Holiday Windows

Stockmann, the omnipresent department store in Finland, has a Christmas window complete with ice cream and chocolate smudges left behind by kids pressing their face and hands to the glass. The pregnant elf and the elf morphing into a cookie are a bit freaky looking. :)

I vaguely remember my parents taking my sisters and I to see the Famous-Barr holiday display downtown when I was a kid. It was two blocks long and impressive, but the store stopped making the displays in the early 70s since downtown St. Louis had became a ghost town and the people who fled the city didn't want to drive downtown just for the lights in the grand old department store. I wonder where the holiday window display tradition for department stores originated. I looked in two of the books I have on the history of Christmas but neither of them cover this specific part of holiday marketing.