Holiday nostalgia: 4 Christmas traditions you forgot about

Ah, yes, we remember the Christmases when presents were piled ’neath the aluminum tree, when homemade fruitcake was a serious gift requiring weeks of preparation, and when kids excitedly opened Sears’ annual Wish Book catalog to circle all the toys they wanted Santa to bring.

Christmas traditions may seem immutable — wreaths and stockings, candy canes and eggnog, turkey or ham on the dinner table — but technology marches on and tastes and the culture shift. Here are four ghosts of Christmas past.

Fruitcake taken seriously

Now a punchline, fruitcake was once a welcome gift representing great time and care.

A form of cake with preserved fruit, it has been around since ancient Rome. It evolved to today’s form by the time of Colonial America, when women would crush blocks of sugar and whole spices, meticulously seed and stem raisins and currants, and mix these and other ingredients with self-sifted flour and butter, topping the baked result with brandy or rum. Since sugar, alcohol and moisture-reducing dried fruit inhibited microorganisms, a fruitcake remained fresh for a long time in the days before refrigeration.

Professional bakers made and sold them with pride. An 1897 ad for the Amityville shop Hulse & Ketcham boasted of fruitcake "made from the choicest ingredients." As late as Christmas 1979, Altman’s in Manhasset sold a 1-pound-10-ounce "Old English fruitcake from London’s Fortum and Mason" for $18.75 — nearly $80 today — with "dark, rich nuts and glacéed fruits."

Newsday that year ran a recipe prefaced by, "The day after Thanksgiving is the perfect time to bake a Christmas fruitcake" because "this cake needs time to ripen" — stored for weeks in an airtight tin, covered with a cloth you regularly peeled back in order to gradually infuse the cake with brandy.

"A good fruitcake actually is good. I mean, they get such a bad rap," said cult-film star Joe Zaso, 55 ("5 Dead on the Crimson Canvas"), who grew up in Bellerose, Manhasset Hills, Mineola and Rockville Centre, and whose upcoming film, "Loose Ends," was shot in Setauket. "They're expensive to make. They're hard to make."

Port Washington-raised L. Stephen Miller, 68, a retired publicist, remembers his family receiving such elaborate fruitcakes from "relatives, church members. I think maybe a couple of merchants even gave my parents one."

But then came mass-produced fruitcakes. "The canned ones," Zaso noted, "are usually, well, it's like anything processed." By the early 1990s, fruitcake had became a comedic trope.

Christmas clubs

Christmas club accounts were popular for decades as a method of enforced savings that ensured you had cash for the holidays.

Christmas clubs originated with Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Trust Company in 1909. They flourished, and by 1922, The First National Bank in Port Jefferson was advising parents their child could open a Christmas club with just 2 cents. And banks did eventually start paying interest; by 1972, Long Island’s County Federal Savings and Loan, for instance, was offering a Christmas club with what would now be considered a high rate, 5%.

In the 1950s, Elie Behar was a manager at The National City Bank of Long Beach, recalled his son, Sayville musician Joe Behar, who continues to gig in jazz combos at 83. "People would put in 50 cents a week, or maybe a dollar, or if you were really wealthy, $2. My father did it, too," he said. "It was nondenominational. ... He wanted to save money for the holidays — he spent money on Hanukkah."

Christmas clubs even had their own "special passbook," Behar said, referring to the passport-sized books people brought to their banks to record deposits and withdrawals via ink-stamp.

With the rise of credit cards, Christmas clubs waned. They still exist today at some credit unions, though none on Long Island appear to offer them.

Aluminum Christmas trees

Prized today by lovers of mid-century modern style, the aluminum Christmas tree reflected the Space Age in which it was born.

The first was patented by Chicago’s Modern Coatings Company in 1955 — but at $80, roughly $970 today, most people couldn’t afford one. Aluminum trees didn’t take off until 1959, when the Aluminum Specialty Company of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, devised a version — eventually dubbed Evergleam — that could sell for much less. In a licensing deal with Modern Coatings, they began producing them by the hundreds of thousands.

On Long Island, Levittown’s Super Toy Discount Center in 1959 advertised a 4-foot "stainless aluminum Christmas tree" for $6.95, and a 6-foot-1-inch version for $13.95. Singer’s Arts’ Decorations, of Hempstead, offered a 6-footer for $11.95 in 1960.

The demand was so great that more than 40 companies would make aluminum trees. Aluminum Specialty alone sold more than 1 million Evergleams before stopping production in the early 1970s. Today, vintage aluminum trees sell to collectors for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Some blame the 1965 animated TV special "A Charlie Brown Christmas" for their gradual demise. Charlie Brown and Linus eschew them as symbols of commercialism, choosing instead a runt-of-the-litter natural tree that charms everyone with its "sincerity."

Also, you couldn’t string electric lights on metallic trees. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, "The tree can become charged with electricity from faulty lights, and a person touching a branch could be electrocuted."

Christmas corsages

Gaudy and showy, a mishmash of ribbons, holly sprigs, poinsettia, pinecone and plastic bells, gift boxes and candy canes, Christmas corsages were an obligatory accoutrement husbands and children gave to wives and moms to pin on clothing come the Yuletide.

"I used to always have a Christmas corsage. That was very important to me," said Jericho’s Fran Zaso, 82, Joe Zaso’s mother. "We always had one on our coats, and I loved them. They were so pretty."

Advertised as early as the 1910s and a staple by the early 1950s, Christmas corsages were not only gifted to one’s spouse or mother but presented by women’s clubs to their members or given by teenage boys to their Christmas-dance dates. Groups would sell them at fundraisers. Fragrance companies sold them in gift boxes bundled with perfume.

And they were an arts-and-crafts project for both schoolchildren and teens. Fran Zaso often would make Christmas corsages "and give them out to friends to give to their moms. It was nice. I liked doing that. Sometimes I would even put them on gifts instead of a bow."

The three Long Island locations of the Peter Henderson and Stumpp & Walter garden center sold Christmas corsages for 25 cents and up in 1951. More than a decade later, in 1964, Long Island Pergament stores advertised them at 19 to 39 cents. By 1989, the four Harrow’s stores here gave them away at Christmastime as "our gift to you."

Christmas corsages were already becoming passé by then. One can still find them as a niche item, but most people now never have heard of them.