AA-2026-B85F20
On the image
By ten o'clock on Christmas morning, the living room had been reduced to this: a continent of torn wrapping paper, open cardboard, and ribbon, with a plaid thermos and what appears to be a Radiant aluminum telescope standing as monuments to the consumer optimism of the postwar decade. The aluminum Christmas tree behind it all — loaded with tinsel so dense it reads as a single silver mass — was the era's confident answer to the question of whether a fake tree could be made even less like a tree, and the answer was yes, and it sold enormously.
The man in the yellow shirt has settled into the particular stillness of someone who has finished opening gifts and has not yet been asked to do anything with the boxes. His expression carries the quiet satisfaction of a father in the 1950s whose job on Christmas Day was to be present and not break anything.
The child in the foreground is face-down in the wreckage, the posture of someone who sprinted through excitement and arrived at its natural conclusion. Everything in this room was considered modern in its moment — the aluminum tree, the telescope, the thermos — and the room itself is a fairly precise inventory of what middle-class American abundance looked like the year Sputnik proved the telescope might actually get some use.
Visually related — by likeness
American Family Christmas Morning Aftermath, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-B85F20. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/american-family-christmas-morning-aftermath-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026B85F20,
title = {American Family Christmas Morning Aftermath, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-B85F20},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/american-family-christmas-morning-aftermath-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - American Family Christmas Morning Aftermath, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-B85F20 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/american-family-christmas-morning-aftermath-1950s ER -
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