Some Christmas memories come back as objects: a shiny silver tree, a handwritten envelope, or a toy catalog with a bent corner. These Christmas traditions from the 1950s and 1960s give us a glimpse of how the season looked, sounded, and felt in many American homes.
“Forgotten” doesn’t mean nobody does them anymore. Several are still cherished, and others have changed form. This list focuses mainly on the United States; customs varied with region, faith, family background, and budget. Many also began well before these two decades.
What makes them worth revisiting isn’t a claim that Christmas used to be perfect. It’s the small rituals around the celebration: waiting, making, choosing, and doing something together.
Images are illustrative recreations, not archival photographs.
1. Making a Wish List From a Christmas Catalog
Before wish lists became a collection of links, a thick Christmas catalog could provide an afternoon of daydreaming. Toy pages sat alongside clothes, housewares, and gifts for grown-ups. Turning the pages was part of the fun, even when most of the things pictured would stay wishes.
The Sears Christmas Book began in 1933, so it was already an established presence by the 1950s. Sears officially adopted the Wish Book name in 1968. That distinction matters: the familiar nickname came before the official title.
Want a small taste of that anticipation? Browse a scanned vintage catalog together and ask everyone to choose one thing. The prices, hairstyles, and toy descriptions make surprisingly good conversation starters.
2. Handwriting and Displaying Christmas Cards
A box of cards, an address book, a pen, and a pile of stamps turned holiday greetings into a proper project. The result was something a recipient could prop on a mantel or tuck away with family keepsakes.
Cards from these decades were far from identical. Smithsonian’s history of Christmas cards includes Norman Rockwell designs from the postwar years and two designs Jacqueline Kennedy painted for Hallmark in 1963.
Sending cards certainly hasn’t disappeared. What feels different is giving it a whole quiet evening, rather than fitting greetings between other tasks. A short handwritten note can still make an inexpensive card worth keeping.
3. Saving All Year in a Christmas Club
The holiday routine could begin long before anyone brought home a tree. Christmas clubs encouraged customers to put money aside through the year, then receive their savings in time for Christmas shopping.
The Library of Congress traces the first Christmas savings club to 1909. By our period, the idea was well established: a December 1960 banking magazine advertised Christmas Club’s golden anniversary.
This wasn’t a magic way to make gifts affordable, and not every household had spare money to save. Its place in holiday history is the anticipation: Christmas was something people prepared for in small installments, not just in one December shopping trip.
4. Watching an Aluminum Tree Change Colors
A silver tree lit by a rotating color wheel is one of the most recognizable sights from a mid-century Christmas. Instead of trying to look like a tree from the woods, it proudly looked like something from the future.
The Wisconsin Historical Museum dates the Evergleam’s debut to March 1959. Aluminum Specialty made the trees in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and offered accessories such as color wheels and revolving stands during the 1960s.
So this belongs to the very end of the 1950s and especially the following decade, not every postwar Christmas. Watching reflected colors travel across the branches was the attraction. An old photograph captures that look without requiring anyone to plug in vintage electrical equipment.
5. Decorating With Bubble Lights
Bubble lights made a tree feel almost alive. Their upright tubes held liquid, and rising bubbles supplied a little moving detail among the ornaments. They offered a different kind of spectacle from a plain string of glowing bulbs.
The Corning Museum of Glass explains that their popularity surged after World War II. It also places the development of blinking twinkle lights and small-bulb strings in the mid-1950s.
That makes the period more varied than the usual picture of one standard old-fashioned tree. Families had different budgets and tastes, just as they do now. If you love the appearance, keep nostalgia separate from electrical safety: an attractive old set is not automatically safe to use.
6. Running a Toy Train Around the Tree
Some trees had an extra layer of activity below the lowest branches: a loop of track, a locomotive, and a row of little cars. A Christmas train could be a gift, a decoration, or a family hobby that returned each December.
The Strong National Museum of Play describes the 1950s as Lionel’s heyday. Its collection history also shows how firmly the company connected its trains with Christmas in advertising.
Not every child owned one, and elaborate layouts could be expensive. Still, the appeal is easy to understand. You didn’t simply admire the display. You could operate it, rearrange it, and follow the train as it disappeared behind the presents.
7. Going Downtown to See Christmas Windows
For families near a big department store, the windows could be a destination in their own right. Small scenes, moving figures, and a story unfolding from one pane to the next made shopping streets feel like an outdoor show.
Chicago’s Marshall Field’s is a well-documented example. The Chicago History Museum preserves objects from the store’s history, including figures used in window displays. Its account records the lasting affection for the State Street holiday windows and the Walnut Room.
This was a local tradition, not an identical nationwide experience. Your family’s version might have involved another store or a much smaller Main Street. The shared idea was making an outing of looking, with no purchase needed to enjoy the view.
8. Playing Christmas Records From Start to Finish
Choosing a record meant choosing a mood for the room. You took the disc from its sleeve, set it on the turntable, and eventually got up to turn it over. The music arrived in sides, not an endless stream of suggestions.
These decades added enduring recordings to older holiday favorites. The official Elvis Presley discography dates Elvis’ Christmas Album to 1957. Vince Guaraldi’s 1965 music for A Charlie Brown Christmas brought a very different sound to the season.
The records themselves remain familiar. The less common ritual is sitting with a whole album and letting its sequence unfold. You can bring that back with a record player or simply by resisting the skip button.
9. Planning the Evening Around a Christmas TV Special
Holiday television once came with an appointment. If a family wanted to watch together, they had to be ready when the program started. There was no streaming menu waiting for everyone to finish wrapping.
The Library of Congress essay on A Charlie Brown Christmas places the special and its music in 1965. Earlier in the period, Hallmark’s first Hall of Fame broadcast presented Amahl and the Night Visitors on Christmas Eve 1951.
The programs are hardly forgotten. It’s the shared schedule that has become less familiar. Setting aside one evening for one show, with phones put away, recreates something of that occasion without pretending the past offered more choice.
10. Baking a Mixed Tin of Christmas Cookies
A holiday cookie selection didn’t need every biscuit to match. Different shapes, colors, and textures were the point: something crisp beside something soft, a decorated cutout beside a simpler favorite.
One concrete link to the era is the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, first published in 1963. Its continuing appeal is a reminder that family baking traditions often travel through well-used cookbooks as much as through written recipe cards.
Of course, Christmas baking is much older than the 1960s and remains very much alive. The nostalgic detail here is the assortment, assembled over time and shared rather than styled into a perfectly matching set. Ask relatives which cookies actually appeared in their kitchens; the answers may surprise you.
11. Turning Gift Wrapping Into a Craft
Neatly folded paper, ribbon curls, and a carefully shaped bow could make the outside of a present an event. Wrapping wasn’t invented in the 1950s, but the period gave it plenty of attention.
Hallmark’s gift-wrap history records workshops from 1956 through 1969, along with instructional films released in 1958 and 1968. That is a lovely glimpse of an everyday household skill being treated as something worth learning.
You don’t need elaborate supplies to borrow the idea. Choose one wrapping style, use paper you already have, and take your time with a single package. The appeal is the care, not how much ribbon ends up on the floor.
12. Gathering Around the Television Yule Log
Here is a distinctly regional addition to these Christmas traditions: a fireplace on television. New York’s WPIX introduced its Yule Log on Christmas Eve in 1966, turning a filmed fire into holiday programming.
The history of the broadcast connects that first version with Gracie Mansion. This was a late-1960s New York tradition, not something every American household watched throughout both decades.
Today, a fireplace video is only a search away, so the image itself is hardly lost. The unexpected part is how early television offered this quiet alternative to a show. Sometimes the screen’s job was simply to make the room feel festive.
Which Christmas Traditions Does Your Family Remember?
A museum can date an aluminum tree, but a family member can tell you where it stood and who insisted on putting it up. Ask about the cards, the music, the shopping trip, or the cookies. Those ordinary details are often the best part of the story.
You don’t have to recreate an entire decade. Pick one small custom you enjoy and make room for it this year. A real note in the mail or an evening listening together can be enough.
More interesting articles you may be interested in reading:
9 Things To Be Careful Of This Year When Bringing A Christmas Tree Indoors!
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