Remembering Chicago’s Thousands Stoops of Light

                                            A Polk Brothers Jolly Santa survivor stands his vigil.

Note—A St. Nicholas Day bonus two-fer.  Versions of this go back nearly twenty years but it remains a personal favorite. 

I was thinking about Santa Claus the other day.  Interesting guy.  Interesting story behind how a Fourth Century Bishop from Asia Minor ended up sitting on an elaborate throne in hundreds of American shopping malls posing for pictures with frightened three-year-olds. But while pondering that mystery, my mind took a left turn down a dusty and forgotten road.  It does that sometimes. 

My mind drifted back to dark, cold nights in Chicago in the ‘60s.  Not to bustling State Street as it was then with the elaborate holiday windows at Marshall Field and Carson Pirie Scott and the throngs of shoppers jostling on the broad sidewalks as Christmas music played from loudspeakers.  No, my mind drifted to the blue collar neighborhoods—the tidy bungalow belts on the Southwest and Northwest Sides, the blocks and blocks of two and three flats jammed cheek to jowl, even to the crumbling, dangerous ghettos on the West and South Sides. 

The Caroling Snowman was originally intended as an alternative for Jewish customers but became a companion to the Jolly Santa on many working class stoops and porches.

Up and down those dark streets thousands and thousands of identical illuminated plastic Santas sprang up every year in the days just after Thanksgiving on front porches and stoops, in postage stamp front yards, on balconies and fire escapes, even on garage roofs.  All casting their cheerful, smiling glow onto the soot-singed snow.  On a lot of blocks almost every home had one. 

From 1964 to 1968 Polk Brothers, a popular local appliance and furniture store chain, gave away the 5” 2’ tall illuminated Jolly Santas with every major purchase.  Offered as an alternative was a smiling, caroling Snowman originally intended for Jewish customers.  Many folks came back and added the Snowman in subsequent years.  In those four years more than 250,000 of the Santas were given away.  No wonder they were ubiquitous. 

The Polk Brothers with some of their Jolly Santas.

Polk Brothers was the kind of operation that advertised in the Sunday Funnies and on radio and TV.  Their stores were not in the Loop but on the artery avenues of the neighborhoods.  In the days before everyone had a Visa or a Master Card and when the snooty downtown department stores were stingy on credit for blue collar families, Polk Brothers trusted their customers to take home the merchandise and pay on time.  Ladies in babushkas and men in grimy work clothes would climb on buses after every pay day and count out payments of $5 or $10 to service desks at the stores. 

That’s how families whose parents lived in cold water flats and boarding houses, got that refrigerator, color TV set, or the whole suite of living room furniture—sofa, love seat, end tables, coffee tables and lamps—for $199.  No wonder they loved Polk Brothers.  And Polk Brothers loved them back with all of those free Santas and Snowmen. 

It made for such an utterly American Christmas—crass, commercial, to the sophisticated eye vulgar and tasteless, yet full of love and joy, and perhaps most of all hope.  The very angels could not have sung on high with greater hope and gladder tidings than those goofy stoop Santas. 

Driving down those same streets 50 years later you could still sometimes spot a survivor glowing in the dark, his red suit faded, his white beard yellowed, perhaps cracked and even mended with tape.  I like to imagine that behind the bungalow door is an old couple who, when their children were babies first put that Santa out.  And that maybe, just maybe, he is a beacon now to draw those long grown children and their children and maybe even their children for one more Merry Christmas home.