Tiemen fonds
We have become accustomed to seeing stores putting out Christmas goods before Hallowe’en is over, and we all know people who have their “Christmas shopping” done even before that. I wondered when people in the old days started getting serious about Christmas shopping. While I did notice a few ads in the paper in mid-November, the ads started appearing seriously at the beginning of December. The fact that the Herald was a weekly newspaper meant that merchants had only 4 or 5 papers to advertise their Christmas items, and that every paper in December had a large number of ads. In 1935, the November 29 issue of the paper carried an editorial-like piece on the front encouraging people to shop early. That article and a few of the ads from that Christmas season are reproduced here.
Note the “If you want to kill your wife use a club, not a tub” mention in this ad above.
