Christmas Days: From Fake Snow to Santalands, the Things That Make Christmas Christmas by Derek McCormack

Author:Derek McCormack [McCormack, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Holidays (Non-Religious), Antiques & Collectibles, Canadiana, history, social history
ISBN: 9780887849466
Google: A6ejHlAPRiYC
Publisher: House of Anansi
Published: 2005-10-01T00:07:55.573523+00:00

2.

Do Christmas trees trigger allergies? Yes, or so said Canadian doctors in the 1970s, when a large group of their patients “developed attacks of sneezing and wheezing several days after installing Christmas trees.”

My mother took my sister and me to the doctor. He scratched me, rubbed the scratch with a powder made up of ground-up white pine, red pine, Australian pine, Scotch pine, Norway spruce, blue spruce, and juniper. A red bump rose. Rudolph’s nose — on my back.

My sister reacted, too. Real Christmas trees? We’d always had them, but we never got another.

In the 1880s, German authorities tried to save fir forests by banning Christmas trees. Germans decided to make their own. The branches they made from wire. For fir, they glued feathers to the branches. Swan, turkey, or goose feathers, dyed green. The feathers didn’t look much like needles. The frames didn’t look like trees. Not any trees I’ve seen.

Germans carried the trees to Canada, where they made new ones, with Canadian geese. Geese don’t like to be plucked, so they’re strangled and cooked for Christmas. Feathers were washed. Feathers are full of allergens. Geese have dander.

In the 1930s, the Addis Brush Company created an artificial Christmas tree from toilet brushes. The trunk: a broomstick painted green. Brushes were branches — wire handles slotted into the broomstick. Trees came in a couple of shades of green: Ponderosa pine, Appalachian fir.

And red. There were red trees, and white trees, which proved popular with window trimmers. Addis brushes were made of hair — horse hair, squirrel hair, badger hair. Hair is also allergenic. By the 1950s, most brush decorations were plastic. My grandmother decorated her house with red toilet brush wreaths the size of toilet seats.

In the 1960s, Eaton’s in Toronto built a space-age Santaland. Santa sat on a throne, in what looked like NASA’s control room. A fifteen-foot rocket stood nearby on a launching pad. Kids climbed into it, pretending to fly to the moon. Everything — the control station, the spaceship — was silver, including the Christmas trees.

In 1959, the Aluminum Novelty Company of Mantiwoc, Wisconsin, invented aluminum trees. Mantiwoc was then known as the “Aluminum Cookware Capital of the World.” The trees were a sales sensation.

Noma Ltd. got into the aluminum tree game. Noma was an American firm with branch plants in other countries. In 1959, Noma’s Toronto factory started manufacturing aluminum Christmas trees for the Canadian market.

Machines shredded sheets of aluminum, which were then wrapped around wires. Shreds were needles. Workers fluffed them by hand. Fluffers, they were called. They wore leather gloves. Wood ornaments, popcorn garlands, paper snowflakes — these old ornaments looked awful on aluminum trees. Noma sold colour wheels, which sat beneath the tree, projecting light. Red, gold, green. Red, gold, green.

“The aluminum ornaments have gradually taken a percent of the market and have appealed to a certain clientele,” sniffed a report from a Canadian Christmas tree farmers’ association in the 1960s. “Ornaments.” That’s what they called fake trees. “However, their everlasting qualities

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