes, penning over 300 pieces in his career with his best known being Marigold (1927). Though he'd been instructed in the piano from an early age, Mayerl's style formed when he encountered American ragtime music while attending Trinity College. When he tried his hand at what the religiously conservative Trinity considered a bawdy and doubtless too African-American, syncopated style he was threatened with expulsion from the college. This censure delayed the release of Billy's composition The Jazz Master, and the launch of his career, for a decade.

Free from the confines of Trinity, Mayerl joined a Southampton hotel band in 1921 and during this time recorded an estimated 37 piano rolls of popular tunes during the early 20's and eventually joined the Savoy Havana Band in London which led to his celebrity.

Billy married his childhood sweetheart and his fame skyrocketed as he became the first to perform Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in London. Soon he was launching a correspondence course from rented offices on Oxford Street. Through the 30's his fame grew and in 1940 Billy gave a Royal Command Performance which led to his wartime radio show, Music While You Work. The program had been conceived as a way to encourage increased wartime factory production but, due to Billy's popularity and talent, it outlasted World War II by two decades. Ten months after signing off for the final time, Billy Mayerl was dead from a heart attack.

The 1931 tune Say it with Carols is characteristic of Billy's early work. A piano tour de force showing his ability to rag-up traditional material with syncopated vim and vigor. So let's gather in the soft glow of the radio, the weather's rotten, but the fire's warm and the music's good. Tis the season to take a little comfort with your fellow man, after all.