Evidently, it used to be A Thing to photograph Hollywood starlets in silly holiday-themed scenarios involving oversized, seasonally appropriate props — giant jack-o-lanterns for Halloween, giant fireworks rockets for the Fourth of July, etc. And this practice was evidently A Thing for a very long time, as I’ve seen examples of it from the Silent Era up through the 1960s or thereabouts. (Barbara Eden of I Dream of Jeannie fame did a lot of these.) For today, allow me to share with you one of my favorites from this genre, featuring the lovely Mary Philbin.

Philbin was a busy actress during the 1920s and is best-known today for playing Christine in the original Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Although her career mostly ended with the coming of talking pictures, she dubbed her own voice for a special 1930 reissue of Phantom, when it was given a synchronized score, sound effects, and some limited dialog scenes. She died in 1993, at the age of 90.

I have no idea when this photo was taken, but at a guess I’d say it was around the same time she appeared in Phantom, the mid-1920s. It always makes me smile. Hope it does the same for you.

Happy Thanksgiving to my Loyal Readers everywhere!