From the St. Louis Globe-Democrat archives of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at teh University of Missouri-St. Louis
Window flocking, fairy lights, and giant, polyvinyl candy canes—it’s all we get anymore. So it’s shocking to see how elaborate department-store Christmas windows remained up into the 1980s. This porthole looks into the interior of a downtown Famous-Barr window, one of a series built around the theme “Santa’s Spacewalk.” Other scenes featured dewy-eyed mice in astronaut bubble helmets frolicking around Santa’s throne, aliens wearing the latest winter fashions, and great wooly piles of cotton batting (it snows on the moon when Santa Claus visits, though apparently he can’t do anything about the lack of oxygen). If you look closely, you’ll see those are Pac-Man cookies coming out of the oven, and Junior there is wearing a pair of Deely Boppers. Which, in the summer of 1982, were an actual fashion accessory, topped with everything from glittery hearts to tiny windmills. Mom’s hair looks hopelessly outdated, but we suspect it’s a sly reference to Star Trek’s yeoman Janice Rand, minus the mullet; Dad’s unfortunate outfit, though, seems to have been constructed from Hefty bags and quilted space blankets (and he appears to be removing a chromium ham from the oven). The Famous-Barr art department did make one stunning far-range prediction—the fetish for stainless everything in the kitchen—and showed a little bit of immediate ESP, too. Four months after this window was installed, Michael Jackson pulled on his silvery socks to perform “Billie Jean” on a Motown TV special, turning Cab Calloway’s backslide into the most popular dance move in history—the moonwalk.
