Maine
How Maine celebrated the holidays 100 years ago
On Dec. 21, 1924, the Portland Sunday Telegram published a festive spread about how children were celebrating the season. Click on the image to go to the full page on newspapers.com
There was a lot happening in Maine in December 1924: Christmas pageants, Hanukkah festivals, caroling through the streets and visits with Santa Claus.
Shops were decorated for the season and stocked with everything from silk scarves to mechanical toys and fancy ribbon candy. Schoolchildren adorned their classrooms with tinsel and ornaments and rehearsed songs to perform for their parents.
It was the middle of the Roaring Twenties and Mainers were in the mood to celebrate.
With a world war and deadly global influenza epidemic firmly in the rearview mirror, the nation’s economy was surging and people had money to spend on household appliances, cars and clothing. Radios were becoming increasingly popular, with people tuning in to listen to news and entertainment from around the world. A host of new consumer products hit the market: Wheaties cereal, Bit-O-Honey candy bars, Dum Dums, iodized table salt and Kleenex facial tissues.
Popular children’s toys included Raggedy Ann dolls, teddy bears, Crayola crayons, chemistry sets, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys and yo-yos. The holiday season kicked off with the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City.
A look through the archives of Maine newspapers provides an enticing glimpse at the holiday merriment 100 years ago.
PARTY TIME
The elementary schools around Portland went all in on their holiday celebrations.
A full page of the Dec. 21 Portland Sunday Telegram was devoted to describing the festivities. The spread was topped with photos of local children under the banner headline “Jolly Old St. Nicholas We’re Sure You Can’t Resist Us.”
The Morrill School held a Christmas party in every classroom “with games and stories and Christmas stories and Christmas songs and best of all ice cream for all.” Fifth-graders watched stereopticon slides illustrating Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and the kindergarten room was “especially attractive.”
“The tree is ablaze with crystal and silver trimmings. After greetings to the parents and guests, the children told the real Christmas story and sang their songs about the Little Christ Child,” the newspaper reported. “Gifts that the children had made to give away, and gifts that they contributed for some needy families, were then distributed and after a meal with ice cream and animal crackers all went home most happy.”
At the West School, students put on a Christmas program featuring poems, songs and readings. There were piano solos and an instrumental performance of “The Desert Caravan” featuring students playing mandolins, violins and the piano. Two sixth-grade classes banded together to put on a Christmas play titled “Santa and the Dragon,” with a Santa, a woodcutter, witches and fairies, dolls for various countries and a knight named St. George.
Santa Claus visited six schools across the city – his arrival was “a gala occasion” everywhere he went.
“The very most elaborate party given for Santa was at the Oakdale School where hosts of parents came in, and where Santa’s arrival was heralded by loud honkings of automobile horns which sent the children rushing to the window. When he drove up in state with his pack just crammed with good things for small boys and girls pandemonium broke loose, albeit a teacher-regulated pandemonium,” the paper reported. “Here and at every other school which Santa Claus visited he distributed rolls of life-savers, one for each child, and the munching and crunching of these goodies accompanied the farewells to the Christmas saint.”
LETTERS TO SANTA
Hazel Fillmore asked her letter to Santa to be read on the radio in 1924. Click on the image to go to the full page on newspapers.com
A young Portland girl’s attempt to get her letter to Santa drew the attention of the Sun-Journal. In a story published on Dec. 18, the newspaper detailed how a letter by Hazel Fillmore of Hanover Street was read by Mr. Messter, the WCBR Portland Radio Exposition announcer.
“The up-to-date child no longer depends on the slowness and the uncertainty of mail. He establishes direct communication to the Saint of Christmas thru radio,” the newspaper wrote.
Hazel used the letter to introduce Santa to her new baby brother, Philip Calvin Fillmore (“we love him very much”), and detail the Christmas wishes of her other siblings. Everett, 2, and Helen, 3, both wanted rocking horses, while 5-year-old Millard and 7-year-old Warren wanted horns and drums. Iona, 8, asked Santa for a sewing box and a sleeping doll.
“As for me, I want a pair of bedroom slippers and a Bible, and if it is not asking too much, a sleeping doll,” she wrote. “Dear Santa Claus, Mamma is in bed sick but I want you to please answer over the radio tomorrow night. My papa will tune in for me.”
FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS
The Jewish communities in Portland and Biddeford celebrated Hanukkah starting on Dec. 21.
In Portland, the YWHAA Intermediates and Juniors prepared an evening of musical numbers and refreshments for the first night of Hanukkah, the Portland Sunday Telegram reported.
“One of the most important features of the evening will be the Chanukah pageant, written by Miss Alice Modes, in which about 10 girls take part and which will prove very interesting. The pageant is a sketch of the history of Chanukah and the scenes will be very pretty, the girls in their flowing white gowns, each carrying one of the letters that form the word Chanukah. Musical numbers will follow and refreshments will be served.”
The Biddeford-Saco Journal wrote about the “impressive services” given by Rev. Lipin at the synagogue on Bacon Street in Biddeford and printed a detailed history of the holiday.
“The feast of lights as it is sometimes called was celebrated with elaborate exercises at the synagogue on Bacon Street at sunset Sunday,” the story said. “One candle was lighted and today, two, with three tomorrow, four the next day, five the next, six the following day, seven on the next day, and eight on the eighth day.”
Ads in the Biddeford-Saco Journal on Dec. 22, 1924, detailed the food and gifts offered in local shops. Click on the image to go to the full page on newspapers.com
GIFTS GALORE
The 1920s ushered in an advertising boom and local shop owners took advantage of the trend to market their holiday season offerings.
In newspapers across southern Maine, shops advertised all manner of gifts – from slippers to kitchen appliances to custom-made suits. Toys, of course, got top billing in many ads.
The Biddeford Bargain House on Main Street had a lot of gift ideas: child’s carpet sweeper, 35 cents; little horse rocker, 35 cents; trains 50 cents to $2.50; electric toasters for $3.95; 42-piece dinner set for $7.95; dolls 10 cents to $7.50; mechanical toys 25 cents to $2.98; solid maple desks and chairs, $4.98.
Over at Mrs. S.E. Ladd on Main and Water streets in Saco, the shop offered “Interesting Christmas gift for women” – most of them involving silk. In stock were sweaters, silk underwear, silk boudoir caps, silk scarfs, underarm bags, silk bloomers, corset covers, bath robes, silk mules, silk hosiery, silk ribbons and silk blouses.
Just two days before Christmas, ads in the Evening Express targeted Westbrook shoppers looking for last-minute gifts. At the Emile Begin clothing shop, “Gifts for Him” included shirts, ties, armbands, bathrobes, umbrellas, mufflers and cuff links. Over on Bridge Street, Carr’s Shoe Store offered ladies’ and men’s Christmas slippers for 59 cents to $3.50 in “all kinds and colors.”
LaFond & Co. invited shoppers to “come to our Toyland on the 2nd floor” for last-minute gifts, including silk hosiery, silk umbrellas, rubber aprons, muslin underwear, baby crib sheets and leather pocketbooks.
WHAT PEOPLE WERE EATING
When it came time for holiday meals, local markets were ready with everything people needed.
The Andrews & Horigan Co. grocery store on Main Street in Biddeford had Christmas turkeys, ducks, geese and chickens, “all fresh killed and fancy stock” ranging from 42 to 48 cents. There were also California and Florida oranges, jumbo pecans, cranberries, squash and all the vegetables needed for dinner. For dessert, 2-pound boxes of ribbon candy were just 43 cents.
“We have everything to complete your Christmas dinner,” read the ads for Bibeau Bros., The Pure Food Market, at the corner of Alfred and Jefferson Streets in Biddeford. Their offerings included extra fancy turkeys direct from the farm, native geese, ducks, grapefruit, apples and nuts.
The grocers encouraged people to “shop early and avoid disappointment.”
To help readers expand their holiday menus, the Biddeford-Saco Journal published a cooking column called “The Kitchen Cabinet” that offered recipes for yuletide goodies, including butterscotch Spanish cream and snowballs made out of sponge cake.
In Portland, ads for Spear Folks Candy at 495 Congress St. – famous for Needhams and caramels – highlighted its “splendid gift packages for $1. There were also candy-filled cedar chests, ribbon candy, novelties, hard candies and stocking fillers ready to be packaged for shoppers.
“Remember, everybody likes candy!” the ad read.
TOPSFIELD, Maine — Jenna Stoddard is not sure where her son will spend his days when he starts preschool next fall.
Sending him to East Range II School would be convenient and continue a legacy. Stoddard lives just down the street and her husband graduated eighth grade there in 2007, one in a class of three. Topsfield’s population has dropped since then. The school now has five students, two teachers, few extracurricular activities and nobody trained to teach music, art, gym or health.
Stoddard’s son is too young for her to worry about that now. But the school may not be open by the time he is ready to go. Topsfield, a town of just 175 residents, will vote on whether to close the school on April 30. If it closes, the boy would likely be sent to preschool up to 30 minutes away in Princeton or Baileyville.
“That’s a pretty fair distance for a kid, a 4-year-old, who is now on a bus all by himself,” she said. “[If] school starts at [7:45 a.m.], what time is the bus picking 4-year-olds up here? And what time is he going to get home at?”
Topsfield is an extreme example of how an aging, shrinking population and rising property taxes are forcing Maine towns to make difficult choices about their community institutions. Just over a dozen people came to a Wednesday hearing on the idea of closing the school. The crowd was mostly in favor of it.
“It is emotional to close the school in a town,” Superintendent Amanda Belanger of the sprawling Eastern Maine Area School System said then. “But we do feel it’s in the best interest of the students in the town.”
Teacher Paula Johnson walked a reporter through the building, which is small by Maine standards but cavernous for its five students. It has four classrooms, a small library, and a gymnasium. There is also a cook and a custodian for the tiny school.
A hallway trophy case serves as a reminder of when the school was big enough to field basketball teams. Topsfield’s student population has never been large, but the school’s population has dropped dramatically over the past few years. It had 25 students in 2023, with many coming from nearby Vanceboro, which closed its own school in 2015.
As the student population dwindled, the cost of sending students to Topsfield climbed. With fewer students to defray the costs, Vanceboro officials realized they would be paying $23,000 per student by the last school year. So they opted to direct students to nearby Danforth, where tuition was only $11,000 per student.
East Range lost seven students from Vanceboro, bringing its enrollment below 10. Under Maine law, that means the district may offer students the option to go elsewhere. Parents of the remaining students in grades 5 through 8 took the option and sent their kids to Baileyville. This school began the year with eight students; three have since pulled out.
In Topsfield, Johnson teaches four of the remaining five, holding lessons for pre-K through second grade in one classroom. Another one down the short hallway is home base for the other teacher. She focuses on the school’s lone fourth grader and occasionally teaches one of Johnson’s first graders, who is learning at an advanced level.
The other teacher, who holds a special education certificate despite having no students with those needs, plans to leave at the end of the school year. If the school stays open, that will leave Johnson responsible for educating Topsfield’s youngest students, though the school will need to budget for a part-time special education teacher just in case.
After 11 years at the school, Johnson is not sure what she will do if voters shut it down.
“We’ll see what happens here,” she said.
Topsfield’s school board, which operates as a part of the Eastern Maine Area School System, is offering its residents a choice: continue funding the school only for students between preschool and second grade at an estimated cost of $434,000 next year or send all students elsewhere, which would cost less than $200,000.
At Wednesday’s hearing, the attendees leaned heavily toward the latter option. Deborah Mello said she moved from Rhode Island to Topsfield years ago to escape high taxes.
“It’s not feasible for the town of Topsfield,” she said. “We cannot afford it and it’s not like the children don’t have a school to go to.”
Others bemoaned the burden of legal requirements for the small district, including the need to provide special education teachers even if they don’t need one. Board members also mentioned that in 2028, the district will become responsible for educating 3-year-olds under a new state law. That adds another layer of uncertainty to future budgeting.
“It sounds like we’ve been burdened something severely by this program and that program by the Department of Education, to the point where a small school can’t even exist,” resident Alan Harriman said.
“And that’s been happening for a long time,” East Range board chair Peggy White responded.
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.
BANGOR, Maine (WABI) – Good morning and Happy Sunday everyone. Skies are cloudy with fog across much of Maine this morning. Rain has entered locations along the interstate and to the northwest. Temperatures vary from the upper 30s to mid 40s. Winds are out of the SE between about 5-15 mph.
Today will be a wet and impactful day with rain and even snow anticipated as a large cold front passes through Maine. Skies will be cloudy with plenty of fog lasting through the morning. Rain will expand across the interstate by the late morning hours, reaching Downeast locations by midday/the early afternoon.
By the early to midafternoon, temperatures will start to drop across northwestern locations as the cold front passes through Maine. This will result in rain turning over to mixed precipitation and eventually snow across the Western Mountains, Moosehead region, and Northern Maine. Rain will continue steadily and at times heavily across the foothills, Interstate, Coast, and Downeast. A few thunderstorms are even possible closer to the coast.
Snow will expand across areas to the northwest of the interstate this evening, reaching all the way down to Interior Midcoast communities, the Bangor region, and Interior Downeast areas by sunset and into the start of the night. Precipitation will taper off across Western Maine shortly after sunset, before exiting the entire state around midnight tonight. High temps today will vary from the low 40s to low 50s with SSE to NW gusts reaching 20-25 mph.
Snowfall totals will vary under 2 inches across Western, Northern, and Interior Downeast locations. However, a few pockets of 2-4 inches are possible, mostly in higher elevations across the mountains. Rainfall totals will accumulate around a half inch to three quarters of an inch when all is said and done.
Precipitation will be out of Maine by midnight tonight, with cloudy conditions giving way to mostly clear skies by sunrise. Lows overnight will dip back below freezing across much of the state, from the low 20s to mid 30s tonight, so cover up any plants or flowers outside. WNW gusts will reach 20-25 mph. A Small Craft Advisory is expected offshore.
Skies will be partly to mostly sunny across the interstate and coast on Monday morning. However, by the late morning to midday hours, clouds will build with a few scattered rain and snow showers in spots. Conditions will remain on the cloudier side in the afternoon before clearing up around sunset into the start of Monday night. Highs will be chilly on Monday, from the low 30s to upper 40s. WNW to SW gusts will be a bit breezy, reaching 20-25 mph, which will add to the wind chill factor.
High pressure will build on Monday night, remaining overhead on Tuesday. Skies will be sunny in the morning, becoming partly to mostly sunny in the afternoon. Highs will remain cool, in the 40s across the board with North to SW gusts only reaching 15-20 mph.
A weaker low-pressure system could bring showers across Maine on Wednesday and Thursday. There is a bit of model uncertainty on exactly when it will impact Maine. The GFS has impacts on Wednesday, while the EURO, GRAF, and GDPS models have most of the impacts on Thursday. We will continue to monitor this system and potential impacts. All it looks to provide as of now are cloudier skies and rain showers, with some snow shower chances farther to the North.
By Friday and Saturday, conditions are trending on the drier side with sunshine and average temperatures returning to the forecast.
SUNDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Cloudy with AM fog. Rain becoming widespread throughout the day, turning over to snow to the north & west during PM. SSE to NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
MONDAY: Highs from low 30s to upper 40s. Partly to mostly sunny early. Developing clouds with scattered rain/snow showers by midday/afternoon. WNW to SW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
TUESDAY: Highs throughout the 40s. Sunnier AM. Partly to mostly sunny PM. North to SW gusts reach 15-20 mph.
WEDNESDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Mostly cloudy with a few rain showers. Few AM snow showers possible North. SSE to SSW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
THURSDAY: Highs from mid 40s to mid 50s. Cloudier skies with rain showers possible. Some AM snow showers possible North. NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
FRIDAY: Highs from upper 40s to mid 50s. Partly cloudy. NNW gusts reach 20 mph.
Copyright 2026 WABI. All rights reserved.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in September 2022.
When it comes to Maine hiking, summiting Katahdin is the ultimate achievement.
Maine’s tallest mountain stands at 5,269 feet, and there are a number of different trails hikers can take to get up and down Katahdin. And while some are harder than others, none are easy.
But the views are incredible.
Whether it’s the rugged terrain of the Knife Edge or the vast landscape of the 200,000 acres that compose Baxter State Park below, here’s a look at what it’s like to climb Katahdin.
Hunt Trail
Abol Trail
Chimney Pond Trail
Cathedral Trail
Saddle Trail
Northwest Basin Trail
Knife Edge
Tablelands
South Peak
Hamlin Peak
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