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TORONTO – One of Toronto’s busiest shopping corridors came alive Sunday with elves driving conveyor belts loaded with Mars bars, celebrating the clock striking midnight with a blast of Skittles and frolicking and fishing in a winter wonderland.
Curios on the Yonge Street side of Hudson’s Bay’s former flagship took over the space that department store sister firm Saks Fifth Avenue usually reserved for mannequins decked out in attractive holiday outfits. For as long as people can remember, they have been around the corner from the Queen Street Window HBC for Christmas.
This year’s scene is confectionery company Mars Canada’s way of making sure a time-honored tradition doesn’t disappear along Hudson Bay. The retailer, known as Canada’s oldest company, collapsed in the early spring and closed all of its stores by June, leaving Toronto without its famous holiday windows.
Mars decided to save the city from that fate when general manager Ellen Thompson’s team passed by the empty windows on their way to dinner.
“For the next 20 to 30 minutes, all anyone could talk about is how sad they are that the holiday tradition won’t be coming back,” she said.
“We started looking at things and saw that there were a lot of people on social media talking about how much they would miss the windows and we thought to ourselves, we could do something about this.”
Within the span of a month, Mars had not only taken advantage of landlord Cadillac Fairview’s move to rent out its windows to advertisers like Mount Sinai Health and the Aga Khan Museum, but also purchased animatronics, lights, and many other creative doodads.
“It was a very bold ambition in a very short period of time,” Thompson said.
The final product, which runs through January 2, is called Wonders of Mars. This transforms seven windows into scenes depicting a day in the lives of the company’s elves.
The first window opens on whimsical creatures beginning their day amid a pink sunrise. Bubble gum balls filled with supplies will rotate around the elves appearing to slide down ribbons of unspooled Hubba Bubba tape.
Then, the action moves to a Mars factory where chocolate is pumped through pipes and elves work levers to collect it into bars.
Other scenes show the elves going sledding, ice fishing and fighting in a snowball fight before baking a fresh batch of M&M-packed cookies.
The experience concludes with a panel inviting viewers to submit their holiday lists. For each submission, Mars will donate $1 to Food Banks Canada, up to a maximum of $15,000.
To put the visuals together, Mars got the help of Ana Fernandes, who had spent the previous two decades as HBC’s creative director of visual presentation and, before that, had worked at its defunct rival Eaton’s.
She wasn’t around when the company and its former counterparts Simpson & Morgan launched their holiday windows — believed to be in the early 1900s — but she is well-versed in her lore.
One year, a live black bear cub was said to be on the glass at the corner of Queen and Yonge streets. When the spectacle caused a traffic jam, the police intervened.
More recently, Mariah Carey was on hand to unveil the album in 2016, reportedly being paid $1 million to play two tunes.
Fernandes had a hand in all the windows created over the past 20 years, including HBC’s recent Santa Factory-themed displays. Surrounded by nutcrackers, he showed a computer showing a list of people writing letters to Santa and rotated robotic arms packaging candy canes.
In other years, her windows took visitors to a forest, where geese danced with wreaths around their necks and bears frolicked in the snow, and to an old-time village where HBC-striped animatronics played carols, decorated Christmas trees and tended Santa’s sleigh and reindeer.
After HBC closed, Fernandes never thought she would be designing holiday windows this year, so the call from Mars surprised her.
“I was so excited,” she said. “First thing, I called every kid and told them, ‘Hey, I’m back.'”
Fernandes usually spent the entire year planning holidays. The load-in alone could take a month and before anything was presented to the public, it had to sit behind a window cover for at least a week to ensure that the mechanical components could last the entire season without any failure.
As soon as one year’s performance is over, she starts the next year’s performance, but Mars is not able to move forward that much on its own.
When asked by Thompson if Mars would make the windows a tradition, he said, “Considering we only started thinking about it a month ago, I think we’re very focused on making sure we can execute beautiful windows for this year.”
“Then, I guess, we’ll see from there. A lot can change.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 14, 2025.