Category: In The News

Jennifer Fickley-Baker (A&S ’01) fondly remembers the adorned Kaufmann’s holiday windows she saw as a Pitt undergraduate.

In her second novel, Fickley-Baker, a Florida-based public relations professional by day and writer by night, revives this spirit through Stella West, a young saleswoman at a prominent downtown department store. 

There is a place where animatronic penguins waddle next to an igloo and wildlife frolics with Santa on a snowy slope, in a bygone world of department store windows decorated for Christmas.

If only you could go back and jump in.

Author Jennifer Fickley-Baker transports readers through time to the holidays of 1942, when department stores in Downtown Pittsburgh reigned, in her recently released novella, “26 Ways to Come Home for the Holidays” (Foxburg & Stern Books, $9.99) 

A rom-com with a strong female main character, the book’s fictional Stella West is the first head of holidays for Hanover’s department store. Stella orchestrates the chaos in quickly creating 26 holiday windows at Hanover’s, inspired by the former Kaufmann’s at 434 Fifth Ave., now Kaufmann’s Apartments.

Jennifer Fickley-Baker grew up in Baldwin in a close-knit family. She remembers oddball phrases older family members used that evoked a different era, particularly a grandfather who would go on about whippersnappers, fuddy-duddys, and doohickeys.

“My grandfather talked like that all the time,” says Fickley-Baker, the author (under the pen name Jennifer Joy) of 26 Ways to Come Home for the Holidays. “That was how he talked all the time: ‘Oh, run to the garage and get me one of those doohickeys,’ like, you had to know exactly what he was talking about.

26 Ways to Come Home for the Holidays — released in October by Foxburg & Stern Books — serves as both an homage to Fickley-Baker’s family and a remembrance of Pittsburgh Christmases past. Set during Thanksgiving 1942, the book follows lead character Stella West, an employee at the Hanover Department Store in Downtown Pittsburgh. Stella faces a crisis when the store’s lead window designer suddenly departs, leaving 26 holiday window displays unfinished.

What was your inspiration for this book?

Pittsburgh was the inspiration! The city itself and the memories so many of us who grew up there have of going downtown and experiencing the Christmas season, the holiday windows, the lights and so much more. I loved Christmas when I was little and can remember getting so excited when the first lights would go up. That’s when the holiday season started for me.