It is either inevitable or compulsory – I can’t remember which – for aging bloggers to do at least one nostalgia post during the Christmas (properly the Advent) season. Memories of childhood, of Christmas in a bygone age, when life was simpler and purer and our societal values were probably better.
Anyway, I haven’t yet finished the book I’m reading for review, and I posted a song last night. So tonight it’s nostalgia. After a brief report on my day.
I had a moment of satisfaction this morning, when I finally got my first Christmas cards ready to mail. (Yes, I’m one of about three people – all of us senescent – still sending Christmas cards. See above, under “bygone age.”).
I always have trouble remembering how to generate mailing labels with Microsoft Word. I only do it once a year, after all. This year was worse, because I had to get my database files from my old laptop to my new laptop, and for some reason nothing I saved – even to Dropbox – on the old computer can be accessed anywhere else. So I had to email them to myself, and when it didn’t work at first, I thought some further incompatibilities were involved, probably beyond my expertise. But I succeeded at last.
Anyway, the Norwegian cards go out first, of course – farther to travel – and now they’re in the hands of the swift appointed couriers.
Where was I going? Nostalgia, oh yes.
I wanted to talk to you about the artist whose work is re-posted above. Probably means nothing to you – he’s a midwestern thing. But he was part of Christmas for me back in the day.
His name was Lee Mero (1885-1977). He was born in Ortonville, Minnesota and studied art at the Minneapolis School of Art and the Chase School of Art in New York City. He distinguished himself in his youth by rescuing a girl from drowning in a boat accident on Lake Minnetonka in Minneapolis, and by being arrested in New York City for drawing a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge (the Great War was going on; he might have been a German spy). He tried his hand at fine art for a while, doing some controversial Cubist stuff, but finally settled down in commercial art. He worked for, among other clients, Coca Cola.
But he was most famous in these parts for Christmas cards and his work for Augsburg Publishing House, the company that provided Sunday School curricula, church bulletins, and other goods to the churches of my (then) denomination. I spent many hours in church studying Mero’s drawings in various contexts.
I wanted to be an artist back then (eventually I would discover I’m better with words), so I paid attention to art. Lee Mero’s style was not one I was interested in emulating; it was rather old-fashioned and often stylized. But he was a master of composition, and every line was precisely placed.
But I remember him best for the Augsburg Christmas annuals, always entitled, simply, “Christmas.” These annuals evolved from “calendars” that used to be published by Norwegian Christian groups at Christmas time, often to raise money for missions. They featured inspirational articles, specially commissioned art, the lyrics to Christmas carols, and anything else that might serve to increase festivity and turn hearts Heaven-ward in a season that’s too often pretty material.
Lee Mero used to contribute several pages of a sort of comic strip. The ones I remember were nostalgic, reminiscing on how Christmas was in his boyhood, in the late 19th Century. He drew men in frock coats and top hats, and ladies with bustles, and horse-drawn cabs and potbellied stoves and oil lamps, evoking the unchanging excitement of a child in any generation. (His work very much inspired my Christmas chapter in Troll Valley.)
Lee Mero is not much remembered anymore. So I raise my (metaphorical) glass of eggnog to him now.