Miracle on 34th Street

Attuning ourselves to the festive season without Christmas carols, walking through Christmas markets, drinking mulled wine or spiced tea, and home decoration for Christmas, would be incomplete, even unthinkable.

2020, a year like no other, has been an incredibly challenging year for everyone and changed many things. I am sure many cannot prepare for the holidays the same way as before, many families will not get together in person on Christmas Eve and will spend the holidays apart. But you can put yourself into the Christmas spirit and eagerly wait for Christmas to come just like when you were a child. We would like to help you unlock your Christmas magic in the following weeks by publishing an article per week on a fascinating topic related to Christmas and waiting for holidays.

This article is about the famous Christmas window displays of Macy’s department store. The history of Macy’s flagship store in New York would merit a separate article in itself: how the department store company has transformed into a retailing giant since the mid-1800s, how it dealt with obstacles and challenges in the past decades, and how it has managed to remain one of the leading department stores of the United States in 2020. That is a very fascinating history, but for now let’s focus on Macy’s holiday window displays. We can truly speak of a long history of Macy’s Christmas window displays, as we have to go back to 1874 to find the moment when it all began.

It was then that Mr. R.H. Macy began employing the large street-level windows as a unique form of advertising. He procured porcelain dolls from around the world to put up the first holiday window display featuring a scene. No less work than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin was taken as a basis for the scene in the window display. What is interesting about the choice of theme is that the book published only nine years after the abolition of slavery is an openly anti-slavery novel, and there were still tensions between blacks and whites at the time. The choice of the theme of the holiday window could therefore be regarded as a public stance on a social issue of the day, as there was a good chance that the majority of Macy’s customers were white, and the message conveyed by the window display promoted social equality.

Crowds viewing the holiday windows at Macy’s in the late 1800s. 

That was only the beginning: Macy’s began the tradition to elaborate pre-composed intricate installations, and other department stores soon followed suit.

A scenario has arisen over the years for starting the holiday season. First, the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is erected in New York City in mid-November. The Christmas tree is decorated with baubles and lights, and the lighting ceremony is scheduled for the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving Day celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. Macy’s also contributes to festivities by presenting a three-hour parade, ending outside Macy’s Herald Square, on Thanksgiving Day. The parade—now a balloon spectacular—takes place from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and has been broadcast on television since 1953. The parade was held sans spectators and aimed at a television audience instead of live crowds this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Staying on the subject of Thanksgiving Day, the Macy’s Black Friday sale begins at 10:00 p.m. Traditionally, families have dinner together on Thanksgiving Day (Thanksgiving may be even more important than Christmas for people in the United States) and go out shopping after Thanksgiving dinner. Black Friday sales start as early as Thanksgiving evening, stores are open on Thanksgiving night, and Black Friday ends the next day.

I was once fortunate enough to wander in a Macy’s store at around 6 p.m. at the end of Black Friday. Although I have never seen devastation caused by a typhoon, it must look like the Macy’s department store struck by retail rage: merchandise dumped, unpaired shoes scattered, and messy piles of clothes. I could see what I had seen in films with my own eyes: people fighting, ransacking stores, trampling each other, competing for deeply discounted products.

Back to Christmas window displays, Macy’s windows brimmed solely with holiday gifts and toys until 1999. Since then, however, its holiday window displays have been taken to new heights, and Macy’s has come up with truly enchanting and quite spectacular Christmas-themed installations year after year. For instance, Macy’s window displays showed characters and scenes from the feature-length family film The Polar Express in 2004, and its interactive holiday windows also featured scenes from Frozen.

The Polar Express-themed holiday window at Macy’s in 2004.

The Polar Express-themed Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2004.

In 2020, Macy’s has dedicated its holiday window displays to essential workers, which, this year, are certainly looks different than most: one of the displays forms a thank-you letter, with neon lights, expressing gratitude for frontline workers.

Whatever the theme is in a given year, one set of window displays depicts scenes from the classic Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street.

But why this particular film? Miracle on 34th Street was released in 1947, and the film’s producers were not sure it would be a success, but the film has become so popular that it is still regarded as iconic decades after its release. The scenes at Macy’s were shot on location at the main store on 34th Street itself. The message of the film is one of hope for a society to which gifts, money and shopping are more important than love. Indeed, it is fascinating and somewhat paradoxical that a department store that encourages people using advertising throughout the year to spend more and more money delivers that kind of warm holiday message. Still, it is a lovely and delightful film, definitely worth seeing. The film that won three Academy Awards is intimately linked to Macy’s for the above-mentioned reasons, they thus feature a series of displays with scenes from Miracle on 34th Street each year.

Macy’s Miracle on 34th Street Christmas Window

Not for nothing does Macy’s invest long hours in planning and creating its holiday window displays. It takes almost a year to plan and create the holiday displays, with 200 team members being involved, so more than 10,000 people admire the bright window displays daily from the end of November to early January. During peak hours, so many tourists and pedestrians crowd the sidewalks in front of Macy’s to view the miracle on 34th Street.