Before Walmart And The Internet We Had The Sears And Montgomery Ward Christmas Wish Books

 

Montgomery Ward Christmas Catalog 1967

The first actual sign of Christmas wasn’t snow or  lights. It wasn’t even the tree. It was the sound of something heavy hitting the kitchen table.

 

You knew that sound.

 

You came running from the living room or outside. From wherever you were. Because if you didn’t grab it first, your brother or sister would.

 

The Christmas Wish Book had arrived.

 

Sears. Montgomery Ward. Sometimes both, if the timing lined up just right. And when they showed up, the entire house changed.

 

Christmas had officially started.

 

You didn’t ease into those catalogs. You dove in headfirst. Spread it out. Flip fast at first, almost frantic, like you were afraid it might disappear. Then slow it down. Because now you were looking. Really looking.

 

Page by page, the world opened up.

Christmas Eve At The Iowa Training School For Boys At Eldora

 

The Elves with Santa Claus and Jack Frost

The Des Moines Register said Christmas Eve 1919 rang with shouts of glee and merry-making at the Iowa Training School for Boys in Eldora.

 

The big hall was dressed with fir trees, tinsel, and lights, while the boys presented a Christmas cantata in the chapel.

 

Every boy had a part. Some played girls’ roles as Sunburst Fairies. One was Jack Frost. Another was Santa Claus. Six were elves. Others appeared as Dream Men. The school orchestra supplied the music.

The Sunburst Fairies

Howard Johnson played Santa Claus. Francis Donahue was Jack Frost, and Emil Greiner starred as the Fairy Queen.

 

The elves were James Frame, Forest Lake, Charles Shay, Leon Lynch, Donald Munson, and Leroy Stanley.

 

The Sunburst Fairies were Edward Hansen, Tom Pasmar, William Arnett, James Shay, and Cecil Snodgrass.

Silent Nights, Gunshots, and Midnight Beliefs: Iowa’s Real Christmas History

Iowa didn’t invent a cute Christmas. It inherited a serious one.

 Before blinking lights and inflatable Santas, Christmas here was shaped by immigrants who brought their old customs intact, farmers who lived by weather and daylight, and towns that treated winter as something to endure rather than decorate. The result was something quiet, loud, watchful, and sometimes unsettling.

 

This isn’t folklore stitched together after the fact. These were actual practices Iowans followed, genuine beliefs they held, and real things newspapers felt compelled to comment on — sometimes approvingly, sometimes with irritation.

 

If you want to understand Christmas in Iowa, drop the soundtrack and listen harder.

Krampus: The Christmas Monster Iowa Didn't Want

Krampus approaching a small Mississippi River town

Krampus had a very clear role in the old world, and it wasn’t subtle.

In the Alpine parts of Europe—Austria, Bavaria, and a few neighboring regions—Christmas came with rules. Saint Nicholas rewarded good kids. Krampus handled the rest. He was hairy, horned, loud, and carried chains and sticks because apparently subtle parenting hadn’t been invented yet. If children behaved, great. If not, there was a half-goat demon lurking nearby to remind them consequences were real.

Krampusnacht wasn’t a cozy night with cocoa. It was grown men in terrifying masks running through the streets, clanging chains, and scaring everyone within range. Kids were meant to be afraid. Adults were meant to remember that winter was dangerous, life was fragile, and order mattered. It made sense in mountain villages, where darkness came early and folklore was taken seriously.

Then Christmas crossed the ocean.

Bringing Christmas Home: How Evergreen Trees Came to Iowa

Christmas trees weren’t a big deal on the Iowa frontier. Not at first, anyway.

For many early settlers, Christmas was quiet. Sometimes it meant church. Sometimes, nothing at all. Winter was hard. Money was tight. There was wood to cut, animals to feed, and snow to shovel. Decorating a tree wasn’t high on the list.

 

The truth was, a lot of early Iowans didn’t know what a Christmas tree was. One widely reprinted explanation in American newspapers during the 1850s tried to spell it out plainly, calling it “a German custom, recently introduced into this country, and designed chiefly for the delight of children.”

 

The idea came west with German immigrants in the 1830s and 1840s, in places like Dubuque, Davenport, and Burlington. Back home, they’d grown up with evergreen trees brought indoors and lit with candles. When they did the same thing in Iowa, their neighbors didn’t know what to think.

Knecht Ruprecht Santa's Not So Nice Helper

Knecht Ruprecht didn’t come to Iowa breathing fire or dragging chains. He came the way most serious ideas do, riding along in a trunk with winter coats and hymnals, carried by people who expected children to behave and winters to mean business.

German immigrants brought St. Nicholas with them. They also brought the understanding that December wasn’t just about treats. It was about judgment. Somewhere in the old country, St. Nicholas had a helper whose job was to remember the bad stuff. His name was Knecht Ruprecht.

In Iowa, the name didn’t stick, but the job did.

Old Iowa newspapers talk about St. Nicholas visiting schools and churches. Kids lined up in their good clothes. Songs were sung. Candy was handed out. Then, tucked into those cheerful little reports, something uncomfortable crept in. A rod. A switch. A warning that not every child would be pleased with the visit.

Santa Claus Delivering Toys

This image of Santa Claus and his sleigh appeared on the front page of the Des Moines Tribune, Christmas Day, 1925. (I colored and touched up the black and white artwork)

Christmas Celebration at Southside Community Center 1927

A Christmas party at the Southside Community Center in Des Moines brought together a small team of “elves” who helped Santa hand out presents and candy to neighborhood children. The helpers—Mary Forte, Victoria Vito, Mary Pasinelli, Marjorie Cardamon, and Mary Rand—lined up beside Santa, played by Olphonus Bisignaro, as families came through the center for the holiday event.

The moment was captured in the Des Moines Tribune on December 27, 1927.

How Santa Claus Came to Des Moines in 1923

Santa Claus on his way to the Younker 
Brother store, with acting mayor,
Mrs. C. H. Morris

Santa blew into Des Moines on November 17, 1923, long before anyone expected him. Kids weren’t ready. Parents weren’t ready. Even the weather wasn’t ready. Yet there he was, swooping in like Christmas couldn’t wait another minute.

By sunrise, thousands of children were already downtown, crowding the sidewalks and pressing their noses to the toy-land windows of the big stores. One reporter joked the shelves held enough toys “to fill the bags of 10,000 Saint Nicks,” and judging by the wide-eyed faces in the crowds, most kids believed that was true.

 

The Des Moines Tribune swore that “never in the history of Des Moines has Christmas spirit gotten off to an earlier start than this year,” and they weren’t kidding. There was a Christmas parade, free taxi rides, and chocolate teddy bears—real chocolate teddy bears—dropping out of the sky.

 

Santa made his grand entrance a little after nine o’clock at the Harris-Emery store. He didn’t sneak down a chimney or clomp in with reindeer hooves. He went big. He flew over Des Moines in a high-powered airplane, circling the city like a jolly red barnstormer. Kids pointed at the sky. Mothers shaded their eyes. Fathers muttered things like, “Good grief, he’s actually doing it.”

Julebukking in Decorah

A knock at the door, and random masked strangers

Decorah always felt like it was built to survive winter, not enjoy it. The cold didn’t nibble at you—it crawled straight through your coat and took up residence in your bones. The Norwegians who settled there understood the cold. They’d lived with storms that could erase entire villages, so when they brought julebukking with them—this odd little winter ritual—it didn’t feel like an import. It felt like a warning that old traditions don’t die; they just change latitudes.

Julebukking was never a spectacle. No carolers in neat rows. No cheerful postcards. No marching band in red hats. It was smaller, stranger, and more intimate. It thing started with a knock after dark—the kind that froze a room mid-sentence. A knock with weight to it. A knock that carried old-country ghosts on its back.

The children always heard it first. They stiffened like animals catching a scent. Adults tried to look unconcerned, but the winter air came into the house in a new way when julebukk night rolled around. Everyone felt it.

Christkindl in Eastern Iowa

Children placing boots by the door on Christmas Eve

Christkindl came to eastern Iowa the way December storms did—quietly at first, then all at once. By the 1860s, the river towns of Davenport, Guttenberg, Elkader, and the communal streets of Amana carried the sound of German carols through the cold air, and it was hard to tell where old-world memory ended and new-world habit began.

The newspapers rarely explained the holiday. They assumed everyone already knew. When they mentioned it, they spoke in plain sentences. A Davenport editor said , “The German families prepare for Christkindl as their parents did before them.”

 

Children placed boots outside their doors on Christmas Eve. Big boots, if they had them. Little ones polished until they reflected lamplight. The Christkindl—not Santa, not St. Nicholas, but something more gentle—was said to slip inside the houses after the family had gone to bed. “The Christ-child brings the gifts,” the Iowa Reform explained, “and no child should seek to spy upon its coming.” Parents repeated the rule with the solemnity of a town ordinance.

 

Sinterklaas Comes to Pella

Sinterklaas came to Pella the way most things did in the 1800s—carried across an ocean, held together by memory, and kept alive because people needed something familiar in a place that was still trying to decide what it wanted to be.

Every December 5th, Dutch families lit their lamps a little earlier. Children took out their wooden shoes and lined them near the door, polished as best as small hands could manage. Nobody said it outright, but the shoes mattered. A good shine suggested good behavior. A scuffed heel hinted at mischief. Children hoped Sinterklaas wouldn’t notice.

 

The Pella Gazette said, “The little ones prepare their shoes with great care, and the streets ring with their anticipation.” That was about as emotional as the paper got, but you could tell the editor enjoyed the spectacle.

Dubuque Christmas Market

The Christmas market on Main Street always arrived early in Dubuque. It didn’t sneak in. It simply appeared one morning, as if dropped there by a tired hand. By the 1860s, everyone expected it. By the 1890s, nobody could imagine December without it.

The Dubuque Herald tried to explain the thing every year. It usually gave up by the second paragraph. Crowds were too big, smells too mixed, vendors too hopeful. “Main Street bustles with the commerce of the season,” the paper wrote in one of its calmer years, leaving the rest to the reader.

 

The smell was the first sign. Pine wreaths stacked in carts. Wet horses cooling in the snow. Oysters that had traveled too far, too fast, and looked a little startled by the journey. The Herald said, “A mild aroma accompanies the oyster barrels.” Mild was one word for it.

SantaCon Holiday Mayhem on Main Street

SantaCon Davenport isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s for people who wake up in December, pull on a $20 Santa suit, and say, “Let’s do this.”

December 13th, 2025. Seven years running. Seven years of red polyester flooding 2nd Street like a Yuletide riot. Santas with fake beards, Santas with real ones, Santas already drunk by noon and swearing eternal love for Rudolf and the Grinch. They come from Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline, the cornfields— with a thirst and a costume.

 

It started back in 2018. A handful of locals turned downtown Davenport into a North Pole fever dream. Now it’s a full-scale invasion. They move in herds, chanting, ho-ho-hoing, clinking glasses, leaving behind trails of glitter, beer foam, and unanswered questions.

 

Rules? There are rules. Wear the suit. A hat’s not good enough. Don’t die. Don’t ruin it for the rest of the Santas. Be nice to the bartenders—they control the flow of Christmas. Beyond that, you’re on your own.