Decking the halls with boughs of holly is a common phrase to hear this time of year with Christmas just around the corner. While working on our Victorian Christmas exhibit, I came across a box labeled "Spool Tree Ornaments" in the museum storage vault. Inside the box were 30-40 decorated wooden spools wrapped in ribbon, sequins, beads and buttons. 

The decorated spools remind me of a set of ornaments made by my great grandma in Wisconsin that my mom inherited and that we still use on our Christmas trees today- they're styrofoam spheres wrapped in satin with beads, sequins, lace and other decorations, similar to the ones pictured below. They were popular craft projects in the 1970s (in fact, my great-grandmother made so many of them that all of my mom's 4 other siblings also got their own set of ornaments when she passed away).

For the last few weeks, I’ve been working with two volunteers on a big project: moving our downstairs archive space upstairs to make room for more exhibits on the main floor of the museum. The process lately has involved moving large, flat file cases out of the archive room to a staging area while we prepare their upstairs home and, due to the size of some of the flat file cases, that’s meant we’ve had to take everything out of the drawers, move the drawer, then replace the items once the drawer has been moved. While it takes a while to move things this way, it gives us a chance to get a really good look at some of the things in the collection that we may not otherwise see. This week, those things were a number of WWII Posters produced by the Office of War Information (OWI).

​I had seen some of these posters before in the collection and outside of it. Of course the most well known include the Uncle Sam “I want You” pointing signs and Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It” poster. They’ve transcended WWII era America to become something quickly recognizable (and oftentimes spoofed) however, many of the posters that were produced at the time and appear in the museum collections were rather alarming, with slogans like “a careless word, a needless loss” featuring an unconscious sailor on a beach.  

​The posters used a variety of symbols and slogans promoting patriotism and support for the war effort, and many were happy individuals supporting the war effort, however some drew on incredibly racist stereotypes or dark subjects. Some of these posters made specific references to negative outcomes, like ships sinking, from people “talking”.

When the WWII period is viewed through these images, a polished, united picture of the population of WWII America arises, which leads to interesting questions on what kind of America people in that period were fighting for in the decision to engage in WWII, and how that image compared to the outcomes reached by the time the war came to an end.  

Treatment time varied based on distance from the lamp and what ailment was being treated. Muscular ailments like arthritis required longer treatments of 6 minutes daily and treatments of respiratory illness encouraged the user to direct the lamp away from the face and inhale ozone, declared as a “germicidal agent” produced from the operation of the lamp for 6-12 minutes. According to the users manual that came with the lamp, it was recommended that babies and children use the lamp to help “enrich their system with Vitamin D and thereby build strong resistance to diseases and infections.” The first few treatments with the lamp caused skin peeling, which would eventually decline when the skin became used to the ultraviolet rays and could be reduced by using the company’s skin crème, which was advertised in the users manual. 

This sunlamp was a 1940’s invention that lasted only a short period, from 1940 until the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act declared it to be a false and misleading device in 1945. (See here for other things that were discontinued for misleading or false information- some of them are pretty wild). Ultraviolet and Violet Light tools were popular around this time period, and we did find a second one during the move, pictured below, produced by the Violet Ray Corp:

The Victorian period (1837-1901) was a time that greatly changed how holidays were celebrated in the United States, oftentimes taking them from being relatively small affairs linked to particular ethnic groups to large, grand celebrations and demonstrations of wealth, prestige and the importance of family. Christmas is a perfect example of this holiday up-scaling within the upper classes of Victorian society. From the Christmas trees to gift giving and holiday games, the upper class Victorians-who were imitated by lower classes- left a deep and long-lasting footprint on the traditions that are celebrated today.

Tree decoration preferences began to include glass ornaments around the latter half of the 19th century as mass production of glass décor became more prevalent. A notable tree décor tradition rooted in the Victorian period that has experienced a recent resurgence in popularity is the tradition of the Christmas Pickle, which is largely attributed to an old German tradition where the first person to find the pickle in the tree would be the first person to open presents on Christmas morning. While it is not a tradition in Germany today and some claim never was a German tradition to begin with, the attribution could be linked to the earlier traditions of hanging edible ornaments in the holiday trees, which was originally a German tradition. An alternate story linking pickles to Christmas is a surprisingly macabre story of two young Spanish boys were were murdered by an inn keeper, stuffed in a pickle barrel, and revived by St. Nicholas, who is also known as Santa Claus. The earliest glass Christmas Pickles in the United States were part of a shipment of glass ornaments from Germany and were sold by Woolworth’s Department store in 1880. Some say that the pickle story came from a shopkeeper who was trying to sell more pickle ornaments.

Christmas cards also came into being in the Victorian period and, with the aid of mass production, became incredibly popular and elaborate with reflective foils or fabric trim. In some places, cards would be hung from the trees as part of the décor. The cards festively illustrated the Victorian emphasis on the importance of family, winter motifs, the rise of mass-produced gift-giving, and subjects like Krampus, a half-man, half-goat demon who punishes naughty children as a counterbalance to Santa Claus. As Christmas cards started becoming more popular, producers experimented with a number of topics to find what consumer wanted and how to visually define the increasingly popular holiday- with some strange results, including cards displaying thieving clowns, torch-carrying birds, dancing frogs, and flowers with children’s faces.

This Christmas while your family is searching for the Christmas Pickle, decorating the tree, or sharing Christmas cards, take a moment to tip your hat to the Victorian traditions that still appear today- and be thankful that it’s fallen out for fashion for friends to send you a Krampus card. They’re rather scary.