Christmastime in the City
explained. Jordan Marsh brought it back in 1990 before discontinuing it again in 1998. It was later sold at auction and has more recently been displayed at a furniture store in Avon, Massachusetts. A similar display graced the second floor of Lit Brothers in Philadelphia each holiday season from 1962 until 1975, two years before it went out of business. The Enchanted Christmas Colonial Village was a “nearly full-scale reproduction of a typical American village of colonial times,” with life-size animated figures in 15 buildings. Like the Jordan Marsh display, it was built in Germany. Visitors could see 200 animated figures going through their daily routines at a blacksmith’s shop, toymaker’s shop, and a replica of Ben Franklin’s printing press. A group of carolers sang under a lamppost, and there was even a family of animated field mice. Rich’s in Atlanta had a tradition of its own. It installed a monorail called the Snowland Express in the fifties that took kids on a 3½- minute ride onto the store’s roof and
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over the toy department. A few years later, the headlight fell off, so the store’s creative minds came up with the idea of replacing it with a pig snout and painting the entire ride pink. They named her “Priscilla.” The tradition of the pink pig, however, didn’t originate there. In the early 1880s, a resident of Saratoga Springs, New York, began making peppermint candy shaped like a pig. The pig, a Victorian symbol of prosperity, was a natural mascot at Christmastime. The candy caught on, and a tradition soon developed: At Christmas dinner, the head of the household would place the pig in a pouch and smash it with a mallet; others at the table would follow suit, breaking off pieces of the candy and sharing stories of their good fortune and wishes for a prosperous new year. A Saratoga-based candy company still sells the peppermint pigs. Meanwhile, Macy’s — which bought Rich’s — continued the train tradition into the 21st century at Lenox Square Mall with a new version of the monorail.
The suburban Sears at Manchester Center in Fresno was brand new in 1956, when it spruced up its plain storefront with holiday trees, “Merry Christmas” lettering, and Santa’s sleigh ascending toward the skies. Joe Wolf. Creative Commons 2.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0.