Vintage red pickup truck drives home a message

It’s Christmastime, and you’ve got the entire holiday package wrapped up in a big, red bow:

Glittering tree

Twinkling lights

Jingling bells

Festive wreaths

Dashing reindeer

Cheerful snowmen

Angelic tree-topper

All these iconic images combine to transport us to the holiday destination of our dreams. However, Santa’s reindeer-guided sleigh may be losing its luster.

Today, an old red pickup truck is making inroads into Americans’ traditional mode of holiday transport: Picture a vintage red pickup truck emerging from the snowy evergreen woods with a freshly cut pine tree loaded into the truck bed, or fastened on top of the roof.

This commercially popular image is plastered on tree ornaments, hand towels, greeting cards, gift wrap, coffee cups, and more. You can buy miniature vintage red pickups, too. Or you can make your own from two small wooden crates, LED stick-on lights, hot glue, and of course, a coat of bright red paint.

Have you ever wondered how — and why — the image of this classic red pickup has become synonymous with Christmas? What’s the connection?

This ubiquitous pickup, with pronounced fenders, running boards, and dual round headlights, was common in the postwar era through the early 1950s. Some identify it as a 1935 Ford Model 50, or a 1939 Chevrolet Half-Ton, or possibly a 1949 Dodge B1-C-116 or 1946 Dodge WC.

During that era, pickup trucks were owned by rural Americans, farmers, veterinarians, and trades folks. No one called them “essential workers.” Their trucks were tools of their trade, used hard, repaired often, but trusted to get the job done over the long haul.

Today, 47% of Americans, including urban folks from all walks of life, own and drive pickups. A quick survey of big box parking lots and urban freeways reveals rows of pickups. Many of the over-muscled models, think Dodge Ram 3500, are considered status symbols. However, their truck beds often are empty.

In 2021, three-fourths of Christmas trees in American homes were artificial. The red pickup with a pine tree loaded in the truck bed harkens back to the days when families brought home freshly cut Christmas trees. My kids loved climbing into our old pickup to head to Ho Ho Holt’s Christmas Tree Farm near Stratford, where they hitched a ride on a tractor-drawn hayrack to the back 40 to choose a tree.

When the Holts closed their business, we made the trek to Deal’s Orchard near Jefferson, where their on-farm store offers all kinds of goodies, from Deal’s fresh apple cider, apples, candies, holiday decor, and more recently its own hard cider. “Fill your life with experiences, not things. Have stories to tell, not stuff to show.” — is the quote posted on its website.

When the original pickup truck rolled off the factory floor, most Americans lived in small towns or on farms. In 1940, 18% of Americans farmed. Only 25% had phones, and 33% had electricity. Many Americans shopped in hometown stores, or ordered from a Sears-Roebuck Wish Book catalog. The catalog featured toys, clothes, gadgets, bedspreads, Blue Willow China sets — and more!

Even if your family couldn’t afford to buy much, the arrival of the catalog was an invitation to dream. Grandparents, parents, and children alike could wish for something bigger, brighter, and better in their everyday lives.

Hallmark movies, a perennial holiday favorite, often portray small towns as an escape vehicle for Americans. When the heroine leaves the big city and ends up in a quaint town, she discovers its subtle charms. Sometimes she returns to her hometown for the first time in years, and now sees it with a different set of eyes. She might even discover the love interest she left behind.

We live in an America where 86% of us live in urban and suburban places, 75% trim artificial trees, almost 1 in 3 has an Amazon Prime membership, and SUVs account for 52% of new vehicle sales. How does this red pickup truck trend fit in?

The rustic red pickup isn’t simply a mode of transportation. It invites us on an emotional journey. “Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house we go” connects us to warm memories of home and family. Only 25% of Americans still live in their hometowns, and the image of a red pickup traveling a country road creates the possibility of a return trip to rediscover our roots.

Or, it might suggest a search for something that tumbled unnoticed out of the truck bed of our earlier lives. Only years later, we’ve recognized our enduring loss.

The vintage red truck captures a longing for simplicity, practicality, or a slower and less complicated time when we felt more grounded.

Nostalgia is a coping mechanism. It serves as an emotional buffer in times of stress, chaos, sadness, and loss. As we approach our 250th anniversary as a country, Americans are struggling with high food costs, inflation, tariffs, international conflicts and violence at home, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a chief executive whose words and actions repudiate the values passed down by generations — including those who relied on those pickups as the workhorse vehicle for their road trip to the American dream.

Is it any wonder that now, more than ever, we may be choosing to remember only a small time capsule of our Americana fever dream?

For despite the economic boom following post-World War II, life wasn’t always made of the stuff of Hallmark movies on the farms, in the small towns, and large cities of America during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Scratch below the surface, and you’d find:

· An estimated 35% of Americans living below the poverty line

· A polio epidemic ravaging families and their children

· A draft of Americans to fight across the globe, this time in the Korean War

· A resurgent Ku Klux Klan in reaction to the Civil Rights movement

Emotional journey

Bruce Hanson isn’t nostalgic for old pickups — he has the real thing: a 1947 Dodge. Hanson, a college classmate, likes to say we are graduates of the Bea Tift School of English. A decade after that earning our college degrees, I found that Bruce was combining farming with a photography/writing business. He occasionally submitted humorous poetry to me at Successful Farming. Although I haven’t seen Bruce for decades, I’ve reconnected with him and his wife, Mary Kae, through Substack.

Bruce’s old truck isn’t red. (It’s hard to imagine a firetruck-red workhorse truck.) Years ago, he penned a poem and photographed his old truck as part of a freelance assignment about auctioneering. Bruce titled it, “Sellin’ Dreams.” More recently, Bruce collaborated with a friend who lives in Hawaii who set this poem to music, and recorded the song. Bruce added his video and photographs of the truck, and the project was produced locally.

I asked Bruce if he ever planned to sell his truck at an auction, and his response articulates the old red pickup truck phenomenon better than I ever could. He wrote:

“I would never sell it. I learned to drive in that truck. Chased cows and built fence with that truck. I drove it to high school football practice. My three kids learned to drive it. My youngest son drove his bride away from the church on his wedding day in that old ‘47 Dodge.”

During the empty nest phase of our journey to Deal’s Orchard these days, my husband and I often look through the rear view mirror of our pickup with rose-colored glasses. “It’s OK to look back at the past. Just don’t stare,” I remind myself.

We also have the choice of looking through the front windshield at what’s ahead. Is it possible the vintage red pickup suggests an optimistic journey through a time portal to a New Year filled with possibilities? This commercially popular red truck sensation is, at its core, about selling a dream. It might be a dream of the past-— or possibly one for the future.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a subliminal message driving the popularity of the red truck theme: the determination to keep going, persisting, and moving forward through life’s journey, even when it’s difficult or seemingly hopeless. Maybe it’s the simple message of resilience popularized by underground artist Robert Crumb in the late 1960s: Keep on truckin’.