A year ago, I wrote this article for Christmas, on divining aspects of the American built environment through the lyrics of Christmas songs:

It is curious that while Americans of this era [the postwar era] were obsessed with boat-sized cars, talking dolls, electrical appliances, and suburban faux-homesteads, the Christmas music dating from the post-war years reveals virtually nothing about these then-new developments. What cultural and architectural clues they do drop suggest a world in which few of these innovations have occurred—but not quite.

They sketch a dream world in which talking and walking dolls accompany Janice and Jen to the bus stop, Rudolph careens Little Saint Nick down the freeway, and the girl with the hippopotamus lives in a house with two stories and a two-car garage.

And yet, Frank Sinatra walks home in a snowstorm after spending the day at his girlfriend’s single-family house with a fireplace, and the kids follow Frosty the Snowman down to a New England-style town square. Oh, and there are still no toy stores, because Christmas means that the toys are in “every store.”

More:

Despite our enthusiasm for the mobility unlocked by the automobile, the near-total absence of the car from cultural imaginations of Christmas suggests either that we were ambivalent about the social effects of the automobile, or that they had not yet been overwhelmingly felt.

No house described in a Christmas song resembles a post-war suburban home, but rather the larger houses that might have been found on farmsteads or in residential districts of classic towns….nearly all these songs paint a picture of walkable and mixed-use neighborhoods.

And so I recently saw a few things that grabbed my attention, given my interest in depictions of Christmas and what it might say about our feelings about our built environment.

The first was this catalog from DiBruno Bros, a Philadelphia-based Italian delicatessen and specialty foods store. It depicts a gingerbread house in the shape of a classic Philadelphia/Mid-Atlantic rowhouse!

The second was this Twitter thread featuring pictures of gingerbread houses based on multifamily housing designs.

YIMBY Action @yimbyaction

Are you excited to show off your Multifamily Gingerbread Homes on Sunday? Check out some of the amazing creations from last year's event... First up, @NeverSassyLaura made these:

December 17th 2021

5 Retweets45 Likes

The third is a Coca Cola ad running this year, which unfortunately I can’t find a link to, which talks about an old apartment building, in which generations of families, above and below each other, are celebrating the holidays in all their different ways.

This might all sound a little too cute, grasping at straws, or trying to politicize Christmas. But it isn’t doing that, any more than your ceramic Christmas village is. Or “Silver Bells,” celebrating Christmastime in the city. There’s something about this kind of urban environment that jibes with the spirit of holidays. A part of us knows that, and much of our popular culture knows that. It’s a shame we no longer build much of the sort of thing we feel so much collective nostalgia for.

Speaking of Christmas villages, look at this one from Kohl’s:

That middle one could no doubt be an entry in my “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” series!

It seems poignant that we don’t build much of this kind of thing anymore—and most of our zoning codes don’t even permit it—and yet we feel such a strong nostalgia for it. There’s just something magical about this, from my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey.

I’ll leave you with that.

Related Reading:

The Treasures of Route 11

Ribbing and Ragging

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