Move over, Beanie Babies. Hit the road, Hot Wheels. You won’t find either at Ferris Wheel Antiques, a place that owner Michelle Ferris calls one of the only “true antique stores in Topeka.”

It’s a strategy that has worked well for Ferris and her husband Ronnie, who are celebrating their 20th year of operating Ferris Wheel in 2023. The Topeka store, which was built from scratch in 2003, wasn’t exactly some-thing the couple planned, Ferris says. Like so many wonderful life events, “it just happened.”

“It wasn’t something we planned on,” Ferris explains, adding that Ronnie is a buyer and seller of petroliana. “When his buyers didn’t buy as much, we decided we had enough to open a store… We just jumped in with both feet to see what would happen, and it worked.”

The couple decided they wanted to deal exclusively in antiques, opting to stay away from the junk one might find in other stores.
Also joining Ferris and Ronnie as fixtures in the store were their young daughters, ages 5 and 1.

“Somehow I ran a store with a 1-year-old. I don’t know how,” Ferris says, laughing. “Our girls basically grew up in the store, and our clients have seen them. Our girls would drive wagons and pedal cars around the store. It was like Romper Room.”

As their girls grew, so did the store’s physical space (Ferris Wheel began with just one building with 3,200 square feet of space and later would expand to its square footage of more than 6,000). Word-of-mouth promotion of the antique store in town that had lots of petrol-related collectibles spread as well. Visitors would discover a steady inventory of prim-itives, early Americana, and antique books, too.

Ferris says you won’t find any items more recent than the 1960s throughout the store’s shelves.
Over the past two decades, Ferris says she and Ronnie have amassed a following of customers who have become like family. And since they don’t have any hired staff to speak of – the Ferrises are at the cash register six days each week – they’ll be the ones you meet when you come in.

“We’re the fun place to shop,” Ferris says, “and we are the faces of the store. We could not have done any of that without customers, friends, and colleagues. We try to make our store feel like home. These customers we have are extended family. We’ve made friendships that will last a lifetime. My customers know that.”

Those customers, Ferris says, likely would describe her store using the three words “family,” “friends” and “fun,” while Ronnie adds that he believes they would use the words “traditional,” “quality” and “unique.”
Throughout the years, trends in buying antiques have come and gone, and Ferris says one of the biggest keys to her store’s success is that she always tries to follow them closely.

“We’ve seen cycles go up and down, trends come and go,” she notes, adding that younger buyers are increas-ingly repurposing antiques. “The younger generation now isn’t really into investing a lot of money in antiques, but the ones who come in now may have creative ways to use antiques and repurpose them, much more so now than 20 years ago.”

You might have pledged allegiance to the American flag every morning in elementary school, but do you know the story behind the holiday that bears its name?

Flag Day falls on June 14 of every year, just three weeks shy of Independence Day. In 1777, the Continental Congress of the United States adopted a resolution stating that the flag of the United States “should be of 13 stripes of alternate red and white, with a union of 13 stars of white in a blue field, representing the new constellation.” The 13 stars and stripes, of course, represented the 13 original colonies.

According to the U.S. Veterans Administration, the flag “was first carried into battle on Sept. 11, 1777, in the battle of the Brandywine,” but the claim of organizing the first official observance of Flag Day has been made by many institutions and on many dates. The first, the VA states, was during a celebration in Hartford, Conn., in 1861.

“In the late 1800s, schools all over the United States held Flag Day programs to contribute to the Americanization of immigrant children, and the observance caught on with individual committees,” the VA website states.

Generally, the first official Flag Day is recognized as having originated in New York in 1889, when a teacher of a free kindergarten sponsored ceremonies to observe the congressional resolution’s anniversary. Only a few years later, in 1897, New York’s governor “ordered the displaying of flags over all public buildings in the state,” the website reads. Other claims to the first Flag Day observance come from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge issued proclamations asking for June 14 to be observed as National Flag Day,” according to the VA website, “but it wasn’t until Aug. 3, 1949, that Congress approved the national observance and President Harry Truman signed it into law.”

Run! Run!
As fast as you can.
You can’t catch me,
I’m the gingerbread man!

The late author Jamie Gilson’s famous rhyme about this cute confection has been recited in elementary schools since its publication in 1981, but Christmas revelers with a sweet tooth have been eating gingerbread men for centuries.

Gingerbread

Gingerbread started as small cakes with honey – they didn’t contain ginger and they weren’t considered a type of bread. Historians believe the honeycakes were invented by the ancient Greeks or Romans, according to a Dec. 22, 2018, article on Time.com. A recipe for “gingerbread” in a 15th-century English cookbook had a chewy consistency, not unlike toffee. The recipe read, in part: “Take a quart of honey and seethe it and skin it clean. Rake saffron and powdered pepper and throw them on the honey. Take grated bread and moisten it. Combine honey with spices. Add cinnamon and cloves and make them into squares. If you want it to be red, color it with red sandalwood.”

Cookies in little men's shapes

The cookies have been shaped like little men since the reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I in the 1500s. The queen had in her employ a royal gingerbread maker, who baked the cookies meant to represent members of Queen Elizabeth’s court. He then served the cookies at Her Majesty’s elaborate royal dinners. By the end of the century, bakers began using sugar in gingerbread instead of honey.
According to the Time article, around the same time, some who practiced folk medicine gave out cookies to young ladies in their village.
“If they could get the man of their choice to eat the gingerbread man that had been made for them, the idea was the man would then fall in love with the young woman,” Carole Levin, a historian with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, says in the article.

According to another historian, Michael Krondl, gingerbread began to be associated with the Christmas season because of the belief that the cookie’s spices heat you up throughout the winter months.

By the 1700s, bakers began to add butter and cream to gingerbread recipes, and thus, the cookie started to resemble the gingerbread we know and love today.

The Christmas season

The Christmas season is a feast for the senses – watching the twinkle of colored light displays, the sound of tearing open wrapped gifts, and the smell and feel of a freshly decorated fir. And one affordable collectible helps bring the taste of Christmas to every kitchen – cookie cutters.

The tool found in every baker’s arsenal can be traced back roughly 700 years, to the 1400s, when they were invented in Italy and known as “imprint cutters.” Like many Christmas traditions, the imprint cutter evolved to become used widely in Germany and Holland, where housewives used them during the Christmas holiday to bake cookies in the shapes of doves, eagles, and human figures, according to Collectors Weekly. Those earliest cookie cutters were made of wood.

When they immigrated to the New World, those same German settlers who worked as tinsmiths crafted cutters made of cheap tin, and the shapes in which they were produced now included stars, spades, and hearts, as well as reindeer and clowns.

“Old tin can be identified from modern metals as it is relatively heavy and thick, usually darkened in color. These cutters make 3/4-inch to 1 1/8-inch-deep cuts,” according to Collectors Weekly. “The back of antique cutters are flat and may or may not have strap handles. Because tinsmiths tried to conserve every possible inch of metal they could, older backs are more or less cut to the shape of the cutting edge. These also have ‘air holes’ or ‘push holes,’ which helped detach the cookie dough from the cutter.”

Cookie cutters

Those cookie cutters made for the Christmas season were also made to be decorative, writes collector Kate Miller-Wilson for the antique blog Love to Know.

“As the idea of Christmas cookies spread throughout the Colonies, tinsmiths created Christmas-themed cutters that created cookies meant to be hung on Christmas trees. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the tradition of leaving cookies for Santa was established,” Miller-Wilson writes. ”Antique Christmas cookie cutters vary in value from a few dollars to over $100. In addition to the condition and age of the cookie cutter, size can also play a role in the value. For example, an extra-large, German-made Santa cookie cutter sold for about $80.”

Metal cookie cutters made in the 19th century can be found in antique stores and online – they were easily mass-produced, thanks to technological innovations made during the Industrial Revolution. These cookie cutters had handles made of metal or wood.
Aluminum cutters began to be produced around the turn of the century, with the most common coming from the 1930s.
“Metal cookie cutters with ‘bullet’ handles are especially sought after by collectors,” Collectors Weekly states. “In general, figurals like chickens and elephants tend to be more valuable than geometric shapes.”

These cutters weren’t just for cookies, however; in the early 20th century, they were made in the shapes of diamonds, hearts, spades, and diamonds – the four suites of playing cards – and made for sandwiches served at poker or bridge games.