Sometime between Halloween and the middle of November, the wind shifted from the southeast to northwest and we began to think about Christmas.  Afternoon shadows grew longer as the year began to wind down and march the dreary road of November.  However, once Thanksgiving was past, days seemed more alive and the time began to rush toward the coming season of Christmas.

Snow swirling, winds howling and the old Chrysler tires slipping are some of my most vivid memories when I think of Christmas, during my coming of age years in Iowa.  My father was a Rexall druggist.  We lived in the southeastern section of the state of Iowa, almost to the Missouri line, in a town called Ottumwa.  This was a community of around 32,000 souls in the late 1940’s and through the 1950’s.  My father’s store wrapped around the corner of Market & Main Street, from South Market to East Main, in the heart of this small town.  It was the meeting and gathering place for shoppers.  There was a soda fountain with a full lunch and dinner menu.  Bus departures were right outside the doors, so people planned to meet each other at “Hill’s Rexall”.  Our drugstore carried perfume from The Houses of Worth and Coty, as well as the best seller, Evening in Paris.  There were Bulova watches in a locked glass case, beside the Timex display.  The drugstore was stocked with all the usual medicinal products, including Lydia Pinkham’s Pink Pills for Pale Ladies and Doans Pills, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Prince Albert in a can, Plenamins multi-vitamins, MI-31 mouth wash and Cara Nome cosmetics.  The prescription department sat in the center of the store and a large annex at the back of the store was devoted to toys and Lionel Trains.

Does this sound like a wonderland for a seven-year-old girl?  It was and still is in my fond memories.  I learned to make “Green Rivers” and chocolate cokes and malts and banana splits.  I roasted the peanuts in the nut machine, weighing each purchase for customers and putting the warm nuts in special bags supplied by the Planter Company.  Cleaning the freezer in the front of the store filled with DeMets Candy, also fell under my job description.  This is the company who created “Turtles” and required anyone selling their confections to keep their candy in the freezer, which they supplied.  My father taught me to do a drugstore wrap and how to pull the string down from the overhead spool.  In addition, he sent me to gift-wrapping school around the age of fifteen.  I believe this two-day school was sponsored by Hallmark.  Free gift-wrapping was, of course, part of the service he offered.  When I was old enough to drive, I became the delivery girl.  My father offered free delivery all over town to anyone who needed it, as long as the purchase was more than $3.

Therefore, off I went to every part of town with cigarettes and candy and cigars, aspirin, and prescriptions.  People were humble, polite and usually appreciative.  Often they were not able to pay me, so I would present the bill and keep records for my father to use when we sent out statements at the end of the month to customers with outstanding accounts.  I was advised to never ask for payment from several regular customers.

I did not learn until my college years, when our drugstore burned to the ground and I came home to close out the books, how many people my father had carried for years.  If they needed their medications, my father never refused.  He even took phone calls in the late evening, went down to the store, and filled the prescriptions for people who had not checked their pill bottles during store hours.  It was still free delivery, no matter the hour.

Christmas preparations for the coming year began in June.  There was a buying trip to Chicago to the Rexall Gift Show, for perfume, pen and pencil sets, watches and other specialties.  However, the” main event”, the Toy Show, took place the first week of August.  This show filled half of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago.  Rooms full of Madame Alexander Dolls, Tonka trucks and tricycles and balls of every description.  There were chess sets and board games like Monopoly and Parcheesi.  The most special room for me was the one filled with trains.  I could watch them circling round and round, puffing smoke and whistles blowing for hours.  We usually spent three days buying toys for the coming season.  This was risky business, for the storeowner was either taking the sales reps opinion on what toys would be “hot” or he relied on his own gut feeling about what to buy.  Either way it was something of a “crap shoot” and did not always work out to the advantage of the storeowner.  Leftover toys were often put on “special” around Easter time or during the Spring One Cent Sale.

The Holiday Season began in earnest as soon as Thanksgiving weekend was past.  We had large display windows across the front of the store and a smaller one near the back door, close to the prescription case.  I was the window decorator. My father had rolls of satin and silk fabric to dress the floor of the windows and then I built the displays after placing the beautiful cloth to cover the floor.  We had dolls and an electric train operating around a tree.  Sometimes I would decorate the tree with merchandise gifts and sometimes I left it natural with pinecones and assembled gifts on display stands.  Electronic elves moved their heads and arms back and forth, and up and down.  There were icicles and ornaments, hung from the ceiling with ribbons and spotlights placed just right to illuminate the displays at night, after the store closed.  The windows may not have looked like Marshall Fields or Bullocks, but I tried to give them a run for their money.  Inside the store, everything was decorated and transformed.  We had counter top trees and giant ornaments hanging and I always remember very big candy canes made of Styrofoam and striped with red ribbon.  From a distance, they did not look too bad.  Even the cigar boxes arrived decked in colors and ribbons of the season.  A large floor tree sat beside the prescription case, hung with ornaments with a child’s first name and age.  The purpose of this tree was for customers to purchase a gift for the needy.  In addition, there was a jar on the prescription case for donations toward Christmas baskets for those without, at Christmas.  We wrapped the children’s gifts and filled boxes and baskets of food for families on my father’s list and then I delivered them on December 23rd before noon, if possible.  My father knew everybody, it seemed, and always those in the worst need.

My biggest job of the Christmas season was to wrap approximately 185 boxes of Fannie May chocolates in fancy paper and ribbons and label each one with the proper name.  I also needed each address on my delivery sheet, so that Dr. Ebinger’s chocolate was delivered to Dr. Ebinger and not Dr. Singer.  My father gave chocolates to every doctor, dentist, judge and attorney in town, as well as all elected officials.  We took a five-pound box to the police department, the sheriff and the fire department.  I would load up the old Chrysler in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve.  Some years we even took Christmas trees to families.  I tried to leave the store by two in the afternoon to begin the delivery of the chocolate boxes.  This took hours and hours.  Hopefully, I would finish by dark, but that rarely happened.  Some years it was nine p.m. before the last box of chocolates was delivered.

When this job was completed, I headed to our Presbyterian Church Christmas Eve Service, often already underway.  Slipping in late to join the choir was often a bit tricky, but the director knew the reason for my tardiness.  The beautiful old church, filled with the sounds of familiar carols and old friends, brought a feeling of calm, renewal and hope for the new year to come.  I was so fortunate to grow up in this loving family, in this small community in the 1950’s.

Article contributed by Juliana Hill Howard