holiday shopping nostalgia

Clearly we’re into the holiday shopping season. Even though Christmas wasn’t my holiday growing up (it is Rudder’s though, so I guess now it’s my step-holiday) I’ve always loved the feeling of being in a department store when there’s an atmosphere of holly and tinsel and a Christmas spirit you could cut with a knife. So it’s not surprising that a quick conversation about Belgian chocolates got me thinking about department stores from my childhood. I just had occasion to look up the history of Godiva chocolates. A Dutch colleague had commented that he thought the company was originally Belgian, and I didn’t know – I’m used to seing them everywhere. No wonder they seemed universal to me: according to the company’s website, they were first introduced to the US at “one of the most exclusive department stores in America, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia”. In other words, they came to the best-known department store in the city where I was born, raised, and educated, the year before I was born. No wonder they don’t seem like a foreign company to me.

Actually, growing up in the Northeast, our big department stores were the Klein’s in Roosevelt Mall, and the Gimbels and the Strawbridge and Clothier on Cottman Ave. I can just remember the Klein’s candy counter right inside the front door, with a sort of big plastic bubble over it shaped like a long balloon, presumably supposed to look like a giant candy. In those days you could buy a lot more things in department stores, as you still can in other countries; in Holland the stores have books and music and small furniture as well as clothing and cosmetics, and in Taiwan each store has a food counter in the basement.

At Christmas, a few times, I was taken downtown to see the decorations at the big Wanamaker’s, America’s first department store, with the big wall of lights up above the famous eagle statue, and the toy department where a train ran around the wall high above the floor. I’m not entirely sure if that train was at Strawbridge’s or Wanamaker’s, but I have a faint unreliable memory that it was actually big enough for children to ride in. (Or maybe I’m conflating it with the monorail at the Zoo?) I think Gimbel’s sponsored a Thanksgiving Parade, as Macy’s did in New York, though of course in Philadelphia THE parade is always the Mummers’ Parade, on New Year’s Day.

By the time I was old enough to walk to the Mall by myself, Klein’s had been replaced by wanamaker’s, so it was a big part of my early solo shopping. I did my early cosmetic experimentation at the make-up counters there and at Gimbels. (I must have done it reasonably well. Once I came home with some blush on and Mom thought I had a fever.)

By the time I was in high school, the Strawbridge’s had been replaced by Clover, its own lower-end brand, though the big one downtown stayed open. Gimbels closed just before I left town; Wanamaker’s was still there when I moved away from town. The Gimbels store on Cottman Avenue is now filled by a Sears and a party store. Wanamaker’s, the Philadelphia institution that was the city’s first big department store, has been taken over by Macy’s. (According to Wikipedia, the May Company bought both Strawbridge & Clothier and Wanamaker’s. The latter became Hecht’s, then Strawbridge’s, then thye all finally because Macy’s.) Fortunately they had the sense to keep the eagle statue in the big 10-story store downtown, so that Philadelphians can meet each other ‘at the eagle’ as they have for a century.