Sleigh in Your Lane

Chicago had long been famous at Christmas time for the glittering displays in Marshall Field's department store windows. But just a few years before the famed department store began its Yuletide tradition, the World's Columbian Exposition in the Windy City had its own holiday exhibit that drew raves. Twenty toy makers from the German village of Sonneberg presented their works on a coach that looked like a cross between Santa’s sleigh and Cinderella’s enchanted carriage. On it, an excited “young lady doll” sat astride the steed that drew a Christmas tree and heaps of toy “yachts, steamboats, dogs, horses” and more.