Holiday gewgaws for the rest of time
It takes time to transform a Christmas knickknack into a collectible, but not necessarily centuries. Here are some more recent sources of Christmas wares that come back year after year:
A Christmas Story (1983): Jean Shepherd’s recollection about Christmas in 1940 is the source of one of the holiday’s oddest emblems: the lamp made to look like a woman’s leg in a fishnet stocking.
In the movie, this object is said to be a “major prize.” Little Ralphie’s house is a real place in Cleveland with a gift shop that sells a 45-inch replica of the leg lamp, right down to the fringed shade. Leg lamps come in other sizes, depending on just how big of a kick the “old man” wants to get out of Christmas.
Fruitcake: the gift that keeps re-gifting. Likely the world’s oldest and longest-kept fruitcake, baked in 1878, resides with the Morgan Ford family of Tecumseh, Mich.
Ford and the fruitcake appeared with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in 2003. Leno tried a nibble and said it needed aging.
What to give the most cynical curmudgeon for Christmas? What else but a reminder of the influence that probably soured him on the festivities 50 years ago, namely an old Mad magazine.
Sure as fruitcake, Mad’s usual gang of idiots attacked the merriment with covers that showed Alfred E. Neuman with his jug-handle ears frozen blue. Cartoonist Don Martin contributed the scene of two street-corner Santas in a fight for territory. And the magazine’s annual Christmas song parodies, begun in 1959, griped about, “The 80 times they play/ ‘White Christmas’ every day.”
Vintage Mads endure in flea markets and online, where the once 25-cent-ers go for $5 and up. Absolutely Mad (GIT Corp.) collects 600 issues, 17,500 pages on DVD.