A Pilgrim's Place: November 2012

They didn’t call it “Black Friday” when I was a kid, just the Friday after Thanksgiving. It was, however, the busiest shopping day of the year. There was only one really significant place in Chicago to shop in the days before suburban malls–Downtown, and that’s where I loved to be

It started when my friend Kenny’s Aunt took us to the Loop on the Addison Street Bus one year. I didn’t go to buy things since I never had much money. I went to took at things. There were so many places to visit: Marshal Fields with it’s decorated windows, Carson, Pirie Scott, the Fair Store, Vaughan’s Seed Store. (They had pets on the second floor and toys on the third floor.) There were the lesser department stores Wieboldts and Goldblatts (but we had smaller versions of those in our neighborhood.) And there were the dime stores F. W. Woolworths and S. S. Kresge–places where a kid could actually afford to buy something. There was the amazing Kroch and Brentano’s book store. It seemed as if they had every book ever printed there, and the clerks new exactly where each book was located. There was Stop and Shop–a grocery store so expensive my family never bought anything there.

The final delight was to ride back on the Addison bus down Michigan Avenue where thousands of tiny Italian lights hung in the bare trees.

It’s almost all gone now. The main shopping area has migrated to North Michigan. All the old stores are gone. Even Marshall Field was bought out and transformed into a Macy’s. Chicagoans protested this adulteration of the Queen of State Street. I was in Chicago a few days before Thanksgiving and noticed that Macy’s has made a few very small concessions to the protesters. The brass name plates bearing the name Marshall Field are back, and the window displays featured the iconic Uncle Mistletoe, the fairy helper to Santa at the North Pole.

One evening I rode the Sheridan bus up Michigan Avenue. (The Addison bus hasn’t gone downtown in years.) They had turned on the tree lights just a couple days before. The new miniature lights made in China don’t have quite the same happy glow as the old Italian lights, but then I don’t shine the way I did 50 years ago either.

I suppose everything looks better through a veil of nostalgia, but I can’t help but think that things were better when Christmas wasn’t so blatantly commercial. Calling the day “Black Friday” to make the point that this is the day stores finish “in the black” just undermines the season. Now Black Friday has threatened to overwhelm Thanksgiving Day with Walmart starting its sales on Thursday. Besides that is the greed. I can remember crowds on the first day of Christmas shopping, but I can’t recall stampedes in which people were crushed to death.

I recall the final lines of Ogden Nash’s poem “I remember Yule.”

This year I’m going to disconnect everything electrical in the house and spend the Christmas season like Tiny Tim and Mr. Pickwick;
You make me sickwick.

Well, I’m not sickwick of Christmas, just the craziness that has overcome the celebration of the Savior’s birth. I’m going to enjoy the season in spite of what our culture has done with it. Like Scrooge I’ll treasure Christmas past, present and future, but I hope you will excuse me if Christmas past has a slightly larger place in my heart.