Kodaks of Christmas past

Without wishing to cheapen Christmas, we all know that shopping is a big part of it, selecting the right gift for your loved ones, and of course companies and manufacturers know it too.

Within the National Science and Media Museum’s collection is an archive of original Kodak Christmas advertisements encouraging people to buy their cameras and projectors to record the festivities.

As you might imagine, the ads focus heavily on Christmas as a family time and encourage parents to use Kodak gifts to record and rewatch Christmases to build up their own image memory bank and to create new traditions such as ‘watching Cine-Kodak movies on Christmas Eve/Christmas Night’.

Whether that tradition ever caught on or not is debatable, but it is certain that throughout the 20th century Kodak were extremely successful and many people would have received Kodak cameras in their stockings.

Here’s a selection of ads spanning the 1920s to the 1960s, some aimed at women instructing them to buy cameras for their husbands, some outlining the fun Kodak projectors can bring to a Christmas party and one which is inspired by Robert Burns’ To a Louse (On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet, at Church) with what can only be described as a rather stereotypical image of a Scottish man…

Happy Christmas!