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  • A Mile of Make Believe: A History of the Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade by Steve Penfold
  • Len Kuffert
A Mile of Make Believe: A History of the Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade. Steve Penfold. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. 256, $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper

Every year, for much of the twentieth century, the Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade provided an ephemeral thrill. As spectators shuffled away from their places along the curbs or watched television hosts sign off, the experience was already becoming a memory for them. The ritual was especially suitable for this thoughtful treatment by Steve Penfold, who [End Page 441] metaphorically boosts us up on his shoulders for a more intimate view, but does not let us forget that the parade emerged as Christmas became a more public season. The astute commercial minds at Eaton’s sensed that their interests might be best served out in the fall air, gliding along on a float for all to see. A Mile of Make Believe situates itself along the parade’s historical route, where civic leaders and citizens themselves came to appropriate some of the spectacle’s meaning. Readers seeking a mere chronicle of the parade as an institution should look elsewhere, because what Penfold offers here, along with his story of how the parade developed, is something more valuable: a history of the culture surrounding and permeating it. Of course, the book offers a number of anecdotes to satisfy our curiosity about the where and when, but scrupulous attention to the how and why connects the whole Christmas carnival with twentieth-century historical currents. Via interpretive models like “the civic fantastic,” we can better appreciate the stakes for Eaton’s, for the cities and towns hosting parades, and for the spectators.

Penfold opens his history of Eaton’s annual spectacle by recounting a lament that seems all too familiar to anyone who even casually glances at social media these days. From her perch in 1982, Alfreda Hall was one of the first sharp-eyed scouts to notice that a war on Christmas (totally real, just like Santa!) was coming. She mourned the announced cancellation of the Eaton’s parade, suggesting that children’s joy and civic tradition had been forsaken. Surely, without all of the usual markers of the season, the holiday itself would succumb to secular disenchantment. We are shown right away that the parade succeeded in appealing emotionally to the public, and that, despite the early 1980s recession, balance sheets alone could not justify the store empire’s decision to step away. Penfold moves on to declare that the parade was “at once a colourful procession, a popular Christmas spectacle, and an expression of corporate power” (13). While some of us might hold to a different definition of “popular”–can a curated window display on wheels embody spectators’ wishes?–the larger point about the parade as multivalent is most important.

First, in a chapter called “The Corporate Fantastic,” we get a sense of how the emerging department store empires in North America, often regional as well as national entities, fused celebration with marketing and did everything but drag shoppers into their stores at the end of these parades. A knack for decorating store displays translated well to parading, and Eaton’s staff developed a rhythm to parade preparation that somewhat reconfigured time itself in the crucial Christmas season, which for many shopper/citizens could not begin [End Page 442] until the parade had passed. Fantastic characters on floats seemed to draw the required audiences, and the money and effort that only a corporation like Eaton’s could provide were essential to bringing those characters to life on parade routes. At bottom, the parade was an advertising stunt, but one that occupied an unusual place in Eaton’s business model. How does one reckon its impact on the bottom line or value goodwill? Penfold implies, as any cultural historian likely would, that this is not an interesting question. More compelling is his discussion of how such a robust tradition could be invented by a family-run business. Capital’s challenge to civil authority long predates these parades, but the parades...

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