Christmas at the Arcade: Public Spectacle, Consumer Capitalism, and American Childhood

Introduction 

The Dayton Arcade, like the rest of the city of Dayton, transformed into a dream world during Christmastime. Christmas at the Arcade followed many of the trends of the larger commercialization of the holiday that began as far back as the middle of the 19th century. Stores in the Dayton Arcade followed the trend of Christmas advertising at the turn of the century, and in the process played a role in transforming the experience of Christmas. The Dayton Arcade remade itself during the holiday season, investing in print advertisement and décor. The Dayton Arcade became hotbed for a new holiday commercial exchange that hinged on the relationship of parent-child gift-giving relationship.

This relationship, reflected in the spatial and commercial holiday transformation of the Arcade, was fundamental in shaping the conception of what it meant to be a child in America. The commercialization of Christmas is a recent development, mostly springing from the advent of radio, television, and internet advertisement.  However, the roots of the way the holiday is celebrated today stretch back to the nineteenth century. At that time, the rise of American middle-class culture fundamentally reshaped the holiday. Historian Stephen Nissenbaum argued in his definitive history of Christmas, “Christmas itself had played a role in bringing about both the consumer revolution and the ‘domestic revolution’ that created the modern family.”[i] Christmas celebrations radically transformed to reflect the rise of new middle-class family values. New traditions were created, and old ones were transformed. A key component involved the commercialization of the event. The new Christmas traditions were rooted in fantasy and wonder. The result has reshaped the memory and identity of American children and adults. Along the way, this transformation generated powerful attachments to the Arcade among Daytonians.

Christmas in Transition

When the Dayton Arcade opened in 1904, Christmas was in transition. Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Christmas was largely foreign to the celebration people know today. It has its origins in medieval end-of-the-year celebrations and has adapted and changed through the centuries to become what it is today. The fourth century Christian celebration of the birth of Christ was grafted onto the Roman end-of-the-year festival, Saturnalia. Traditions of Saturnalia, as well as other western and northern European pagan traditions, fused in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern Era.  Peasant end-of-the-year celebrations were characterized by “excess, carnality, and… ‘social inversion.”[ii] These types of practices were common throughout the world in agricultural societies. Saturnalia was just one example of such a tradition. Other such celebrations included the visitation of Odin in Northern Europe, the festival of lights, and winter solstice. As Christian culture extended its sway over Roman Empire and Northern Europe, the birth of Jesus Christ became associated with these festival traditions.

European petitioning their local lord for alms in a tradition known as Wassailing, Image from Historic UK. 

When coupled with heavy consumption of alcohol, Wassailing may have created a great deal of discomfort for the wealthier members of these agricultural societies. However, participation was largely voluntary. The tradition served as a peaceful way to address simmering frustrations revolving around inequality in societies that possessed strong notions of mutual obligation. In treating the revelers, the more wealthy and noble-born returned the obligation.

The pagan roots of the celebration so offended the Puritans of New England that the celebration was officially outlawed between 1659 and 1681. As Nissenbaum noted, Christmas in America was not popularly celebrated for the first two centuries of white settlement in North America.[iv]

However, the Industrial Revolution, which began in the US in the nineteenth century, encouraged a reorientation of the holiday.  Urbanization began to increase, leading to the evolution of working-class and middle-class. The growth of middle-class culture led to efforts to curb the disorderly and impure “rioting” and “drunkenness” associated with traditional end of the year holidays. Middle-class Americans began to refashion Christmas with new traditions, images, rituals, and gift-giving relations. These traditions, however, retained the desire to invert the social order. Through the act of consumption, employment fantastical imagery and lore, the average American could escape from their daily work. In Dayton, as elsewhere across the US, the celebration began to center around the act of consumption and the burgeoning consumer culture.

Advertisement from The Dayton Daily, 1914. 

Thomas Nast, “A Stocking Full,” 1879. Coutesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York. 

According to cultural historian William Waits, just as many ancient societies used the end-of-the-year visitation of spirits to socialize children, parents used Santa Claus to maintain a semblance of control over their children during a time of loosened restraints on behavior. The promise of toys, treats, and other gifts “taught that Santa Claus would give them presents only if they were good; if they were bad, Santa would leave them only switches and ashes.”[vii] With the increase in manufactured toys caused by the rapid expansion of America’s productive capabilities, more toys were available to more children. Previously punished children received gifts regardless of their behavior. Likewise, the imagery of an evil or impish figure was replaced by the jolly, round elf.[viii] Industrialization contributed to the rise in both abundance and complexity of toys. Thus, the development of marketing of toys sought to seize upon new-found abundance and increased demand for children’s presents at Christmas time.

In Dayton as elsewhere, retailers provided gift ideas for husbands, wives, and children.[ix] The Elder and Johnston Company, located in the Reinhold Building on Fourth Street, combined its Christmas advertising with Dayton Arcade businesses like the M. Franckel Piano Company, Walter G. Bowers’ Diamonds, and Percy Wolff clothing to create full page “Christmas Store” advertisements brimming with gift ideas for family members. In particular, Elder and Johnston reflected a new development in the imagery of Christmas and gift-giving relations with its “Santa’s Dominion” advertisements.[x]

As one descended into the basement of Elder and Johnston, the world melted away, transforming from the growing urban landscape of Dayton to the swelling population of “Toyland” in “Santa’s Dominion.” According to Elder and Johnston, “eager crowds in Toyland (were) picking up odd trinkets at a lively rate. But is it any wonder? Prices were never so reasonable.”[xi] The advertisements were directed toward children on one hand, but also toward their parents. 

Retailer’s use of toy displays, as well as their effort to advertise to children and parents marked a significant development in the commercialization of the Christmas tradition. They began to utilize both space and play-element in commercializing Christmas in the coming decades.

Christmas displays and shop windows, such as the Rike’s annual Christmas fair, fostered the consuming public’s desire to purchase gifts and enticed shoppers with grandiose displays. The Rike-Kumler’s Company claimed it had been celebrating Christmas in Dayton since 1852, however, they instituted their popular Christmas open house just as the twentieth century began. In order to take advantage of the burgeoning commercial aspect of Christmas, Rike-Kummler’s invited Daytonians to share in the holiday at their store and on the street corner with their extensive Christmas displays. In December of 1919 The Dayton Herald beckoned visitors to the Rike’s display, “Follow the crowds to Rike-Kumler’s, where everybody is helping to make this a genuine old-fashioned Christmas.”[xii] The advertisement went on to claim that the art department at Rike-Kumler had created a “Christmas Fairyland” that hundreds would wander through. Rike’s annual Christmas open house not only included an elaborate shop window display and a “Christmas Fairyland,” but also a “Toyland” where parents brought their little boys and girls to meet “the Merry Old Fellow.” However, as The Dayton Herald warned, “You’ll wish you were a child again when you see the immense displays of Santa Claus wares.”[xiii]

Evidence from archival sources and oral interviews suggests that the Dayton Arcade and Arcade management employed similar advertising tactics at Christmas time. The Dayton Arcade transformed itself into a Christmas wonderland to entice shoppers and entertain children of the Dayton area. Advertisements suggest that Arcade retailers invited customers to visit their Christmas displays.   The department store Traxler’s, located in the Arcade, offered its shoppers “peace and good-will and Christmas cheer” at their “Christmas Store.”[xiv] With separate Christmas displays on both the second floor and basement, Traxler’s “Christmas Bargain Carnival” transformed the Arcade into a shopping carnival. Likely describing the same carnival in 1914, Connie Breen of Kettering recalled her father’s experience at the Arcade,

“[My father would] go into the Arcade at Christmas time and see Santa Claus and across the street at the Court House they kept a herd of reindeer,  four or five reindeer, in a pen. He’d go over and pet the reindeer the week before Christmas. And when it became Christmas Eve all the kids in town would come there to get candy canes from Santa Claus and they would bring the reindeer into the Arcade and parade them around the Arcade.”[xv]

Breen’s memory suggests that in the decades after the founding of the Dayton Arcade, Christmas had begun to “spill out into the public realm.”[xvi] American historian Penne Restad explained that Christmas in the public sphere “brought people together and transformed the landscape and even the experience of public space […] the city center […] became an arena for exchanges of goodwill, cheerful greetings, and benign purpose.”[xvii]  Much as it had in Ancient times and Medieval Europe, festivals served to bring members of the community together to share in goodwill towards each other.

 After Christmas became an American national holiday in 1890, its celebration in public spaces began to spring up across the country. The first public Christmas tree was lit in New York City in December of 1912, while Hartford and Boston held first-of-their-kind “open-air” music concerts. Christmas in 1913 saw some 160 cities participate in a public celebration, but just over a decade later nearly every single city in America had some form of public celebration of the Christmas season.[xviii] Like Breen’s father experienced in Dayton in 1914, the traditions of Christmas extended outward from department store carnivals into shared space like the courthouse plaza. From there the celebration would move back into consumer complexes filled with the iconography of Christmas. When viewed with the aspects of space, movement, and imagery one can begin to see the ritual-esque dimensions of a consumer Christmas.

Rikes’s Children’s Parade, 1930s, Wright State University Archives

The stories told by Daytonians illustrated that the Arcade began to morph both the spaces and the time in which the holiday was celebrated. This “Christmas Season” would then take on public dimensions and served as a shared experience of consumerist capitalism with the Christmas department store as its holiest location. With their processions of reindeer and Santa Clauses, Dayton Arcade’s own department stores were for the city of Dayton the most sacred spaces of the consumer Christmas pantheon.

“Old King Cole,” part of a float from Rike’s Children’s Parade, c.1930s, Wright State University Archives

a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly […] it proceeds within its own proper boundaries […] according to fixed rules […] it promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy […][is] the ‘supra-logical’ element of humanity.”[xxii]

Click here to see the author talk about the above image. 

The rules of the ‘game’ of American Christmas, if one can call them so, necessitate a suspension of belief by both child and adult. Even companies, who stand to profit from the consumer culture surrounding Christmas, must submit to the logic of Santa Claus and Christmas mythology, lest the entire façade of the dream world fall apart. This is evidenced by the process of “learning the truth” about Santa and the elaborate schemes of parents to prevent such happening.

Adults also share in the game when they “play” Santa Claus. As Huizinga described, adults “wear the mask,” hiding their own recognition of the game. While adults may realize they are “just playing pretend,” the game demands they follow all the rules regardless. Even the slightest step out from the ‘game’ ruins the illusion of the dream world. Usually relegated to a designated “sacred space,” players can “step-out” of reality and into a new world.[xxiii] Traxler’s “Toy Town” was where Santa visited and where store and customer joined to create such a space.  Going to meet Santa at the Arcade, parent as well as child immersed themselves in a wonder world of toys and jolly spirit.  The Rike’s Christmas parade, like Traxler’s, created another “sacred space” that suspended belief and let whimsy rule.

AUDIO ELEMENT GOES HERE

Crowd gathers for the Children’s Parade, 1930s, Wright State University Archives

In describing her father’s memories of participation in the Rike’s parade Connie Breen remarked on the gravity of the whimsical event saying, “He said it was always a big deal to be in the Children’s Parade. All the kids got dressed up and wore the best of clothes and the parents gathered around and watched the kids parade around the Arcade with Santa Claus leading the reindeer.”[xxvii]  The Children’s Parade, while a whimsical and fun event for all, necessitated the act of dressing up and was recognized by its participants as an important event, and even perhaps an honor to be included.

Santa Arrives by sleigh to the Rike’s Children’s Parade, 1930s, Wright State University Archives

Similarly, the American Santa socializes, but perhaps more importantly, his image and likeness instructs both child and adult to participate in consumer capitalism through the act of Christmas consumption. In fact, the adult chosen to be Santa Claus must embody excess in consumption. With broad shoulders, plump stomach, and bedecked in rich red and white fur, he not only instructs, but is the embodiment of consumption. Thus, in the very act of Christmas shopping and engagement with its iconography centered in places of consumption, the public participates in the fantasy that is the essence of consumer society. A consumer society gives the promise of fur coats and red fabrics of kings. It offers a carnivalesque reversal of societal norms in which the working class, through excess and conspicuous consumption, can pretend to escape from their lot in life. However, as Huizinga explained, the fantasy will only work if all parties share in its rules and customs.

The social participation in these celebrations and the “sense of sharing” or camaraderie in fantasy are two important aspects that stores like Rike’s and Traxler’s in the Dayton Arcade sought to leverage in the new American consumer culture.  Stores levered emotional and symbolic events to capitalize on the burgeoning Christmas consumer culture. They created Christmas-themed store displays, hosted events like open houses and Christmas bargain carnivals, and facilitated extravagant parades.[xxviii] Emotion and symbolic events, however, were leveraged to secure a customer base that desired to use Christmas as a means of participation in consumerism.

In response to the growing demand, American businessmen delved into production of toys and spectacle targeted toward children.  By 1926, the United States was the greatest producer of toys in the world, meeting a serious demand as the influence of children grew over their parent consumption choices. The rise of the child’s participation in the act of consumption led to the development of “child experts” who directed, lectured, and instructed companies how to market to children using spectacle and “toy expositions,” and interactive marketing.[xxix] One such example of interactive marketing was the Dayton Arcade’s advertisement campaign with Dayton native and Hollywood child star, Mary Jane. Arcade retailers hosted interactive events in November of 1930 at which locals could meet the young star and purchase their “Mary Jane” products and toys.[xxx]

This style of informed advertising increased dramatically at Christmastime.  By the middle and late 1920s, nearly every department store in America had its own “radio Santa Claus,” and weekly letter shipments to the North Pole.[xxxi] The involvement of children in interaction with Santa would continue into the 1930s as the Arcade Market invited them to meet Santa’s brother, “Jack Claus,” and listen for his nightly messages on the home radio.[xxxii] The process of tradition-invention had never stopped. Rather it continually, as in the past, adapted to meet the values of those participating.

The success of radio and print advertisement featuring Saint Nick created a demand to meet him in person.  Thus, in 1937 Charles W. Howard, a career Santa Claus, founded the Howard Santa Claus School to train new prospective Kris Kringles in “showmanship, salesmenship, child psychology, the economics of the toy industry, and Santa history.”[xxxiii] As America entered the middle of the twentieth century, new mediums of Christmas advertisement and entertainment reached wider audiences, and like graduates of the Howard Santa Claus School, became standardized by a “canon” or a uniform Christmas lore centered around nostalgia informed by the country’s experience of prolonged depression and the Second World War.

Creating Christmas Memories and Tearing them Down

The memory of past Christmases at the Arcade resonates deeply with those who frequented the Dayton Arcade in November and December in the 1940s and 1950s. Reflecting on his time working at his parent’s fruit stand during the Christmas season in the 1940s, Bob Rafner relived the great passion and effort they put forth during the Christmas season to create hundreds of decorative fruit baskets. During this time, “[He] worked with [his] father in making up the baskets late into the night, and [his] mother and some helpers would wrap and ribbon the baskets.”[xxxiv] Rafner’s memories demonstrated a major theme of Christmas in the 1940s, namely the ideal of a family working together and sacrificing to provide for the community. Rafner’s father’s business “would sell baskets to organizations and individuals who would purchase them for sick employees or friends, and they would be delivered to local hospitals.”[xxxv] Indeed, to Rafner as well as many Americans during the war, the ideal of the Christmas spirit was mirrored the core values of America. All aspects of American media, print, radio, television, and movies were dedicated to portraying the idea that Christmas represented “everything that the armed forces were fighting to save.”[xxxvi]

In particular, the films of the 1940s like Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street and It’s a Wonderful Life constructed a popular image of the ideal American Christmas and helped to engrain the hope for post-war “prosperous consumption” into the consciousness of the American public.[xxxvii] Despite New Deal programs to help bring the nation out of depression, America still faced high unemployment while the entire world began to descend into conflagration of war for a second time in two and a half decades. According to cultural historian Max Myers, the commercial interests in promoting Christmas as a means to stimulate economic consumption “dovetailed” with the national desire to find images that were both traditional and reassuring.[xxxviii] In the context of this economic need and national longing, along with the implementation of “the Production Code” on all Hollywood movies in the 1930s, the stage was set for a series of films that worked to hold up traditional American values while idealizing and glorifying the American Christmas.

In the memory of Daytonians who frequented the Arcade at Christmas in the late 1940s and 1950s, it was an occasion of merriment, abundance, and grandeur.  Remarking on his childhood memories of the late 1950s Dayton during Christmas, Gary Eubanks recalled that “downtown used to be so decorated at Christmas time[…] The Court House always was decorated with Christmas trees and there was always so many lights downtown with candles on each one of the light posts. You know, everybody really decorated up.”[xxxix] In Dayton, as in other industrial cities across America, wartime employment and production had lifted the country out of economic depression. Transition to peacetime production with expanded capability led to a cornucopia of consumer goods. Consumer discretion increased and improved productive capacity provided a supply to a demand created by returning consumers and rising wages. The three Christmases after the end of the war (1945, 1946, and 1947) were among the best in history in terms of retail sales.[xl]  The Christmas of 1945 was marked with particular grandeur in the city of Dayton when store owner Frederick Rike convinced New York City’s NCR to provide Rike’s with their “exhaustively researched” Christmas display based on Charles Dickens’, A Christmas Carol.[xli]

The run of successful holidays came to an end in 1948. Retailers struggled to discover the desires of a public flushed with cash but with a much higher degree of discretion. This trend in Christmas shopping followed the general trend of retail in Dayton as the years 1948-1954 saw a minimal increase in sales downtown as suburban retail blossomed.[xlii] Potential customers of the Arcade were drawn away from the downtown area as capital investment gravitated toward Dayton’s new suburbs and their state of the art shopping centers. These factors combined with concerns that war in Korea would threaten the consumer market like it had during World War Two. The following years failed to live up to the memory of ’45, ’46, and ’47. The memory of these three Christmases, however, would stick in the American consciousness as the “Golden Age” of Christmas.[xliii]

Cultural historian Kathleen Sands described the process of nostalgia for the “Golden Age” of Christmas as “historical misrecognition” through a process that Catherine Bell termed “ritualization.” This ritualization, as has been demonstrated, can occur with any cultural event, not just a religious one.  According to Sands, the purposeful forgetting through ritualization occurs through hegemonic cultural forces, especially those which Americans can “buy into.” As Sands and others have suggested, consumerism had become religious for Americans. Because of its many connections to American’s religious traditions, Christmas was a key nexus in the process.

While advertising and public displays had played a major role in this transformation, so too had popular entertainment. Popular Christmas films and songs by crooners like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in the 1950s began to blur the experience of “old” Christmas into the present moment. Irving Berlin, followed by countless others, sang that he was “dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones we used to know.” It is no surprise that Gary Eubank remembered a thriving downtown in the late 1950s even as suburbanization began the process that would destroy the American inner city and begin an unstoppable trend toward the downfall of the Dayton Arcade. Undoubtedly, collective nostalgia played a role in driving Sheila Spence to revisit the Arcade at Christmas in the 1990s. She claimed it was because of her strong Christmas memories of the Arcade as a child in the 1950s.[xliv] Despite the fact that the 1950s marked the beginning of the decay of downtown Dayton, the memory of Christmas in downtown was powerful enough to wash away the pain felt by downtown retailers and the growing social unrest in the late 1950s.

Christmas in Vietnam, December 1969, by Jack Baldar

Evidence from Dayton’s newspapers in the 1960s suggests that the Arcade’s Christmas was dampened as well.  Writing in a column of The Dayton Daily News, James Reston of the  New York Times Service painted a picture of the American downtown, “all aglitter for the Christmas festival of peace but peace seems more remote than ever[.]”[xlv] The promise of a rise in troop involvement by the Johnson administration, he concluded was “why the mood is solemn at this Christmas period.”[xlvi] The Dayton Daily News reported that the Christmas holiday season, which usually was characterized by the green of the holiday, had “some more somber colors- particularly olive drab-running through its otherwise bright texture this year.”[xlvii] The department store Fitzgibbons featured a Christmas advertisement that revealed the dissonance and subsequent questioning events had produced.[xlviii] Radically different from any type of advertisement in the past six decades, this advertisement consciously called attention to the artificial nature of the American Christmas:

“Strange are the ways of Christmas in Dayton. The day after Christmas almost on signal, big candles come out to light the twilight. “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” come out of the walls everywhere. Bell-Ringing Santas materialize on street corners. Lonely old men look lonlier. Touchy teachers worry about getting Christ out of Christmas, (Who needs more school controversy?) But the best place to get a reading on Christmas, 1965 is a department store.” (emphasis is the author’s)

This advertisement suggested that the Dayton Arcade was experiencing what American folklorist Sue Samuelson termed as the “festival malaise” of the 1960s.[xlix] This was a trend of complaining about or critiquing the rituals of Christmas by various magazines, businesses, and public figures beginning in the late 1950s. Another example of such “malaise” or “alienation” with Christmas would be the magazine Esquire’s 1966 holiday message to its readers: “[we wish you] a very, very alienated Christmas, a disenchanted New Year; some degree, if you insist, of peace on earth; and whatever you may find to your advantage in good will toward men.”[l] This “disenchantment” was a result of the fantasy of a consumer Christmas coming up against the experienced reality of America. In Dayton, the racial tension that reached the city melted the mythology of “White Christmas.”

As the oral history collected by the Dayton History Project in its study of the Arcade reveals, the experience of the Arcade as a democratic space centered around the egalitarianism of consumption was always provisional. For Whites more than others, the Arcade was a shared space. For all Daytonians, inegalitarianism remained. As a lifelong resident of Dayton’s West Side, George Scherer explained that “we (his family) never stopped going to the Arcade.” But he added, “We just knew what the conditions would be when we got there.”[li]  The Arcade was “really pretty at Christmas time. Yup, it was really crisp, really pretty.”[lii] Pausing while he fondly reminisced about the beauty of the Arcade at Christmas, he explained that he was forced to use the stairs to get to the balcony to view the Christmas decorations. If he tried to enter the elevator, George recalled, “They always told me, ‘Stairway to the right. Stairway to the right.”[liii]

Dayton Police outside of a looted store, 1966, Dayton Daily News

The malaise and alienation with Christmas, resulting from war and domestic unrest, ruptured the fantasy created by the 1950s. Disillusionment led to a reorientation of space and imagery, which ironically strengthened commitment to consumerist values. Likewise, the Dayton Arcade would remake itself and establish new Christmas traditions as the holiday continued to adapt.

Mall Santas, Urban Renewal, and the Hollydays 

The Dayton Arcade’s undertaking of renovations in the late 1970s and mid 1980s further cemented it as a special place to Daytonians. Its renovations meant it could become a place that catered more to the youth of Dayton and the growing mall culture. Gary Davis, a teenager that spent time both working and hanging out in the Arcade during the 1970s, remembered the Arcade at Christmas as being “so busy and so alive.”[lvi] The Arcade was facing growing competition from suburban malls and a shrinking consumer base as urban renewal projects removed populations of people from the downtown area. It undertook these renovations to make itself into a space similar to its competition. Out of both necessity and tradition, the Arcade also adapted styles of Christmas celebrations similar to those of suburban malls while retaining its unique connection to the downtown area. Ultimately, the City of Dayton recognized the role of the Arcade at Christmas as one of its most important function. After nearly a century of being the center of Dayton’s Christmas celebration, city planners and local business leaders sought to revitalize the Arcade by emphasizing its most magical and beautiful time of the year.

In the Arcade, as well as other shopping centers in the late 1970s and 1980s, Santa Claus was the most important element of the holiday transformation. With the explosion of regional malls came an increased demand for the “mall” Santa. According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, mall Santas across the country averaged 8,750 visits from children per mall per Christmas season.[lvii] Indeed, the mall became the “official sponsor of Christmas spirit” as it played host to Christmas’ most important commercial icon. At this point however, the history of the Arcade and that of malls began to diverge.

Dayton Philharmonic performs at the Arcade, c.1980, Wright State University Archives

For the decade between 1980 and 1989, the Arcade Square Rotunda was filled with the sound of Christmas melodies nearly daily.[lviii] As part of the “Holiday Festival,” the Rotunda welcomed groups ranging from professional choirs, local children’s choirs, accordion groups, and perhaps most notably, the Dayton Philharmonic.[lix]

Increased foot traffic during the holiday season gave rise to a sense of “rejuvenation,” felt by Arcade tenants and customers. Joan Blank Montenegro took advantage of the new energy surrounding the Arcade to open a Christmas Shop after the renovations. She explained that, “People in the beginning, in the early ‘80’s when the Arcade was really rejuvenated with all the excitement, people wanted to come down and see it and they’d bring family and friends that were visiting from out of state in to see the Arcade because it was a real show place[…]The Dayton Arcade Steering Committee,” Montenegro explained, “was really designed to do a marketing study as to how we could generate more people coming into the downtown area. The committee was composed of store owners and business owners in the Arcade.” [lx] Montenegro suggested that the Arcade’s involvement in local arts during Christmas was likely a part of the larger effort to rejuvenate Dayton’s downtown. Additionally, at Christmas time, the Arcade would swell with vendors hawking Christmas wares. Between 1976 and 1986, Linda Daegele witnessed vendors every December moving into the Rotunda to sell ornaments, decorations, and miscellaneous gifts. [lxi] Efforts to save downtown in the 1980s and 1990s hinged upon the importance of the Arcade traditional role as a sacred space of Christmas.

Watching the Christmas Concert, c.1980, Wright State University Archives

No single example better illustrated the City of Dayton’s investment in Christmas at the Arcade than the series of Christmas concerts throughout the 1980s by the Dayton Philharmonic. At least once per holiday season, the Arcade’ rotunda was filled with large crowds of spectators and the sounds of a full professional orchestra performing Christmas classics. The orchestra filled the bottom floor as shoppers and spectators gathered at the rotunda balcony. Photographic evidence suggests that these concerts were enormously popular, drawing packed crowds into the Arcade and potential customers for Arcade tenants. Mary Monroe, a soprano opera singer, remarked that “the place is just packed. People are hanging from the rafters.”[lxii] Monroe described the atmosphere of the Arcade, “there is a warm, gracious feeling about the concert […] It’s marvelous to stand on the top level of the Arcade and look down at the orchestra. The whole spirit of the thing is very positive.”[lxiii] In fact, for many Daytonians, it was the Dayton Philharmonic Christmas concerts that cemented the importance of the Arcade itself. The concerts brought about the feeling “like you got in the old days, when people took time out at Christmas for singing and getting together,” and even brought one old man to tears.[lxiv] As the Arcade continued to struggle, and eventually shut its doors in the early 1990s, it was ultimately the memory of past Christmases that brought hope for a revival.

In 1991, the Dayton Arcade closed its doors with no plan for a reopening. Despite renovations by ownership and the steering of foot traffic by the city, the Arcade could not overcome its financial struggles. After changing ownership multiple times, the Arcade closed its doors 87 years after its opening. Despite the Arcade’s closing, the debate about how to revive downtown never ended. Dayton’s mayor at the time, Richard Clay Dixon, continued to put forth the argument that increased foot traffic would ultimately promote economic growth. However, the question, according to Dayton city council, was what kind of events, entertainment, or businesses might accomplish this goal. The Hollydays of 1992 was one such experiment encouraged by city council and mayor Dixon. The event’s reception was overwhelmingly strong. Mayor Dixon claimed that it had “settled once and for all that people will come downtown if you offer them the right kind of options […] so I think it’s no longer a debate of whether people will come downtown or not.”[lxv] 52 shops helped to welcome Daytonians back to their beloved Arcade for its most special time.  Between November twelfth to December twenty-fourth, an estimated 150,000 shoppers filed through the Arcade.[lxvi] While mayor Dixon admitted that seasonal attractions at the Arcade would not be a strong enough “magnet,” to lure visitors downtown year-round. Nearly 90% of HollyDays visitors claimed they would be interested in making it an annual tradition.[lxvii] This demonstrated both the desire to save the Arcade, as well as the power Christmas at the Arcade had to shape public decisions.

The HollyDays, 1992, picture by Todd Jacobson

HollyDays would not return to the Arcade, but would be replaced by the tree lighting ceremony at the Courthouse and annual Children’s Parade. A change in mayorship also doomed the HollyDays. New mayor Mike Turner desired a long-term approach to re-opening the Arcade. “I do not believe the Arcade is necessary for retail to thrive at Christmas,” Turner explained, “Instead of wasting money on the short-term event, the city needs to spend it on a plan to get the building open for the long-term.”[lxxi]

Click here to see the author talk about the 1992 and 1993 HollyDays and their implications in the fate of the Dayton Arcade.  

Ultimately, the meaning of an Arcade Christmas could not overcome the financial struggles that plagued the Arcade for the last quarter century of its existence.  The HollyDays had demonstrated that Arcade was a powerful place in the memory of Daytonians. As a child, former resident of Dayton, Sheila Spence, had visited the Arcade at Christmas with her mother and father. When she had a family of her own, she created a tradition of going to the Arcade with her own children one day in December. In the 1990s, she had the opportunity to bring her elderly father to HollyDays. Spence recalled the special moment meant to her and her father, “We made a special point of going down to the Arcade so that he could see it and there, again […] It was just wonderful for him to see it. He passed away a couple of years after that, so that made that visit even more special.”[lxxii]

Conclusion

The Dayton Arcade was always more than just a place to shop, relax, or live. It was itself a world within itself. Its beautiful architecture, wondrous glass rotunda, and its countless vendors offered an idyllic alternative outside of the mainstream. Social theorist Walter Benjamin went as far as to consider them utopian dream worlds. In no other time of the year was this truer than at Christmas. The Arcade followed the trends of the commercialization of Christmas at the turn of the twentieth century as manufacturing and the rise of the American middle-class culture began to transform the celebration of the holiday. The Christmas shop displays created a new form of dream-like spectacle that focused on commodities. The Arcade enticed visitors with its beauty while serving to “fetishize commodities,” or rather make them the object of worship. Utilizing the pantheon of American Christmas iconography, the Arcade created tradition and ritual that revolved around the act of consumption. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Arcade became the object of Christmas nostalgia as the process of ritualization created the ideal American Christmas; for Daytonians, this ideal Christmas included a trip to the Dayton Arcade. The tumult of the 1960s threatened the utopian order of the Arcade. The “invented” tradition of Christmas was challenged and the shared illusioned shattered. It is little wonder this time marked a decline in the economic fortunes of the Arcade.  The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw the Arcade attempting to recreate the old Christmas traditions while adapting itself to the changing culture of downtown. The 1990s HollyDays in particular illustrated that the Arcade remained a ‘sacred’ space of Dayton’s Christmas ritual.

Holiday Greetings card from The Friends of the Arcade, 2019, Facebook

 Endnotes:

[i] Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996): xii.

[ii] James Tracy, “Introduction,” in Christmas Unwrapped: Consumerism, Christ, and Culture ed. Richard Horsley and James Tracy (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001): 2-3.

[iii] Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas, x.

[iv] Ibid., 3.

[v] “What Shall I Give for Christmas?” The Dayton Herald (Dayton, Ohio) December 22, 1909. “XMAS Shopping Large at Ellman Store.” Dayton Daily News (Dayton Ohio) December 15, 1915.

[vi] William B. Waits, “Something for the Kid: Gifts from Parents to Children.” In The Modern American Christmas (New York: New York University Press, 1993).

[vii] Ibid., 121.

[viii] Ibid., 145.

[ix] “The Christmas Rush is On…” The Dayton Herald (December 22, 1902. Dayton Ohio.)

[x] “A Christmas Store,” The Dayton Herald (Dayton, Ohio) December 6, 1905.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] “Follow the Crowds,” The Dayton Herald (Dayton Ohio) December 8, 1919. 5

[xiii] “Toyland Opens, Special Christmas ‘Extra,’” The Dayton Herald (Dayton, Ohio) November 7, 1919.

[xiv] “The Christmas Store is bountifully ready for you, be your needs what they may,” The Dayton Herald (Dayton Ohio) December 17, 1915.

[xv] Breen, Connie. 2008. (Dayton resident) interview with Diane Wallace and Nancy Roach. February 18, 2008. Friends of the Dayton Arcade.

[xvi] Penne L. Restad, “A Frame of Mind: Christmas in the Twentieth Century,” in Christmas in America: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 156.

[xvii] Ibid., 157.

[xviii] Ibid., 157-160.

[xix] Ibid., 161-162.

[xx] Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870-1930,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (December 1991): 889.

[xxi] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950): 3.

[xxii] Ibid., 13.

[xxiii] Ibid., 9.

[xxiv] Ibid., 6.

[xxv] Ibid., 18.

[xxvi] See Huizinga, 18-26 for argument on why ritual is of the play-element.

[xxvii] Breen, Connie, February 18, 2008. Friends of the Dayton Arcade.

[xxviii] Adam Eldrige and Illaria Pappalepore, “Festive Space and Dream Worlds: Christmas in London,” in Destination London ed. Andrew Smith and Anne Graham. (Westminster: University of Westminster Press, 2019): 186.

[xxix] William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993): 328-329.

[xxx] “Mary Jane, Child Star from Dayton,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) November 2, 1930.

[xxxi] Leach, 330.

[xxxii] “Have you Met Jack Claus,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) December 16, 1933.

[xxxiii] Restad, “A Frame of Mind,” 163.

[xxxiv] Rafner, Bob. (worked in Dayton Arcade) email to Diane Wallace. 2008. Friends of the Dayton Arcade.

[xxxv] Ibid.

[xxxvi] Max A. Myers, “Christmas on Celluloid: Hollywood Helps Construct the American Christmas,” in Christmas Unwrapped: Consumerism, Christ and Culture ed. Richard Horsley and James Tracy (Harrisburg:Trinity Press International, 2001): 39.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 39.

[xxxviii] Ibid., 42.

[xxxix] Eubanks, Gary. (Dayton Native) interview by Joanne Graznow and Nancy Roach. March 21, 2008. Friends of the Arcade.

[xl] Waits, “Something for the Kid,” 195.

[xli] Andrew Walsh, Lost Dayton Ohio (Charleston: The History Press, 2018): 89.

[xlii] Bruce W. Ronald, Dayton the Gem City (Tulsa: Continental Heritage Press, 1981), 150.

[xliii] Waits, “Something for the Kid,” 195-196.

[xliv] Sheila Spence. (former resident) interview by Nancy Roach. April 2008. Friends of the Arcade.

[xlv] James Reston, “Vietnam Christmas Solemn as Mixed Up War Drags On,” (Dayton, Ohio) December 17, 1965.

[xlvi] Reston, December 17, 1965.

[xlvii] “Vietnam War May Affect Stores’ Christmas Sales,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) October 10, 1966.

[xlviii] “Christmas Comes with Bang” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) December 1, 1965.

[xlix] Elizabeth Pleck, “Christmas in the Sixties,” in Christmas Unwrapped: Consumerism, Christ, and Culture ed. Richard Horsley and James Tracy (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001): 19.

[l] “Black Christmas: Holiday Season in US Magazines,” Time 88 (December 23, 1966): 44.

[li] George Scherer (Dayton Resident) interview by Chris Koester and Hannah Kratofil, March 3, 2020. Dayton History Project.

[lii] Ibid.

[liii] Ibid.

[liv] Josh Sweigart, “Lasting Scars, Part 2: Fifty Years Later, Dayton Remains Segregated,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) August 30, 2016. https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/lasting-scars-part-fifty-years-later-dayton-remains-segregated/n43hseF7clMWsXtdVODYMM/.

[lv] Maulana Karenga, Kwanzaa: Origins, Concepts, Practice (Inglewood: Kawaida Publications, 1977): 15.

[lvi] Davis, Gary (resident) interview by Diane Wallace and Nancy Roach, May 27, 2008, Friends of The Arcade.

[lvii] James J. Farrell, One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003): 119.

[lviii] “Weekend Calendar.” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) December 13, 1984

[lix] “Orchestra, Singers Bring Sounds of Christmas to Arcade.” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) December 18, 1980.

[lx] Montenegro, Joan Blank (store owner) interviewed by Nancy Roach, May 30, 2008, Friends of the Arcade.

[lxi] Daegele, Linda, (worked near the Arcade) interviewed by Nancy Roach, May 2008, Friends of the Arcade.

[lxii] Carol Siyahi, “A Little Christmas Culture,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) December 7, 1983.

[lxiii] Siyahi, “A Little Christmas Culture.”

[lxiv] Ibid.

[lxv] Derek Ali, “Dayton Trying to Duplicate HollyDays Success at Arcade,” Dayton Daily News, December 30, 1992.

[lxvi]  Derek Ali, “HollyDays a Success in Dayton; Crowds Flock to Downtown Arcade.” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), December 30, 1992.

[lxvii] Derek Ali, “Dayton Trying to Duplicate HollyDays Success at Arcade.”

[lxviii] Julia Helgason, “All That Glitters…Is in the Arcade,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), November 25, 1993.

[lxix] Helgason, “All that Glitters…Is in the Arcade.”

[lxx] Debra Jasper, “Expense Dooms Arcades HollyDays Bloom,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), July 14, 1994

[lxxi] Jasper, “Expense Dooms Arcades HollyDays Bloom.”

[lxxii] Spence, Sheila (resident) Friends of the Arcade.