Christmas shoppers on 16th Street search for bargains, circa 1910. Photos courtesy Denver Public Library, Western History Department
By Rosemary Fetter
During the late 1800s, Colorado ranchers and farmers generally ordered holiday gifts from the Montgomery Ward catalog, but Victorian Denverites had plenty of shopping alternatives when Christmastime rolled around.
The entire family usually went Christmas shopping together, according to John Monnett in A Rocky Mountain Christmas, “The Saturday before Christmas during the last two decades of the 19th century might find a proper Victorian family leaving their fashionable home on Capitol Hill to board a cable car or, by 1892, an electric trolley that ran along 15th Street. After lunch at the Windsor or Brown Palace hotels [the Denver Dry Goods Tea Room didn’t open until 1924], the family would join crowds of people prowling the shopping district.”
A Christmas tree in the home of a relatively affluent family, circa 1900.
Along 16th Street throngs of holiday buyers shopped for bargains in the days before Black Friday and the Internet, The Denver Times newspaper portrayed Christmas shopping in Denver as an adventure, at least for the children.
According to The Denver Times, “From store to store go patient mothers, marshaling the eager youngsters shouting unlimited wants amidst abounding bright decorations, heaps upon heaps of wondrous toys and mountains of multi-colored sweets. The surging throngs will go the rounds, adding parcel after parcel to already cumbersome loads, bowing and declaring in the same old way that another year will find them through with shopping fully a month ahead so that Christmas week will not catch them belated in Sixteenth Street.” (Sound familiar?)
Prices were hard to beat in those days. In 1889, the May Company was selling men’s suits and overcoats for $10 and $20, while women’s gold-tipped umbrellas went for $1.65 and cashmere scarves only $10. (At this writing, a major department store, which will go unnamed, sells them for $75.)
Twenty years later, in 1910, prices hadn’t changed much. Silk scarves at the Denver Dry Goods Company ranged from $2 to $59, women’s shoes went for $2.35, and small Axminister rugs (for the practical giver) were $1 to $2.10. Charles H. Schreiber at 1510 Broadway offered sets of children’s dishes for five cents, Theodore (aka Teddy) bears for $1.25 and rubber dolls (water squirters) for a quarter. Monash’s Christmas Fair sold tree decorations such as 12 tin candleholders for a nickel.
Great bargains and super sales always have been part of the holiday picture. In 1910, Denver Times columnist Ellen Egan was attracted by the following newspaper ad:
Special sale for one day only. 5,000 regular 20-cent handkerchiefs will be slaughtered at 19 cents, only 2 to a customer.
“It sounds grand,” she tells readers, “and the next day at noon you postpone your luncheon indefinitely and hurry to the big store. Through the crowd you wend your way slowly until you arrive at a table surrounded by women and bearing the sign, ‘Special sale, fine handkerchiefs, 19 cents each.’ You finally attract the attention of a girl after waiting 45 minutes and you spend 10 minutes selecting the two with the most embroidery, and then hasten back to your duties. You proudly exhibit them to your chum, telling her of your great buy. ‘Well, they’re not the ones on sale,’ the friend enlightens you. ‘Those were all gone at 9:30 this morning. That was the regular price you paid.’ And you know how you hate that girl forever after that.”
Seventeenth Street in downtown Denver decorated for the holidays.
For the confused shopper, gift guides were plentiful in the newspapers even then. In 1910, Rocky Mountain News reporter Phoebe Forrest suggested ladies’ gifts such as genuine seashell hatpins and ankle watches, the latter presumably more practical now that hemlines were rising. She wrote with a touch of condescension, “It is now considered to be in perfectly good taste for a woman to wear imitation jewelry, and so no matter how slender your purse, you may have all the barbaric and bizarre ornaments that the present fashion in gowns demands.”
Newspapers also provided helpful suggestions for homemade gifts. In the pre- Hobby Lobby era, a 19th century Martha Stewart wannabe could fashion a homemade lampshade from yellow cardboard decorated with a pencil design. After cutting out the design, the artisan would paste the back of the shape with red transparent paper. When the shade on the lamp, the light shone through, providing a contrast between the red and the yellow.
Another craft project, a toy “whip” for baby, sounds positively deadly. Readers were directed to cover a short, round stick, approximately 19 inches long, in brightly colored crochet, narrowing the work beyond the wood until it came to a point and fastening a tassel at the end.
“Leave enough room to allow the tiny hand to grasp the stick firmly, and beyond this fasten a row of six small bells. This will be found a never-ending joy to baby,” the article states, carefully avoiding mention of possible injury to household pets and unsuspecting siblings. Perhaps it’s fortunate that Victorian children received toys only on Christmas or their birthdays.
Like today, wily merchants stressed the educational value of their products in preparing the tyke for the adult world. During the late 19th and early 20th century, toys for young boys began to reflect the new technology that was revolutionizing the country. (Girls were still expected to stick with dolls). Although horse-drawn carts and fire engines were still popular, the modern electric motor had already been invented and the internal combustion engine would make the cheap Model T Ford available to middle class families by 1908. Roll photographic film was available in 1888, the radio or “wireless telegraph” in 1896, and airplane appeared on the scene in 1902. Boys’ playthings reflected all of these advances, but the ultimate toy for both son and father was a miniature railroad.
In 1901, Joshua Lionel Cowen invented a toy train that used dry cell batteries, a discovery heralding elaborate train sets that miniaturized the masculine world of powerful machines and the prophesized the high-tech future. Since the industry was flourishing, parents considered employment by the railroads a worthy goal for their sons. Eventually, the scale model miniature locomotive became a Yuletide fixture, taking its place alongside candy canes, paper angels and, as one writer put it, “hellish tangles of colored lights.”
