WASHINGTON — Once, we made special trips downtown this time of year, lining up to gape at mechanical bears eating porridge, Victorian cats celebrating in the snow and toy soldiers guarding over our happy holidays.
Now those same jumbo-size windows in re-purposed downtown department store buildings offer views of advertising signs, old photos and waiters grinding $12 guacamole.
This is progress?
The grand old animated Christmas window displays of the sort that once had department stores competing to demonstrate their creative extravagance are now relegated to nostalgic memories, scenes in old movies and on New York's Fifth Avenue (and even there, the competing stores' windows are all produced by one company).
The reasons for the demise of the Christmas window are well-known: the decline of the downtown department store, the rise of windowless big-box retailers, the replacement of family-owned local shops by big national chains and the triumph of convenience over showmanship.
"It was an amenity of the walking-around town," says William "Larry" Bird, a Smithsonian curator whose new book, "Holidays on Display," tells the story of the art and business of the window shows. "Department stores lived and died by their windows. They spared no expense. This was the secular creche."
Oddly enough, in this era in which technology has made it possible to personalize retailing as never before, consumers expect less in the way of service and splendor. Businesses that once rose or fell on their ability to lavish customers with service -- airlines, supermarkets, department stores -- now compete to cut costs. Any notion of romance in shopping has yielded to the utilitarian imperative.
The old Washington department store Woodward & Lothrop -- known for decades as Woodies -- spent $200,000 a year on animated window displays in the 1970s. These days, the Seattle-based department store Nordstrom is cutting back on its trademark piano players, eliminating live music from about half of its stores while trimming pianists' hours at others.
Nordstrom has an animated holiday display in the windows of one store, in downtown Seattle, where a Santa's Village show is maintained only because the company took over that location from a local business, Frederick & Nelson, which had a long tradition of Christmas windows.
