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.