Throughout much of the last century, Christmas in Washington, D.C., and other American cities drew more than shoppers downtown. Many of the people crowding the sidewalks during the holidays had come solely to view the festive displays that filled the windows of the downtown department stores.

On carefully lit stages behind the plate glass, Santa and his elves, reindeer, snowmen and fairy tale figures gestured and twirled—to the extent their mechanical innards allowed—across winter landscapes or in cheerful domestic interiors.

Washington, D.C.’s Woodward & Lothrop department store always seemed to have the best displays, and one of the children admiring Woodies’ windows on F Street in the 1960s would do more than just fondly remember.

“I grew up here, and my store was Woodward & Lothrop,” says William “Larry” Bird, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, recalling the years when his family would come downtown to see the holiday displays.

“Garfinckel’s had them, Kann’s had them, Lansburgh’s and the Hecht Co. had them,” he says, reeling off the names of long-gone Washington, D.C., department stores. “But Woodies always seemed to go out of its way to have the most charming show.”

Bird captures that charm in Holidays on Display, his lavishly illustrated new book about the behind-the-scenes magicians who conjured up those shopper-stopping store windows, engineered the first outdoor Christmas lighting, and crafted the prize-winning floats for America’s biggest Thanksgiving and New Years parades.

Published by the Smithsonian in association with Princeton Architectural Press, the book highlights how these commercially inspired displays created strong emotional bonds between stores or other sponsors and the public who viewed them, bonds “that transcended commercial meaning,” Bird says.

Bird’s own vivid childhood memories of the animated displays that Woodward & Lothrop staged are one measure of that bond. In Holidays on Display, he notes that, in several cities where department stores have gone out of business, their beloved Christmas displays have been kept alive by nonprofit groups or city governments and are faithfully rolled out for public viewing during the holidays.

Bird works in the American History Museum’s Division of Politics and Reform and he explains that his scholarly interest in the long tradition of American political campaign parades, as well as in the history of advertising, also brought him, in a roundabout way, to the subject of his book.

“The more I looked at the trade press on parade-float building, the more I came to have an appreciation for float construction as a business, as a commercial enterprise,” Bird says. Studying old magazines devoted to float making that he found among the Smithsonian Institution Libraries holdings eventually led him to other specialized publications, such as Show Window magazine, a trade journal for window trimmers that in its early years was edited by L. Frank Baum.

Before becoming famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum was an avid chronicler and booster of the window decorator’s trade, awarding prizes for the most artfully trimmed store windows and noting approvingly in 1899 that “every village and hamlet in the land has had some sort of a window display of unusual merit to attract the public and further the sale of Christmas wares.”

To research Holidays on Display, Bird also embarked on a listening tour of display old-timers, sitting down with float builders such as Earl Hargrove, whose Lanham, Md., company has made floats for every presidential inaugural parade since Harry Truman’s, as well as for a host of other events ranging from Virginia tobacco festivals to the New Orleans Mardi Gras. “He told me great stories about the float builders that he knew,” Bird says. Hargrove, who started out trimming liquor store windows with his father in Washington, D.C., during the Depression, also brought Bird up to speed on the ins and outs of the float-building business.

In Pasadena, Calif., Bird interviewed David Coleman, a retired physician who was the son of the late Isabella Coleman, a legendary creator of floats for that city’s New Year’s Tournament of Roses Parade. “He told me this incredible story of how his mother started decorating floats for the parade. Her parents encouraged her to do it one year because she couldn’t find a ride on a school float.”

That was in 1910, and the teenage Coleman’s marigold-bedecked, horse-drawn float won a prize. She went on to design more than 300 floats for the Tournament of Roses Parade for chambers of commerce, oil companies, evangelists and other sponsors. The parade’s greatest float builder, she never lost a certain homespun approach to the craft.

In Cleveland, Bird pored through business records at Nela Park, the corporate headquarters of the General Electric Co.’s Incandescent Lamp Division. Also known as the “University of Light,” this is where, beginning in the 1920s, General Electric lamping application engineers developed and tested Christmas lighting products. A laboratory for outdoor lighting effects, the business campus erected holiday displays that drew an average of 300,000 drive-through visitors a year.

“I was given free run of the history-file room,” Bird recalls. “I asked, ‘Has anybody published these photos?’ and was told, ‘No, no one has ever come here for that.’ That’s what you want as a historian—first crack.”

Bird says he wanted to “put a book together that talked about holiday display as a business, focusing on the creative people who were drawn to it.”

Asked how the float builders, window decorators and lamping engineers he tracked down felt about his scholarly interest in their work, he says, “They’re shocked that somebody from the Smithsonian is interested in them, in what they’re doing. They understand what the Smithsonian is and they’re delighted to talk to us.” Many of them willingly shared tales of their trade and made available photographs and other material that Bird used to illustrate his book.

Bird’s first interview for Holidays on Display opened a door in his own memory. From Roland Leimbach, a retired Woodward & Lothrop executive in the store’s display department, Bird learned the details behind one of the department store’s most lavish holiday productions, “A Window on Williamsburg.”

The display was a painstakingly accurate evocation of Colonial Williamsburg by the store’s craftsmen, who even “counted and faithfully reproduced the number of bricks on building exteriors and re-created in miniature the moldings in the [Governor’s] Palace supper room.” According to Holidays on Display, “The display became so popular that it attracted an average of 50,000 visitors per day.”

As Leimbach described the display, which opened in eight sidewalk windows on Thanksgiving Day 1966, “In my mind, I could kind of see it,” Bird says. “I could remember something like that. It was a big deal, the coolest thing that they ever did.” And for just a second or two, the historian has a faraway gaze in his eyes, as if part of him is back on a wintry sidewalk on F Street in the 1960s, taking in the free holiday show behind the plate glass.