I have always associated my early Thanksgiving dinners and such with working at the Lou Lucke Company.
For those four short weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas the Lou Lucke Company was decked out in live Christmas trees, bells, mica display racks and front display windows that looked like they were here direct from the North Pole.
I think it all started when my Grandfather and his brother Bob loved to decorate for Christmas. It was only fitting that their store, the Lou Lucke Company, would really be decorated as well.
Keep in mind that old store (where Normans is now) in Havre had loads of high ledges and on those ledges were mounted animals.
It would be too dangerous now to ever do what they did when they decorated for Christmas, but they ordered hundreds of many sizes of live Christmas trees for decorating those ledges so when the trees finally were all in place, it looked like the animals were walking through huge forests above the merchandise in the store.
Best of all the entire store smelled like a giant Christmas tree during that time.
The problem with all that was that by the time Christmas was over, those trees really had dried out and were nothing but a terrible fire hazard. It is a wonder the whole place didn't go up in flames.
Where Thanksgiving became a part of the store decorating scheme is that no decorating ever happened until Thanksgiving was over. I remember often going down to the store on Thanksgiving night so that the decorating crew could get a good start on decorating. The decorating must be completed by the Saturday after Thanksgiving and that meant getting all the trees up, getting the mica displays in place and most of all getting the large front windows decorated so that they looked like the North Pole.
Due to the fact that when the original displays were put in the store, the roads out in front were dirt, then gravel, everything was kept under glass. A clerk helped a customer find what he or she needed and under what glass it was.
All that changed at Christmas. Everyone knew that no one could wait on the hundreds of people buying Christmas presents every day so all merchandise was displayed on mica display racks, adding to the sense of Christmas all around.
It was as beautiful a store as I have ever been in for Christmas. It was just wonderful year after year after year.
My father and uncles loved watching football in later years. I often wonder how that would have messed up their decorating on Thanksgiving night!
Lastly, on the Monday morning after Thanksgiving my father would drive the company delivery truck all over town and deliver a free 25 to 60 foot Douglas fir for their sanctuaries.
When that happened we in the family knew we were now full bore in the swing of Christmas.
