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April, 2017 The Antique Shoppe Page 21
EASTER PARADES
by Roy Nuhn
Until the time of the Civil War, Easter
was rarely celebrated in this country. During
that conflict, some towns and villages in the
North began using it as a day of mourning
for their dead and wounded. In Pre-
Revolutionary War America, Easter, along
with Christmas, was ignored, if not outright
banned, in many of the colonies by the
Puritans and other strict religious groups.
Since no mention of it being a holiday to be
commemorated each year was found in the
Bible, contemporary Easter festivities were
considered sacrilegious.
In Elizabethan England, from where the “Boardwalk, Easter Sunday, showing
Puritans and Pilgrims had fled, the holiday
was one of wild merrymaking and Mardi-
Gras style festivities that angered their (anonymous publisher, No. 3524).
pious beliefs.
After the end
of the Civil War, in “Easter Sunday on the Boardwalk, Atlantic City, N.J.”
1865, it took only a (Souvenir Post Card Co.).
couple of decades
for Easter to catch on
as a popular holiday.
Children, along with
their elders, quickly
latched onto the egg
and rabbit as favorite
holiday symbols.
Meanwhile, bachelors
began sending Easter
cards to their favorite
ladies. By the time the
century had come to
an end, Easter was a
permanent part of the
calendar.
The very first Easter parades most likely took place in Byzantium, early
in the first millennium, A.D., when Emperor Constantine
ordered all his council members to dress themselves in
their most colorful finery in honor of the Resurrection. This
custom in the Eastern Roman Empire probably give birth
to the later medieval belief that a person must wear a new
article of clothing, for the first time, on Easter Sunday to
guarantee good luck for the balance of the year.
Later, in Europe, the custom evolved into townspeople
taking a walk or stroll on Easter Sunday through the fields
and forests while wearing new clothes. In the U.S., after
Easter had become a traditional holiday in the latter part
of the 19 century, this pleasant, low-keyed practice
th
transformed itself. It was now a grand parade of all the
citizenry, dressed in their newest, richest and most elegant
clothing, down the main street of their hometown while
going to or coming from church services on Easter morning.
Easter joined Christmas as being one of the “must attend”
days of the year for those who regularly missed the weekly
commitment. In time, attending religious services came to
have nothing to do with going out dressed to the nines to
showcase yourself.
It soon became a fashion extravaganza, as both men and women
dressed in their newest and most colorful spring clothes and paraded up
and down the street. The most famous gathering of people seems to have
been on the Boardwalk of Atlantic City in New Jersey, and in New York City.
The latter, of course, inspired the 1948 motion picture, “Easter Parade,”
and its now—famous song about a man’s
sweetheart sporting her “Easter Bonnet”
with all its frills to become the grandest
lady on Fifth Avenue that day.
The Atlantic City parade has been the
subject of countless postcards published
since the turn of the 20th century. Many
publishers printed view cards of it, almost
always in the black and whiter photographic
style. Sales of such cards were clearly
aimed at the six million-plus tourists who
once flocked to the famous seaside resort
city every year for sun, bathing, and frolic.
The Easter Parade in Atlantic City has
Marlborough Blenheim, shown up on cards issued as early as 1902.
Atlantic City, N.J.” A prolific producer of such souvenirs in
the years leading up to World War I was
Osborne, Ltd., located at 22 Easter 21st
Street, New York, and often identified as
the Rialto Post Card Company. Souvenir
Post Card Co. was also involved, as was Raphael Tuck & Sons.
Tuck’s “Atlantic City, N.J.” Series No. 1089, for instance, contains
an interesting card of the parade captioned “Easter Sunday on
the Boardwalk.”
Other printing houses involved in the early years of the
last century included the Albertype Co., Garraway Photo—Art,
and I. G. & Co., among others, as well as a large number of
anonymous vendors.
All of these postcards show the huge crowds of massed
humanity crowding the famed Boardwalk. One of the Albertype
cards portrays the logjam of bodies in front of Haddon Hall.
A real joy is to examine these photo style postcards carefully
to look at all of the people, to see the face of America as it was
over a century ago.
It is a page out of the history books, a look at ourselves back
in the Yesterdays now long gone and mostly forgotten, except
for postcards of the era.
Raphael Tuck & Sons “Atlantic City, N.J.” Series No. 1089. Card shown is captioned:
“Atlantic City, New Jersey, Easter Sunday on the Boardwalk.”