Boston in the early 20th century had a Christmas season rooted in neighborhood life, church services, and family gatherings. The city’s many immigrant communities each brought their own traditions to the mix, giving different corners of Boston their own festive character. The holiday was quieter and more local than what it would become in later decades, but no less meaningful to the people who lived it.
Department stores were early anchors of Boston’s Christmas season. By the 1910s, places like Houghton & Dutton on Washington Street were already dressing up their storefronts for the holidays, drawing shoppers into the heart of downtown. As the decades passed, the competition between stores to create the most eye-catching displays grew fierce. Jordan Marsh, Filene’s, Gilchrist’s, and RH White all became destinations in their own right during the Christmas season.
While the big department stores grabbed headlines, smaller vendors set up shop across the city. Fruit and produce sellers like Allen & Co. turned to Christmas trees as a seasonal sideline, selling them from open-air stalls. These street-level transactions were a familiar part of the Boston holiday experience long before the modern pop-up lot became common.
By the mid-1930s, the intersection of Washington and Summer Streets in Downtown Crossing had become one of the busiest spots in the city during the holiday season. Shoppers packed the sidewalks, and the area buzzed with the energy of people hunting for gifts. The annual Santason parade, which rolled through Boston’s streets during this era, added another layer of spectacle to an already lively season.
The Santason parade was a genuine crowd-puller. In 1938 and 1939, Santa and his companion Santason rode floats through cheering crowds while giant balloons spelling out “Merry Xmas” floated overhead. The parade returned the following year, with Santa and Santason handing out presents directly to people lining the route.
Christmas decorations in 1939 weren’t limited to retail storefronts. The Mural Lounge in Kenmore Square set up a full Santa-and-sleigh display, showing how broadly the holiday aesthetic had spread across different types of businesses. Meanwhile, the shopping crowds at Washington and Summer Streets had grown even thicker than they were just three years earlier.
Beacon Hill on Christmas Eve drew its own kind of crowd. The neighborhood’s gas-lit streets and brick rowhouses made it one of the most atmospheric spots in the city during the holidays. Carolers gathered on corners like Mt. Vernon Street, and residents came outside to take part. It was a tradition that felt older than the century itself.
Into the 1950s, Boston’s downtown department stores remained the centerpiece of Christmas shopping. Gilchrist’s flagship store dressed its exterior in holiday style, competing with nearby rivals for foot traffic. Jordan Marsh that same decade went so far as to place a full nativity scene at one entrance while keeping secular decorations at another — a reflection of the tension between religious and commercial expressions of Christmas that played out across the country.
Boston City Hall and other civic buildings joined the stores in decking out for the season. In 1954, a sign on one entrance to City Hall read: “A Happy, A Holy, A Joyous Christmas To All.” Religious institutions added to the citywide atmosphere, with Trinity Church in the Back Bay and St. Francis Seminary both decorated for the season. Quincy Market and the area near Faneuil Hall became spots to buy wreaths and fresh-cut trees.
Boston Common became the city’s most important public stage for Christmas. A nativity stable scene was erected on the Common in 1956, and the lighting of the Christmas tree — a gift given each year by Nova Scotia in gratitude for Boston’s aid after the 1917 Halifax Explosion — drew large crowds to watch the official start of the public holiday season.
Filene’s was one of the most beloved stops for holiday shoppers in all of New England. The store’s Downtown Crossing location stayed packed from Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve, with extra staff brought in to handle the surge. Families made the trip to Filene’s a seasonal ritual, as much about the experience of the store itself as the gifts they came to buy.
Boston’s public figures marked the holiday in their own ways. In 1948, Mayor James Michael Curley gathered with his family at home to cut the Christmas turkey, a scene captured for the press. The image of the mayor at the head of the holiday table reflected how deeply the domestic and the public sides of Christmas intersected in mid-century Boston.
Boston’s neighborhoods each found their own ways to celebrate. Dorchester firemen decked out their station with Santa and reindeer in 1959, while East Boston’s Don Orione Home and Madonna shrine glowed with Christmas lights. That same year, Rev. Dr. Harold John Ockenga spoke at Park Street Church as TV cameras recorded the service — a sign that Christmas in Boston was increasingly being broadcast to a wider audience.
Christmas morning brought a stillness to Boston’s usually busy streets. Dock Square, normally a bustling commercial area, sat completely empty on Christmas Day 1952. By 1960 and 1961, the trees on Boston Common blazed with lights and drew crowds who came specifically to take in the display. The Common had cemented its role as the city’s holiday gathering place.
The area around Faneuil Hall remained a hub for holiday commerce through the 1960s. Stacks of wreaths lined the market, and shoppers moved through the space picking up last-minute items. A 1965 photograph from the Common showed four sailors and a soldier pausing to pray in front of the holiday decorations — a quiet moment during a decade marked by the Vietnam War.
Snow was a reliable feature of Boston Christmases throughout the century. The Public Garden blanketed in white, with the Berkeley Building and the newly built Prudential Tower rising in the background, made for one of the most striking images of 1966. A year later, the Boston Common Frog Pond was similarly transformed, its surface covered in snow and ringed with lights.
The late 1960s brought more complexity to Boston’s Christmas season. The shopping crowds at Washington and Summer Streets were as thick as ever in 1968, but the same year saw mothers and children protesting at the city’s welfare office, demanding toys, food, and clothing for the holidays. The gap between the abundance on display in store windows and the needs of many Boston families was impossible to ignore.
As 1968 wound down, Bostonians took breaks from the shopping rush wherever they could find them. Two siblings rested on Boston Common after a day of shopping, surrounded by the Common’s holiday decorations. The following year, the fountain on the Common was dressed up for the season, a Santa sat in a sled at City Hall Plaza, and downtown streets fell quiet on Christmas Day itself.
The early 1970s saw Christmas traditions continue alongside growing political tensions. In 1972, anti-Vietnam War demonstrators marched down Washington Street in a Christmas-season protest. That same year, church services at the Shrine of St. Anthony on Arch Street drew worshippers on Christmas Day — a reminder that for many Bostonians, the religious core of the holiday stayed central regardless of what was happening in the wider world.
Boston Common continued to draw visitors through the mid-1970s. In 1973, a young girl studied the nativity scene on the Common before the tree lighting ceremony. Park Street Church, framed by the lit trees in 1974, became one of the most photographed scenes of the season. Mounted police officers helped manage the steady flow of shoppers along Winter Street in 1975, the same year children from Boston’s Chinese community gathered at Holy Trinity Church for their own Christmas celebration.
Christmas trees stacked near Faneuil Hall in 1976 and a father-son duo pausing their shopping to look at a Boston Police officer in 1977 captured the everyday rhythms of the season. By the 1980s, the crowds around the Boston Common tree had grown substantially. Santa Claus appeared not just in parades and store displays but out in the community — stopping to inspect a cut on a homeless child’s finger in 1985 while delivering presents.
The season’s lighter moments carried into the end of the decade and beyond. In 1989, a man dressed as Santa Claus fed a Boston Police horse at the annual Christmas dinner for police horses outside Faneuil Hall — an only-in-Boston tradition. In 1992, eight CEOs staged a performance of “O Christmas Tree” featuring an unstable star on top, a corporate twist on a classic carol. Boston’s Christmas season, across all its decades, found room for the solemn and the silly in equal measure.
