On December 6, 1956, the Gallatin County Tribune and Belgrade Journal announced the official beginning of the Christmas season. “Coincident with the drop in temperatures there was an appreciable rise in that intangible thing called Christmas spirit. Despite the zero temperatures there were plenty of people on the streets, bright scarves, red stag shirts, crimson noses; gaudy cars with their white topping of snow and the trailing plumes of their exhausts. Suddenly people became conscious that the holidays were almost upon us and the attractive and varied window displays of Bozeman merchants had new and potent appeal.” Seventy years later, the holiday season is again in full swing and most of us are in various stages of holiday shopping. It is also the season to reminisce about those unforgettable gifts—treasured items that brought so much joy that no other present could ever compare.

In the 1890s, Christmas gifts were often humble but nonetheless memorable. In a 1975 oral history recording, Don Anderson recalled his older sister’s description of an early Christmas spent on the family farm southwest of Bozeman. “Each child got a family gift of an apple or an orange—not both, understand. They had to take their choice. And when she turned up her nose at her orange, my father eagerly took it, because he hadn’t had any fresh fruit for a long time.” The Anderson family, for whom Anderson School is named, came to the Gallatin Valley in 1888 and operated a hardware store on Main Street until they switched to farming.

In contrast to the orange, an elaborate Christmas gift in the museum’s collection is a striking French-made dark blue sewing basket with gold embroidery. This keepsake was given to longtime Bozeman resident Mary Susan Oliver Smith Mendenhall in 1857 by her future first husband, Major Robert Henry Smith. Robert and Mary, or Susan as she was commonly called, were married for just five years before he was killed in 1863 in the Civil War. Susan relocated to Bozeman in 1869 with her sister and brother-in-law, Elizabeth and Achilles Lamme. The next year she married local merchant and first Gallatin County Sheriff, John Mendenhall. Susan lived in the family home at 521 S. Willson Avenue, or the “pink house,” for most of the rest of her life; she passed away in 1933. Her Christmas sewing basket was kept by her descendants until it was donated to the museum in 2023.

Missouri native Niza Shaw moved to Bozeman with her husband George in 1936. She lived at 22 W. Lamme Street for over forty years and kept a faithful diary of her daily activities. One page of Niza Shaw’s diary is dedicated to a list of Christmas gifts she received from friends and family in 1959 and 1960. Food items like cookies, candy, fruit cake and quantities of beef, pork and deer meat were popular. Niza also received practical gifts—handkerchiefs, potholders, an apron, and an embroidery thread holder. A necklace and an “oil picture for the top of a calendar” could be considered some of the more frivolous presents she received. Fiercely independent and known for jumping rope, even on her 101st birthday, Niza Shaw passed away in 1987. Her diaries, along with a portion of her collection of agates and opals, are now part of the collection at the Gallatin History Museum.

Food, handkerchiefs, and sewing baskets were all well and good, but nothing compared to the delightful toys given children at Christmastime. As the 1956 Gallatin County Tribune article, “Christmas Shopping in Bozeman” proclaimed, “Because Christmas is primarily a children’s holiday, perhaps the goods offered for children are, of all holiday offerings, the most interesting. Their range is wide, their variety infinite.” It is usually toys that produce those wonderful life-long memories, and the magic of Santa Claus in childhood is undeniable.

In a 1975 oral history interview, Margaret “Bessie” Gee described her memories of Christmas gifts and Santa. “I just loved Christmas. Of course, I believed in Santa Claus until – I don’t know just how old I was – but my older sister, my older brother, took us into the bedroom one day and told us there wasn’t any Santa Claus, that it was just grandma and grandpa and mother and father... and the next morning I had a mechanical seal, and I wouldn’t even look at it, because I knew it didn’t come from Santa Claus.” Gee, whose family farmed near Reese Creek north of Belgrade, also noted that some of her favorite childhood Christmas gifts were dolls. Her father made doll beds and doll trunks for both her and her sister, which remained her lifelong treasured possessions. Bessie remembered having rag dolls as a small child, acquiring more sophisticated versions as she grew.

One early variety and toy store in Bozeman that sold dolls (and much more) was Wisey Wonder Store, located in the 1910s on the south side of Main Street between Black and Tracy Avenues. A December 1, 1914 issue of Wisey Wonder Store News provided families with a poster-sized advertisement featuring the season’s popular toys. A colored border around the toy advertisements featured illustrations of elves, fairies and gnomes hard at work while Santa, hammer in hand, supervised from the top. Toys advertised that year included dolls and doll accessories, rocking horses, musical instruments, board games, sleds, and the ever-popular air rifles and cap guns. The Wisey Wonder Store ad not only included illustrations of various toys, but prices, and descriptions sure to entice young readers.

For forty cents, parents could purchase “unbreakable dolls” for small children that were so durable they “could be thrown without breaking.” The famous Kewpie doll made an appearance in the 1914 Wisey Wonder store ad as being much “in demand,” and the store carried a line of Kewpies that started at twenty-five cents. A fifteen-cent “Fish Pond” game included two rods and eight fish. Pop guns, priced at fifteen cents, were “just the thing for the little tots. Absolutely harmless.” For slightly older children, air rifles cost twenty-five cents and were capable of shooting rubber balls and corks. One dollar could buy a mahogany-finished toy baby grand piano with keys that produced “accurate notes.”

One of these fabulous toy pianos, like the one mentioned in the 1914 Wisey Wonder Store ad, is part of the toy collection at the Gallatin History Museum. Given to Martha Story Drysdale at age 5 in about 1933, the instrument still makes music more than ninety years later. Martha, daughter of Malcolm and Rose Ashby Story, grew up in Bozeman and in recent years volunteered at the museum, where she donated her treasured toy piano in 2012. She passed away in 2021.

For eighty years, Chambers-Fisher Department Store in downtown Bozeman was a popular destination to purchase toys and gifts for the whole family. The store famously displayed a giant silhouette of Santa’s sleigh and reindeer on the front of their building above the awning with the words “Whoa! This is the place,” printed underneath. In addition to Santa’s endorsement above the front door, longtime owner Minnie Preston also published large advertisements in the local newspaper during the holidays. A December 3, 1943 ad in the Bozeman Courier asserted “Toyland is Fairyland,” and encouraged parents to bring their children to Chambers-Fisher’s downstairs toy department to peruse the season’s popular toys. Because there was a wartime effort to save metal in 1943, the ad made a point of mentioning some great alternatives to metal toys, such as Lincoln Logs for $1.50 and cartoon drawing sets for $1.00.

In December 1956, the Gallatin County Tribune provided many gift ideas for young and old—skis and skiing equipment, ice skates with the blade already attached to the footwear (instead of, as the ad described, the “old fashioned kind we clamped on ordinary shoes”), freezers, dish washers, and televisions. A large ad for a local electronics store called Elite Novelty Company at 226 E. Main Street featured a variety of TVs in blonde, mahogany, and walnut consoles. The high-end television that year from Elite was a $299.95 Philco model with “sound out front and top touch tuning” that provided “startling new mastery of sight and sound.”

So, this year, bring on the nostalgia. As the Tribune noted in 1956, “Shopping in Bozeman, with cordial merchants and friends around you, is an experience not to be dreaded, but enjoyed.” Best wishes for an enjoyable holiday season, filled with warmth and happy memories. May it be as delightful as that treasured childhood gift which will never be forgotten.