Celebrating the Holidays at Special Collections

The purpose of The Compass Rose is to raise awareness of Special Collections' resources and to foster the use of these resources. The blog series also reports significant new programs, initiatives, and acquisitions of Special Collections. 

In celebration of the season, Special Collections at the University of Texas at Arlington is highlighting some of its holiday-themed items.

UTA Libraries’ Digital Gallery has over 76,000 images in its collections. Browse the photographs by category or use the search function to find a more specific image. The images below, which represent the lyrics of the “12 Days of Christmas,” can all be found on the Digital Gallery.

While books compose the largest portion of the holdings in Special Collections, we also have a wide variety of materials in other formats, including music, maps, graphics, ephemera, archival material, and oral histories. This collection of Christmas carols was published circa 1941 by the Triangle Creamery in Vernon, Texas.

This item, Forget-Me-Not: A Gift for 1846, is an example of a gift book, a common holiday present in the 19^th century. The first gift book appeared in the 1820s, about 20 years before the first known printed Christmas card. Also known as literary annuals or keepsakes, gift books were famous for their elaborate, often gold-tooled bindings and colorful steel engravings. They were compilations of recently published short stories and poems by some of the most famous authors of the era, such as Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lord Byron. Notably, many of these works were also edited by women authors such as Sarah Hale, Lydia Marie Child, and Lydia Sigourney, who, although less well-known than the aforementioned authors, were all successful writers in their era.

Neiman Marcus has been headquartered in Dallas since 1907, when the first store was opened by owners Herbert Marcus, Sr., his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman, and her husband A. L. Neiman. Beginning in 1939, the luxury department store published an annual Christmas catalog. Since the 1950s, the “Christmas Book” has offered unusual and expensive purchases, some of the most interesting of which were advertised as “his and her” gifts. Special Collections has issues of the Christmas Book from the 1960s through the 1990s. Throughout the years, Neiman Marcus has offered his and her bathtubs (1966), his and her camels (1967), his and her Jaguar cars (1968), a baby elephant (1969), his and her custom mannequins (1972), an elaborate mousetrap (1974), and original letters penned by Martha Washington (1975). The future of the Christmas Book is unknown, however, because the company filed for bankruptcy in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Special Collections has many rare and unusual items, including Thomas Heywood’s 1635 work The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells. Although not strictly holiday-related, it contains many beautiful engravings of the orders of angels, which Heywood describes at length in the text.

Lastly, here are the covers of three books that describe Christmas, Texas-style: Elizabeth Dearing Morgan’s Texas Christmas: as celebrated under six flags (1995), A. C. Greene’s Christmas Memories (1996), and Leon A. Harris’s The night before Christmas in Texas, that is (1986).

UTA Libraries and Special Collections wishes you a safe and happy holiday!