The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Every holiday season since 1963, a baroque, fairy-tale-inspired display has been assembled on the eighth floor of the original Dayton’s store in downtown Minneapolis, a tradition that began as the Dayton family’s annual “gift to the community.” But earlier this year, when Federated Department Stores became the new parent company of Marshall Field’s and vowed to convert the Nicollet Mall institution into a Macy’s, ugly rumors began circulating about the auditorium show’s inevitable demise. Bloggers and men-on-the-street put its life expectancy at two years; thereafter, they reckoned, the tradition would become so much pixie dust in the memories of generations of Minnesotans.

Department store flacks, however, insist the show will go on—and if history is any indication, their assertions can be believed. Ownership of the store many still stubbornly call “Dayton’s” has changed hands seven times since that first holiday show in the auditorium, and yet insiders and stalwart pilgrims alike claim that it has changed very little over the years. If anything, it has only become more lavish. The scale of the spectacle has increased dramatically since the early days, while technological advancements have made possible stop-motion animation and all manner of smoke-and-mirror wizardry.

The early auditorium shows were an outgrowth of Dayton’s mid-century window displays (which were themselves part of a much older tradition dating back to nineteenth-century Europe), and were based on themes like “Santa’s Enchanted Forest” and “Christmas with the Animals”—static narratives that were purely set pieces for the designers. In 1969, however, the auditorium was transformed into Never Never Land for a show inspired by Peter Pan, and that seems to have launched the enduring trend of bringing to life fairy tales and other storybook classics. In the 1970s the store staged shows based on The Nutcracker, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Babes in Toyland. Productions in the intervening years have included Alice in Wonderland, Pippi Longstocking,

The Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz, and The Twelve Days of Christmas, as well as a couple of more mercenary shows inspired by Santabear, Dayton’s collectible stuffed toy.

The Harry Potter-themed exhibit, in 2000, was considered a coup. Designers worked closely with Warner Bros. to emulate the look and feel of the as-yet-unreleased first film in the blockbuster saga. For the most part, though, the show’s creators have traditionally worked with classic children’s tales, usually material in the public domain, and they have been careful to eschew the sort of showy aesthetics most commonly associated with Disney. Instead, the show’s designers have relied on fine art illustrators to define the look, while allowing a bit of wiggle room to inject some of their own style and sensibilities. For example, last year’s Snow White resembled Audrey Hepburn and carried a Louis Vuitton handbag.

This year’s sparkly, pink, and rigorously floral Cinderella exhibition features seventeen scenes, over the course of which the lead character is rendered in shadow puppets, pencil drawings, and statuettes. On an early visit, a poker-faced, thirty-something man was observed crying out “Cool!” as the fairy godmother turned a pumpkin into Cinderella’s carriage—with fiber optics!

That’s a bit more flash than many of us encountered on our initial visits to the annual eighth-floor wonderland, as wee things clinging to the hands of our parents. Yet year after year, something about these displays always manages to conjure some of the same magic we felt back then, shuffling wide-eyed through that maze of bright lights and animatronic dreams. And even today you’ll still see everybody from young families to older couples and gaggles of teenagers standing in a queue that often stretches all the way down to the elevators—proof that the Dayton family’s gift has helped to define many of our notions of what a Minneapolis holiday, not to mention a downtown department store, should be.