The View from 1909: What They Thought Christmas Would Be Like Today

It’s possible that this article is well-known to certain history geeks, but that won’t stop me from being tickled that I found it.* My commitment to online archaeology only goes so far on Christmas Day. Whatever the case: on Christmas Day, 1909, an article was published in papers nationwide. The copy I found was published in a long-defunct, Logansport, IN paper on that day. Here’s a link to a screencap made from the PDF: “Christmas a Hundred Years From Now.”

The article details the (apparently anonymous) author’s predictions for Christmas in 2009. In many ways it’s funny because it gives the future so much credit. However, it also comes remarkably close in other respects to the way we celebrate today.

Because of the predictions that landed (and the ones that didn’t), this item belongs here, in The Occultist (Tumblr’s own little X-Files).

And no matter what, the artwork - a portion is at the top of this post - is KICK-ASS.

A few interesting bits from the article, which may be difficult for some to read:

The Christmas spirit will be the same [in 2009]. But whether it is a hundred years from now or a thousand we may be be sure that when the Christmas season comes the world will be full of the Christmas spirit. Little children and grown men and women still will be made happy by giving and receiving, grudges and grouches will be forgotten, enemies forgiven and good will will prevail.

Is this true today, still? I kind of think so. Mostly.

… [It] is reasonable to imagine that within the coming century men will travel through the air as commonly as they now travel over the land. The automobile, the trolley car, the railroad train, and the horse as a draft animal — will all be gone. Men will use the earth, as birds do, for a resting place for their homes and the principal source of food supply; but when they want to move from one place to another, they will mount into the ether, even as the birds do, and fly swiftly and safely to their destination…

Aw, that’s sweet, 1909. Those of us reading this in 2009 totally appreciate the credit, but I’m afraid to tell you - we suck. Autos, rail and even in some places trolleys still remain. Yes, we do a crapload of flying, but as anyone who believed a flying car would one day be their sovereign right can tell you, flying is still exotic compared to just getting in the car and going somewhere. I’m thinking the handful of youth-slaughtering wars between your time and now may have put the kibosh on that one genius we needed to put a flying car in every garage.

The suburbanite who does not fly to work in 2009 will be shot through a pneumatic tube, traveling the five, ten or fifty miles of distance in a space of time that may only be a few seconds and certainly cannot be more than a few minutes. It may be that few people will walk anywhere in the year 2009.

Only on Futurama, 1909. We don’t do walking now unless we need to get away from the fam and listen to “How it Ends” on our iPhones. By the way - iPhones are pretty freaking cool, 1909. You’d love ‘em.

With the passing of the Christmas sleigh there will be no longer any need for reindeers for Santa Claus…

Not really true, I’m afraid. In fact Santa even added one to the roster, via a Christmas song that is only slightly less annoying than Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmas Time.”

Now is the moment when Occultist readers and followers should hold onto their hats, because Mr. Anonymous Christmas Predictor of 1909 nails it:

A hundred years from now, if you want to avoid the rush and do your Christmas shopping in your own apartments, the scientists probably will have provided for you a combination of telescope and moving picture machine by means of which you can connect your room with the toy department and see the display by wire — or perhaps by wireless — and at the same time you get prices and leave your order with the clerk by telephone.

I know. HOLY CRAP, right? Damn, 1909, you landed that one. (BTW, just in case there is one supremely stupid person reading this, I did add the hyperlinks. They weren’t in the original. Now put your helmet back on and continue banging your head with that hammer, you’ll feel better.) Wow. I had to read that paragraph twice and then I did a touchdown thing with my arms on behalf of my pal from 1909. Sure, it may have been a matter of logically extrapolating from things that already existed at the time, but I added the links to make a point - the terminology was way off (because those were the only words the writer had to work with) but the concepts were bang-on. Pat yourself on the back, 1909 futurist. Even though you’re all dead and stuff.

The mechanical toys of 2009 will be marvels of perfection. The most imaginative man cannot possibly conceive of the new things that will be invented in the way of machinery, but it is safe to assume that the wireless transmission of power will be perfected. Wheels will spin without any visible motive power. Power may be taken from the sun’s rays or wireless power stations may be operated by the waves, the waterfalls or even the winds. Before the coal supply is exhausted the need for coal, either for warmth or power, will have passed away.

Well, that’s a few near-misses. Wireless power transmission is here but it is by no means common, unless you count that thing that powers all your phones via a pad. Sadly, we’re just as dependent on “fossil fuels” as we ever were and solar power is still fairly exotic, though definitely in use. Mr. 1909 Christmas Prophet gets a C+ for effort.

Here is where - after some literal pie-in-the-sky theorizing about 245 story-tall apartment buildings and a very 1909 mention of “the servant problem” the writer of this article once again nailed it, even acknowledging that they didn’t yet have the words to describe what they were writing about:

If you prefer to remain at your apartments [on Christmas night] the telautoscope attached to your telephone may be connected to any theater you desire and you can sit in your easy chair and smoke while you see the play projected on the wall like the most perfect moving picture. All the stage settings will be there to make the play seem real and the improved telephone will bring ever shade and subtle inflection of the actor’s voice to your ear.

It seems certain that this telautoscope arrangement — the exact word to describe it will be coined after the process is discovered — will be one of the triumphs of the coming century. It will enable you to see the person you are talking to over a telephone.

Emphasis was added. A miss with the furnishings being right there in your living room, but otherwise, again, our 1909 Christmas Prophet kind of kicks some ass and takes some names. Everything described in those two paragraphs exists in some form today and indeed, one could argue that computers and communication-linked tech was one of the crowning achievements of the end of the 20th Century. A great deal of the technology we use now was already in place and in use by the year 2000.

The article ends on a hopeful note and it is striking because with this hopeful note the writer nailed another prediction. The kind of thing so common now that many of us probably don’t appreciate the fact that it was once so hard to do:

On Christmas day in the good century to come this flight in the air will be the means of many family reunions that are impossible now. A few hours will take one to the most distant part of the country, and the practical cessation of business during the holiday week will leave all free to foregather with the loved ones and pay deferred visits.

I’m honestly not 100% sure the article ends there, but I like to think it does. The final prediction came true a while back. I find it touching, too, because it seems to speak to something in the writer’s own heart, perhaps. I tend to imagine some harried fellow with a green eyeshade on, alone in the newsroom with his typewriter, thinking of family too far away for a convenient train ride, dreaming of a day when people could just hop on a flying machine and see loved ones in a matter of hours.

If my own vision of the article writer’s past is anywhere close to true as some of his (or her, for that matter -women were already writing for newspapers in the late 1800s) predictions, I hope he or she lived long enough to see that day and to see some of these things start to fall into place.

Though I’m not sure predicting My Buddy Dolls (it’s in the article - just go read the whole thing) would be a point of pride, now that I think about it.

(* NOTE: I did get a little less lazy as I wrote this and I checked - inevitably, some other folks found this article as well. But just 16 hits in Google at the time of this posting is good enough for me; I’ll take it. Here, by the way, is a cleaner copy of the same article uploaded about a week ago by someone else.)