Deitch Studio: Christmas 2025

Pam’s Pictorama Post: Arguably the most popular day on the Pictorama calendar – the holiday card reveal – and here we are again! For the third year now, with Kim’s blessing, I have attempted all seven cats – the Jersey Five and the New York cats combined as the illustration. As has become our pattern, I draw it and he then redraws, traces and inks it. The cats have stayed true to my drawing as has the design. Us in the sleigh is more him and the moon has become a good old Deitchian moon. I think it is a fair melding hybrid of our styles.

Kim noted that the cats look a bit like balloons here – of the Thanksgiving parade kind. Some more than others – Stormy hovering over Christmas is the most balloon like. (She is a pretty dreamy kitty. One of the last of the strays mom acquired.) Evidently a slow moving sleigh now that I reflect on it.

For the record and the curious, the top row from left to right are Blackie, Milty, Gus, Cookie and bottom row, Beau, Peaches and Stormy. Milty is the oldest and Peaches and Stormy roughly tie for youngest and last into the house. Cookie and Blackie are the only ones from the same litter (our New York kits) and Blackie and Beau share their all black cat-ness.

As I do the card reveal this year I need to apologize a bit – it seems I have lost my address book which I have had since college. Although many addresses have migrated to my electronic book, many of the oldest ones have not and among those I don’t necessarily have emails or numbers to text either. Someone pointed out that the universe was trying to tell me something.

I didn’t see it at first but someone pointed out that Kim has candy cane horns – I must ask him if it was on purpose or if he was having subliminal Grampus urges. Now I don’t know how I missed it.

If you are new to the card reveal, this joint card project goes back to the first year Kim and I started dating (predating Pictorama by decades) and has developed over time. Some earlier examples can be found here, here and here.

As you read this on Sunday morning we will (hopefully) be packed up and on our way to New Jersey with Cookie and Blackie in tow. We spent today (Saturday) organizing and filling boxes and suitcases so the cats are suspicious – sleeping on the bed with one eye slightly open I’d say.

When we get to the house I am anxious to see if my holiday swags of evergreens have lasted on the front railings. I will take out my few holiday decorations – oversized colored lights will go in the fireplace, an elderly Santa made of lead skiing and a few other choice bits that will live on the mantle – one of the few cat free spaces in the house. (That of course is always subject to change if a cat is enterprising enough!)

*Hard to read beyond Mr. and Mrs. Will Claff. How on earth did this get delivered I wonder.*

I thought I would bookend this post with another card I bought this fall. Sent on December 23, 1914. It was sent from Brockport, NY but the address is hard to read as is the message. Of course it was the idea of the nifty cat pull toy on the front that did it for me, bow and all. I like the little poem too which says, I send this kissy kat because I cannot go like Santa Claus, to give my Christmas love to you, or kiss you – as I’d like to do. So a Merry Christmas to you all – a few New Year’s cards tucked away next.

On Christmas Day Have Mirth and Laughter

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: We have a cat Christmas card entry of a jolly sort today, something to get us tuned up for Thursday.

Here in Manhattan, after about four inches of snow last week, we were awash in rain yesterday. (We’re talking street flooding – a lot of rain!) Although there is precipitation in the forecast for later this week, I’d gamble a guess that it will be a green Christmas in New Jersey. A few degrees either way though and we’ll see. Pretty as the snow is (see below for some photos of the house last week) I guess I am old enough to see the disadvantages of shoveling (or paying someone to!) and the slippery sidewalks and roads. We do like to take some long walks when we are out there. However, I wouldn’t mind a sprinkling for Christmas though to see if it could put me in the holiday mood a bit which I could use.

*Snowy front yard in NJ last week!* *From a friend’s phone video.*

The end of the calendar year is always a very busy time for fundraisers. I believe I have opined on this in the past and since the earliest days of my chosen career, the last weeks of the year have been fraught with either being too busy (at the Met) or not busy enough (my first years at Jazz).

My current gig combines its Top Dog Gala and its fiscal year end at the already very busy calendar year end. It’s pretty boffo. However, now in my second year end there I understand it a bit better and I am hoping for some down time, even while keeping an eye on things at the office. I am also old enough to know that we have a plan we’re executing and what will be will be. It isn’t really the sort of place, like the Met, where someone is going to decide they want to donate a valuable mortgaged piece of property in the last ten days of the year.

*Decorating and setting up for Top Dog earlier this month.*

Therefore in my adult life there has never really been a holiday season that has been free of work concerns. There was the year I left Jazz right before the end of the year, but that was a year of other losses and the holidays were a bit sad and full of the anxiety of a new job. Sometimes you just do the best you can do over the holidays.

The card at the top of the post sums it up well, Whatever fortune my come after, on Christmas Day have mirth and laughter. Mom and Dad cat (perched on an ottoman) are in an interesting composition of paws and tails. (The adult cats form a really great sort of central square with a paw and a tail leading us in and out!)

Their progeny, in kitten form, giggle and poke each other next to mom on the couch. There’s something about the furniture that makes me think that it is so specific it refers to real furniture somewhere in the artist’s life. It’s a very suburban and somewhat prosperous scene. Whatever their world weary worries are Mom and Dad cat chuckle together.

The artist knew cats. Dad cat is a proper orange marmalade and mom a darker orange and brown mix – producing an orange kit and as well as a black and white tabby. This combination certainly within the possibility of likelihood.

The copyright on the card is actually 1890 by a company called L. Prang and Company of Boston, USA. Below I share (in its entirety) an entry on Louis Prang via the Boston Public Library:

Louis Prang (1824-1909), a German immigrant, ran a highly successful printing firm in Boston during the late nineteenth century. His company produced high quality reproductions of major art work and greeting cards using the complex technique of chromolithography. Prang is often referred to as the ‘Father of the American Christmas Card’ because holiday cards were rarely exchanged in America until his factory began producing them in the 1870s.

A quick look at his other wares in terms of Christmas cards does not show many of this type. He generally seemed to go in more for arty reproductions of flowers and holly. There is a tiny signature for the artwork, EBW. I cannot find tracks on him, perhaps his foray into cat cards was brief – or he eventually expanded his signature.

This card was never sent but in faded pencil on the back, in script, it says, John Peckham.

*78th Street on our way to Orwasher’s last Sunday.*

So today’s card is a shot over the bow for those of us who are having trouble getting the the holiday spirit. I will spend my day packing us up for our 2-3 week sojourn in New Jersey. And cleaning the apartment – I like to come home to start the New Year in a reasonably clean apartment.

Tomorrow is the 2025 Deitch Studio card reveal. For ongoing readers, you knew it was coming! For now however, try to insert a bit of ho, ho, ho into your proceedings and if not, at least for the day later this week!

Kicking Off the Holidays: Fleureux Noel

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Evidently the literal (Google) translation of the flourish at the top is Christmas Flower but I am thinking it is perhaps more like Christmas Tree because that is what this kit is bringing home or delivering today.

This card is a nod in honor of those of you who get that tree and put it up right after Thanksgiving – which was at one time the holiday tradition in the Butler family home. After a few years it was a fake tree (mom developed a distaste for killing a tree for the holidays) and I always missed the smell of a real one. Luckily here in Manhattan I get to walk past them on the street and enjoy! I don’t do a tree in New Jersey – it would just be a giant, expensive, messy cat toy. However, I have employed a wreath and some swags on the railings of the front door in there and it has a lovely smell each time you walk in. (I also discovered that this do-it-yourself outdoor decor thing is harder than it looks!)

*The front door, most of the way done for the holidays…it was a several day process.*

On this cat card snow is falling on this already amply covered mountain scene. (I’m a sucker for snow in pictures, just ask Kim – I always ask to put it in the Christmas card! It is a lovely decorative element.) The tree isn’t especially well secured – snow covered, it is in fact a bit precarious in its (large) pot on the back of this wooden sled – and sports a few decorations, a gift box, some lights even if you look carefully.

Our kitty driver is a bit oblivious – he’s knocked this other unfortunate fellow aside. He does sport a nifty little tie around his neck, sled “reins” in his paws and snow shoes on his lower extremities – which I guess makes sense if you are an anthropomorphic puss. He has a fluffy tail but his fur otherwise suffices to keep him (and the others) warm in the snow. No hat, Mr. Cat?

The small cat which has been casually bowled over onto his bottom by this sled notwithstanding (I think of this as a bit of a ham-handed tip of the hat to Louis Wain myself), Mr. Driver Cat keeps his eyes on the path. There are two cats watching him go by – well, one is and the other is looking off elsewhere. The snow covered mountain peaks are in the distance and high above the scene. I am not exactly sure what the artist has sketched in behind the mountains and below the clouds – there are lines which might be water? Hard to say.

It has to be said that the sender had little respect for the card (or was it the postal service requirement?) and plunked a stamp on the front. As a result I can’t read the cancellation with place and date. It also almost covers the already difficult to read name of the card maker. I think it is Favorite, maybe a company name; it is pretty illegible. (There is also a sort of silver-izing or oxidizing of this card which makes it extra shiny in spots in the light and which make it harder to read.) I quick look at my own archive and I come up with Maurice Boulanger as the likely artist. (That was a New Year’s card back in 2019 which can be found here – ironically I opined that I would like to travel less for work in the coming year. Little did any of us know what March of 2020 would bring!) I have had other Boulanger cards in color recently – you can read one of those here.

*Let me know if I have missed something in my rough translation!*

This card was sent by someone named Louis and he has nicely dated the card as December 23, 1912. It is addressed to Monsieur et Madame Richard at what appears to be: S Rue Caron Malakof, Seine. (He has written over Malakof and I have checked the spelling online.) I don’t read French and the (very) rough translation appears to be something along the lines of: Dear Charles, I’m sorry, I had to go, I’ll woke up the [?}, he had been warned, but I’ll skip Christmas if that doesn’t bother you, I’ll be at your place around the 7th, say hello to everyone. Louis If I am missing something vital I ask you French readers to share!

Back in the early part of the 20th century the French did extremely well with holiday cards – New Year’s cards being their forte – which I continue to enjoy today. In fact, Pictorama may have one of those lurking in the pile for this year. I assure you all that some gems are hiding in this pile still!

Feline Greetings from Fair Haven

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is the annual Christmas card reveal. clearly this year we celebrate the whole Butler crew, all eight kitties, including Hobo.

We are ensconced here at Oxford Avenue for the holiday duration this year. I have inaugurated the holidays by acquiring a violent stomach virus so this may be a bit brief. It’s an odd year, my first without my mom and I am feeling it even more keenly than I thought I would. I am usually pro-Christmas and manage holiday cheer even under duress. This year is tough, although I am curled up here in New Jersey with Kim and all the kitties which helps. Drinking fluids! No baking while this is going on.

*Last year’s card – Blackie and Cookie solo in front of our apartment window.*

The card has a double meaning this year as I leave Jazz at Lincoln Center for the very different world of fundraising for the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center. Animal lover and rescuer of animals as she was, all of us think Mom would find that an appropriate switch; she was always concerned that my job at Jazz was too exhausting for the long haul, with its travel and many nights.

AMC will be unlike anything I have done before and I don’t dismiss the difference and the adjustment – all fundraising is not the same. Still, my brain itches to engage with new challenges and I think building a full fundraising operation for them is the next best chapter.

Blackie is stalking around the New Jersey house; Cookie has returned to her safe spot under a chair in the bedroom. Beau and Blackie had a hissy hello last night. I think the other New Jersey cats remain largely unaware. There is always an adjustment period.

Kim has taken over my office for the duration and, after a few false starts for a new dip pen holder and something for his ink, he is inking away upstairs.

*The original Pam Butler pencil drawing.*

This year’s card was conceived of and drawn by me as a tribute to my new cat family and job – I include my original pencil for the first time. Kim inked it and added the logo which is properly Deitchien. Each cat gets a proper portrait. Kim added a little maniacal twist to Cookie who is chasing her tail (as she still does almost daily at 10 years of age) and Beau and Blackie are facing off a bit.

So our best wishes for the holidays and the New Year from us at Deitch Studio and Pictorama. Hope you enjoy it!

Cat-a-pult

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I am in love with this photo and snatched it up as quickly as I could! A timeless image for cat lovers, caught on an early photo postcard. Somehow, even with slower film, someone managed to catch this perfect moment, the woman in her full white long cotton skirt, her hair carefully done. Puss, who was to have his photo taken, probably in her arms, has other ideas.

So lucky that the camera man or woman was quick on the draw! Kit is quite a fluffy furry fellow or miss – tail flying behind him or her – I am betting on him as it appears to maybe be an orange tabby and those are mostly male.

There are leaves on the ground which create a pattern and some space and a Tudor-style house in the background. It is interesting to note that this was used as a Christmas card. Printed on the back with what appears to have been a stamp is some holly and the message, A Merry Xmas to You. Hand written is also, With Mr. &Mrs. Hook’s best wishes 1912, and in the corner just, Jessie Hook.

I like to imagine that the photo, presumably of Jessie, was taken in the early fall and Jessie so amused it became the Christmas card.

It is hard to believe, but here at mom’s there are five cats and almost none will let me pet them. There is of course, Stormy (Cat of Mystery) who will allow no one to pet her – or even see her very often.

For those of you who are new to her story, she appeared one (very stormy) night and my mom put a trap out for her. She strolled into it immediately. After shots and spaying, mom kept her with an eye to finding her a home. Despite some internet pleading on my part, we had no takers and Stormy joined the family – although a bit like a shadow. She appears in the evening most often when the house is at its most quiet. She likes to sleep in a chair near my mom – who never leaves her chair so Stormy likes that stationary aspect of her.

Peaches, another female, was found as a kitten trapped in a basement in a neighboring town, yelling her head off until someone found her. The someone was a friend of my cousin and somehow Peaches also found her way to mom’s house. She is very feral and fiercely keeps humans at a distance of never less than about a foot. Recently though she trusts us enough for a stretch and a roll around on the kitchen floor in front of all of us. I have a long term goal of petting her one day.

Meanwhile, my mom’s cat Beau (Beauregard) is utterly devoted to her. He glared at us humans who are clearly inadequate to the task of caring for her to his standards.

He’s rarely further than the chair next to her. His yellow eyes following our every move. Mom rescued him from a photo she received from a Newark shelter years ago. He somehow understands that she moved heaven and earth to get him and appreciates it.

Beau will allow me to pet him and if necessary I am usually designated to move him if necessary – if mom wants to eat let’s say. I usually put him on my coat for a snuggle which is novel and meets with his approval.

Gus is another stray who wandered into the house a few years ago. He is a very mild mannered cat – a bit under the thumb of Beau and the elder statesman, Milty. He has a major crush on one of mom’s care givers and snuggles with her, but never can let me get more than about three inches away.

Lastly is Milty – he came from a Milton Road in Newark many years ago. Most senior cat, he is approaching his second decade. He is the squeaky wheel of the house and will seat himself in front of you (or on you) and demand food or attention. Occasionally he takes on Beau to remind him he is senior cat and not down yet.

I am missing Kim and my own Cookie and Blackie during this extended stay in New Jersey. However, while I may not get pets with each of the (sometimes) slippery kitties here I appreciate their antics and mom enjoys each and every one and loves being surrounded by them every day.

Dreams of Krampus

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Welcome to the Pictorama reveal of the Deitch Studio holiday card memorializing the year that was, 2021. A tip o’ the hat this year to Kim who carried the ball a bit more than usual and this one has a slightly more Deitchian appeal which is always a good thing. (For those of you just joining this year some previous card reveals can be found here and here for starters.)

I only learned about Krampus as an adult, although years ago now. I do find this sort of shadow Santa fascinating and the idea that not only was Santa watching to make sure you were nice and not naughty, but this dark side Santa was going to come after you if you were a very bad kid. It makes sense though that Santa wouldn’t be all sweetness and light – I mean, how interesting is that after all.

While the concept of Krampus has its roots in a Norse underworld character the name Krampus is derived from a German name. I gather that there are German and Austrian festivals (which not surprisingly involve some drinking) where the Krampus story is played out via a run through town by Krampus glad participants. The runners carry sticks, like those used to beat said naughty children, and scare onlookers. Can’t say I am sorry to have missed this. The Catholic Church at one time made an effort to ban Krampus which was, given his increasing popularity, clearly unsuccessful.

*Cookie and Blackie – photo taken because they so rarely sleep together! Inspiration for the card.*

Our Krampus has all of the key characteristics – a hairy beast with great lolling and pointed tongue, goat horns and cloven feet, but we’ve replaced the beating chains and sticks with lightening bolts.

Poor Cookie and Blackie are clearly fretting about and totting up their misdeeds this year – poor kits! – and sharing a mutual dream of this monster. Oh gosh though, who in thinking about 2021 doesn’t feel a bit like this sums it all up? No worries though – Cookie and Blackie will receive toys, catnip and ear rubs Christmas morning just as they always do. And 2022 will dawn in a week and we’ll all turn the page and hope for a truly great New Year!

The Great Deitch Studio Card Reveal

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Ta Da! It’s that time of the year! With Thanksgiving running late it was a tight turnaround this year and apologies to anyone who hasn’t gotten theirs in the mail yet before I do the online reveal. (And that includes just about everyone at my office.) As some of you might know, the day after Thanksgiving is the day when I sit down and do the first go at the card. This year it pretty much fell together with that initial session and here we are.

Pictorama readers aren’t going to be surprised that the recently renovated kitchen played a role in the Deitch Studio pictorial summing up of the year. (Although I could have shown our window installation as an alternative. Cats installing new windows? Um, gives me vertigo to think about. Those recent renovation posts can be found here, here and here – just for starters.)

I have set Cookie and Blackie to stirring up a storm here. The kitties are very fond of the new kitchen (counters have been duly jumped upon, the floor rolled over and over on, and the cabinets duly sniffed and inspected) although disappointingly the new fridge is too high and narrow for Cookie climbing – she liked towering over everyone on the old one. Of course, in reality we rarely let the cats cook and discourage their use of the stove in general. (I don’t mind them using the microwave, but worry they will be careless and use aluminum in it. And Blackie was showing an unfortunate interest in jumping up on the stove early on which we needed to compel him not to do.)

Kim let me have my head on this one and the result is more Pam than usual in execution I think. Although he always neatens things up (especially lettering – I don’t do that properly at all) and the shading always makes things pleasantly Deitchien. (A phrase I may have coined earlier this year in my happily and totally biased spousal post reviewing Kim’s Reincarnation Stories which can be found here and here. Kim’s book is of course the other big news of the year – the cats could have been reading about themselves in it. Or complaining that they didn’t play a bigger role.) The cats’ expressions are a bit more Kim-ish than Pam too. He has given them a slightly maniacal mad scientist look – probably closer to their true expressions.

From the opening of Reincarnation Stories.

As I believe everyone bemoaned this season, with Thanksgiving falling a bit late in the calendar the holiday season is a bit compressed. Kim inked quickly and the printer turned it around fast (a nod to Bill from Yorkville Copy, which no longer exists as a storefront – he comes from Westchester to pick up our original and copy, score and return annually), but that only left a week to get them in the mail. I hedged our bets by making it a New Year’s card.

As I write this part of my brain is taken up with the things that still need doing, the apartment is in a state of chaos, and I long to have a proper workout at the gym after an endless week of work related events. I know you, dear readers, are probably thinking much the same so thank you for spending a little time with Pam’s Pictorama today. A Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and of course every best wish for the New Year from all here, feline and otherwise, at Deitch Studio.

And a Merry Christmas to You!

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Forgive me as I’m out of order this year as yesterday’s Deitch Studio card post was for New Year’s and this little gem I’ve been hoarding for a couple of months is for Christmas. Devoted readers may know that I am a fan of the photo collage postcard, although I generally collect more primitive examples. (Click on these for examples: Well, wouldn’t this make you exclaim! and the very seasonal, Dawn of a New Year.) However, there is something still goofy and charming about this more mass produced card. This hand drawn young couple, separated by photos of a fluffy and proud looking cat, a happy woman with a tea cup, and a dreamy young girl – surrounded by Christmas decorations – go figure. Clearly someone’s ingredients for a happy holiday. I cannot argue.

This card was mailed from Birmingham, on December 25, 1912. It is addressed in neat penned script to Mifs Lucy Oliver, 139 West Parade, Lincoln. (Our friend Google tells me that Mifs is an early way of writing Miss. Definitely my fact for the day.) In a loopy, but carefully child-written pencil is the message, With love and kisses from Douglas.

The Christmas postcard seems to no longer even be in existence as a genre – the hold on physical cards in general even seems a bit tenuous these days. (Maybe it is just our own popularity flagging, but alas there was a real falling off this year.) Collectors of future decades beware – much as I opine that our digital photos don’t get printed and the physical evidence of this time will be paltry in the future, this is true of cards (photo and otherwise) as well.

I do love receiving fat enveloped cards in the mail this time of the year – I remain a bit of a child-like sucker for the holidays and the trappings of the holidays. I like to see midtown Manhattan all dressed up in holiday finery – Christmas balls, lights and garlands sized appropriately for the home of a giant or giantess hung between buildings or plopped down on their plazas. I love Christmas lights – especially the old-fashioned bubbling ones, but also the newer ice sickle ones. I regret that our studio apartment is too small for even a small tree (I used to have a small, fake one I would cram in here and the cats would sit under it like we’d brought a forest in for them) or much decorating. I am sad when it all comes down in January, which therefore seems very dull.

Holiday decorations on a plaza near Rockefeller Center earlier this week.

For a fundraiser, the last week’s of the calendar year also represent a balancing act between festive celebration (our Big Band Holiday concert has its last performance this afternoon), while turning our hand to getting the last of the calendar year-end gifts into our coffers. It is a busy time. More on that as the New Year draws near in Pictorama’s next post, poised to ring in 2019. For now – Merry Christmas to all!

Best Wishes for the New Year!

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: 2018 is being rapidly ushered out the door and today I offer the annual Deitch Studio-meets-Pictorama card reveal. When I designed this year’s card I am not sure I was thinking about making it a New Year’s card, but it seemed to make itself and that’s what it turned out to be. Frankly 2018 was a tough year and I am not sorry to see the hind end of it – good riddance! Meanwhile, this was a rare season when I had an idea for the card and I pretty much sat down and out it came, exactly as I was imagining it. Kim, already deeply immersed in his new book, made some adjustments and inked it up and here we are – ta-dah!

If anyone reading this is post is new, welcome to this Deitch Studio annual tradition. Kim and I have collaborated on a holiday card since the first year we started dating. (May I note, such was the thrall I held over him, even in those nascent days, since it turns out that in reality he isn’t a fan of Christmas in the least.) Anyway, that makes 24 cards. We cannot seem to locate anyone who has good ‘ole number one which we hand colored. (Kim is rumored to have one in his files – somewhere.) By the second year we started rolling them out to a wider audience and a bit more efficiently. The card is generally drawn the day after Thanksgiving – although executed more expeditiously some years than others. I always start the card. Some years Kim adds more, some years less. Generally speaking we each draw ourselves, although this year Kim remains sort of Pam-esque as Kim Deitch fans may note. (Some former card reveals can be found by clicking on: Merry Christmas from Deitch Studio! and Merry Christmas 2015.)

The boat theme is a nod to my father who liked to sail. Born a city boy, something about sailing always intrigued him and throughout my childhood he always kept a sailboat, docked or moored in the river behind where we lived. Since he grew up in Washington Heights, I have no idea of the origins of his love of being on the water. My sister Loren got the sailing bug from him and she and her husband devoted much of their free time, summer and fall, to sailing. I, on the other hand, did not. While I am not as bad as my mother who, despite being the daughter of a fisherman and repairer of outboard motors, goes a bit green just watching a boat bob up and down in the water, I cannot sail a boat any more than I can drive a car. I see the appeal – the quiet of being on the water under sail can be thrilling and beautiful. (My father and sister were both overwhelmingly impressed that I had several trips on the enormous sailboat the Sea Cloud II when working at the Met and it was pretty amazing!) However, the time and money that one needs to devote to this pastime is beyond me and my somewhat inadequate swimming skills mean that I was never destined to be a fan.

One of my father’s trips to the hospital last year landed him in a room with a beautiful view of the Navesink river – we lived on the other side of town on the Shrewsbury river, but both rivers are lovely, if somewhat different. The hospital is built along the river and the views of it seem to be a more or less luck of the draw situation and we won the lottery that time. We looked out and talked a bit about how we’d rather be out on the water sailing than sitting in that room. I think I was thinking of that a bit when drawing this year. I plunked a sailor’s wool cap on my character’s head like dad wore in winter, and set Kim, me and the cats in this tiny vessel sailing and looking forward to the New Year, leaving 2018 behind.

Christmas in July – Part 2

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: I decided that this summer weekend deserved some cooling down with recent Christmas finds. For many years when I worked at the Metropolitan Museum they had Christmas in July, a preview of the holiday line for the gift and bookshop. It would be set up in our boardroom and senior staff would be invited up to have a look. Anyway, the phrase stuck with me and ignited the holiday feeling with the British Felix card I shared yesterday. (It can be found here). Today’s treasure is a card that I saw a variation of quite awhile ago (same set and different photo? I wish I remembered), but it was priced very high. I snagged this one for considerably less.

Although this was a photo postcard it has traces of photo album paper stuck to the back of it. It does not appear to have been mailed. However, written neatly on it is Erma & Fred from Millard. While I think we can assume that Erma is the little girl perched on this grand beast, who is Fred? Is he dressed up as Santa? (Don’t suppose he could be the reindeer?) If you look carefully Santa is atop a box to make him sufficiently tall for the composition of this photo – and perhaps also to make him a little bit more grand?

If you look carefully there is a small sign, on a little stand, which reads 1237 – December 1937? or a number to track which photo take this was to attach it to a person later? Of much more interest however are the toys scattered below, including a small Felix doll which is one that I neither own nor have seen previously. The dolls are generic from my perspective, but I say that understanding that perhaps to others they are as fascinating as Felix is to me. It is in some ways a sad and dry little set, yet I bet from Erma’s perspective it was pretty great to be there.

My own family wasn’t one for posed, studio holiday photos. We never sat on Santa’s lap for a photo or to tell him what we wanted for Christmas. We celebrated Christmas (and Hanukah), but in a secular way, and additionally we were never taught to believe in Santa Claus. My mother (raised Christian, but agnostic) thought lying to children about such things was an awful practice and told chagrined stories about her brother leaving the front door wide open on Christmas Eve to accommodate Santa better. My dad, as an atheist and ostensibly Jewish, was extremely ambivalent about the holidays and therefore no unnecessary pageantry was added. (Additionally, my younger brother Edward was born on Christmas Eve so we added a birthday party in there as well.) I don’t believe as a kid I felt like I missed much by not having the opportunity to sit on Santa’s lap or to mail lists to the North Pole. We had a tree, there were toys and big family meals – but alas, no toy-filled Santa photos!