Denver Christmases


(entry for 12/25/2024)



Wherever we were at Christmas Time in Colorado during my child and teenage years, we always ended up in Denver on or near Christmas Day. And especially Christmas night. (Not ‘Eve.’ Night. The 25th itself.) We would drive from wherever we were staying that day to the City Center, and park, however far the parking spot was from where we were going. And no matter the weather.

Because there was something we had to see. (There’s a modern photo of it at the head of this post.)

Denver is one of the few cities I know of that is not in a county. It is the county. The City and County of Denver is one single governmental body and it does double duty, as its name implies. (I believe the same situation applies in San Francisco, California, and those are the only two examples I have ever heard of.)

The government building of the combined body is called the City and County Building (for some strange reason!) and it is located at the other end of a park-like area from the city’s State Capitol. (The Capitol Building is about 50 feet higher, as it is on a hill, and it is an attraction in its own right, but that’s not what we were there to see on Christmas Night.) The City and County Building is what we were there to see. The photo doesn’t come close to doing it justice. It’s spectacular, in a very quiet sort of way. We loved it then, and I still love it now.

We loved it even when it wasn’t decorated for the holidays. But especially when it was.

Here it is without the lights:


It was designed in 1924 by a coalition of thirty-nine different architects. Which has to be some kind of record. (And is in my opinion the only successful thing ever accomplished by any committee!) That’s a bit misleading, though, because the famous Robert K. Fuller was the lead designer and the overall shape is his. I don’t think he was thinking in terms of Christmas lights, though, when he came up with it. Construction began in 1929, and provided employment for over 400 workers. It took almost three years to build.

So many Christmas displays are rather gaudy. This one wasn’t. There were some exposed light bulbs (incandescent then and LED now). But the vast majority of the lighting was indirect. The bulbs were hidden and aimed away from you, into the apses and niches of the white-walled building itself. Every year was different. There was always a predominant color: sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes orange, and sometimes red. There were contrasting colors throughout the treatment, but the overwhelming impression was of one predominant color. And that predominant color was always muted, not glaring. Here are more examples from various years.










The fact that the building was pure white helped a lot, as the colors were not influenced by the stone, but merely bounced off of it. Another thing that helped was that at least in those days the Capitol Building across the way was neither decorated nor lit, so the C&C Building had the Christmas Glory all to itself.

But the building wasn’t the only attraction. In front of it, running a block and a half out to Broadway, was an intricate display of holiday motifs, with Santa in charge. (Along with his very realistic and full-size reindeer, including, after 1950, a Rudolph with a red-light-bulb nose.) There were no competing religious displays, no creches, no mangers. The City and County of Denver believed in the separation of Church and State, and the displays proved it. (An occasional long-tailed star on the cupola of the building doesn’t count, as that symbol is used in many non-Christian traditions as well as in the Magi story.)

There were Christmas Trees galore, large, small, and in between. On winters when there was snow, the snow remained unplowed, except on Broadway itself. On winters where there wasn’t snow, it was brought in from the mountains by the truckload. No soap flakes or white painted wood chips allowed. (Styrofoam hadn’t been invented yet, thank God!)

There was always a complex display of the ‘Night Before Christmas,’ complete with fireplace and chimney, with Santa’s boots hanging down from inside it.

There were people dancing around in snowflake costumes.

There wasn’t anything to buy. No souvenirs. No books. No money involved at all. It was all just to look at, for free.

There was music playing, continuously, through loudspeakers turned down to almost whisper level. You could hear Jingle Bells being played softly in one spot, walk a few feet away and hear ‘Jolly Old St. Nicholas’ or ‘Up on the Rooftop’ in another. Or even ‘Oh Tannenbaum,’ sung in German.

Within a few blocks of the C&C Building, there were other displays, most of them in store windows. These display made no attempt to separate Church and State, or Church and Anything Else. Lots of creches. Lots of mangers, large and small. Some with realistic Jewish-looking Josephs and Marys and Shepherds, and some with very unrealistic people who might very well have come from Lapland along with the reindeer.

Some of the displays were mixed up a bit. I remember in particular one year staring at a Santa holding up an Easter Egg. I never did figure that one out.

There were Nutcrackers and related wooden soldiers.

There were literally hundreds of Trees. Some elaborate, some simple. My favorite was one that was there every year in the Daniels & Fisher store window (now sadly demolished). It was covered in pink snow and festooned with silver balls. That was it. No garlands. No lights, though it was well illuminated by the store’s window lights. Just tree, snow, and balls. Very elegant.

But no matter how far we wandered, or how many store windows we looked in, we always came back eventually to the C&C Building, the heart of Christmas for us. The lights stayed on all night, but we usually left by midnight, having satiated ourselves on Cheer.

They also stayed on every night until the first Monday in January, whenever that was, but by then we were Christmassed-out and didn't go downtown at night any more.

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