Easter Greetings!

What are some of your Easter memories? I remember...

 

There was almost always a new spring dress for Easter, and new strap Sunday shoes, purchased after a deadly dull trip downtown to look at only clothes and shoes. I hated the early skirts of my childhood, which were stiffened with starched tulle slips and itched abominably. New Sunday shoes hurt, too. Had I grown over the year I would also get a new Easter hat, usually along the line of an old-fashioned bonnet or straw boater, with flowers on it (how annoying that awful elastic band that kept it firmly anchored to your head, but irritated the skin in the fold between your head and your neck!), and a new spring coat in a suitably spring color: pale yellow, pink, pale blue, and the most memorable one, a woven fabric of spring green, with saucer-like buttons down the front (see photo below from May 1967, I am eleven).

 

Mom would have baked Easter goodies: perhaps some wine biscuits for me, but more "spring" type baked goods: egg biscuits, finished with a light sugar glaze and sprinkles on top; almond bars for dad. She would also make a rice pie, which was, as you might guess, made with rice, with sugar and eggs. No top crust; it looked like a custard pie.

 

On Good Friday she would shut the TV off from noon to three, the hours Jesus was on the cross, and say her rosary and read the Bible. I was expected to be quiet, too, and occupied myself perhaps with reading my children's Bible, or coloring quietly, later just reading.

 

At the grocery store earlier she would have bought all the goodies for Easter dinner: a very small Virginia brown sugar ham, some potatoes, some type of vegetable, and we had the rice pie or the cookies for dessert. We might have already watched some religious films on TV: Barabbas with Anthony Quinn, or The Robe, and there would be just some generic Catholic films on as well, like Sally and Saint Anne, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, Song of Bernadette, Going My Way. Our Easter lily, in a ceramic pot wrapped with pastel colored foil, sat on the front steps, and we still had the vase of pussy willows Uncle Guido brought us every spring sitting on the kitchen table.

 

Sunday began with 10:15 Mass, upstairs, a High Mass, which meant we could sing along with the choir, but it wouldn't do much good as we would have been drowned out. There were usually three priests officiating, Father Bernasconi as the main celebrant, and the scent of incense drowning out anything else, from the big waxy-white Easter lilies with their pale yellow throats on the altar to the lily and carnation corsages our mothers wore. All the responses were sung, so High Mass took a while, and since you'd been fasting since you woke up, so you could receive Communion, everyone would be very hungry once Mass let out at 11:30. You had to file out decorously, shaking hands with Father on the way out—and then bunches of people made tracks to Solitro's Bakery, one block down, to pick up some pastry for the afternoon. The line would snake out the front door and down the street. Everyone else was in the parking lot, waiting in or near their car, for the people in front of them to quit hugging and kissing friends and get in their cars to go home.

 

Easter dinner was at noon or thereafter: the sweet, succulent ham, warmed up in the oven with brown sugar and canned pineapple in juice, the potatoes, the veg. As on all Sundays, we would probably go for "a ride" after dinner: this was usually up to Diamond Hill or down to Oakland Beach, or out to Scituate and drive around the reservoir, but on Easter Sunday we joined the long, long lines going through the big black iron gates at the entrance to Roger Williams Park on Elmwood Avenue to take photos with the new beds of colorful tulips and hyacinths and crocuses, a riot of scarlet and saffron, lilac and orange, lavender and white, or else to the Japanese garden if the weather had been warm enough—alas, there were Easter Sundays, especially in March, where we went to church in winter coats and clothes—and the flowering trees were in bloom, branches snowy in white or looking like cotton candy in pink. Sometimes we would also walk in the zoo and pet the farm animals, still shaggy with winter coats.

 

Then about 4 or later, it was off to Papà's house where Aunty Margaret had fragrant coffee waiting along with her nicely decorated trays of cookies: more egg biscuits, some of them finished with sparkly silver dragées; the inevitable little torrone pieces in their colorful boxes; struffoli basted in honey and sprinkled with tiny multicolor candy periods, and wandi doused in confectioners' sugar (the latter two probably ordered beforehand from a bakery, as they were time-consuming to make); and even Easter-colored wrapper Hershey's kisses. Even with all this bounty, someone had evidently gone earlier to one of the numerous bakeries in the Silver Lake neighborhood like Crugnale's or Scialo's and there were pastries: lemon squares, sfogliatelles, cannoli, New Yorkers... Oh, and pizza strips! I called it "bakery pizza," and every Italian bakery had them: rectangular pans with pizza crust covered in pizza sauce. No cheese, just goodness.

 

When we got home there was this year's Easter basket to look forward to. We did not dye eggs in our house. Nobody ate hard-boiled eggs and they would have had to be thrown out; as teens in the Depression and conserving food during the second World War, my parents refused to waste food. I usually got an Easter basket Mom had put together. I wasn't allowed jelly beans or Peeps (nothing pure sugar, and I disliked them anyway), but there was the nice basket; Easter grass for a colorful bedding (the basket and the grass were stored in the attic and used year after year); a few plastic eggs with faux gold coins in them; usually a new stuffed Easter bunny, each year in a different color: white, pink, pale blue—the bunnies stopped when I was twelve and finally received my favorite one, a brown-and-white rabbit that looked almost like the real thing; I named him Harold J. Rabbit, "Hoppy" for short); small solid-chocolate eggs with colorful foil wrappers that I carefully removed, flattened, and used to make Christmas ornaments from; and of course a big Peter Rabbit, a hollow chocolate Easter bunny. This I would nibble on successive days during the week, from the tail to the ears, until it was all gone.

Third Sunday of Advent: Hygge and Hard Drives

Our original plan for today: go to McKay's in Chattanooga and then eat at City Café. I love going up to McKay's before Christmas; they have the Christmas CDs and Christmas books right out and easy to find. And City Café has a brilliant chicken soup that they put broken-up spaghetti in instead of noodles. Every Italian kid remembers his mother doing this for a quick supper. It's like suddenly going back in time: to grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles speaking Italian (I miss people speaking Italian), and torrone squares in with the Christmas cookies, which weren't sugar cookies with thick colored frosting or gingerbread boys, but almond bars and molasses bars and wine biscuits and pizelle, and even hard fruit-flavored Italian candies in the candy dishes, and always a dish of nuts in the shell.

But it was supposed to start raining in Chattanooga by 10 a.m. and in Atlanta by two. The power chair isn't supposed to travel in the rain, and you can't carry cardboard Xerox paper boxes in a pickup truck's truck bed in the rain. Life happens and rain happens. I've driven home from Chattanooga in the rain, chair or no chair. It's not pretty.

We spent part of the morning swearing because yesterday we'd pretty much had to wedge the new hard drive into James' old computer (everything is riveted in) and since it didn't work, we now had to take the new hard drive out, and the old hard drive, too, to get the files off it. It took James about a half hour, and I had to use a wrench to bang part of the strip of housing that was holding the enclosure with the hard drives in it so it would come out (and he still had trouble). But he got the old drive out, put it into the enclosure, and prepared to copy the files off.

The old disk was completely blank. The update hadn't corrupted Windows, it had wiped everything!

James had done a backup of his main drive to a portable disk in June, so we were able to extract his Eudora mailboxes from that. I turned on the Christmas tree and the Christmas village and put more Christmas cassettes on and we had Christmas hygge as he loaded Eudora and WordPerfect and Paint Shop Pro and other necessary programs, and we restored his mailboxes. We even cleaned out the spinner full of program discs on the top shelf of his computer desk. We found some relics up there, including some disc that could be booted in DOS and a WindowsXP operating disc! He threw out old stuff, kept discs of images, e-books, and manuscripts, and kept any games he was still interested in. The next step will be to see if all the games (mostly military, a few fantasy and some arcade) still open in Win10, and if they don't, if compatibility mode will make them work.

For supper we had half of the four-pound pork loin I found at Kroger, slow cooked in barbecue sauce, with a cucumber salad chaser. It was delicious, and there's leftovers for lunch for both of us.

To finish out the night, we watched the live performance of the Broadway play version of A Christmas Story. It was super, especially the little boy—Andy Walken—who played Ralphie. What a voice on that child! He made it all real. Interesting bits added to the story, like about Schwartz being Jewish (he isn't in the movie and apparently the Hanukkah scene was written for the television production), Miss Shields having OCD, etc. I loved how they worked adult Ralphie, played by Matthew Broderick, and his narration into the action, and really adored the songs "Counting Down to Christmas" and "Just Like That" (also nodded vigorously to "What a Mother Does"!). But what brought down the house for me was the ending narration provided by Broderick, about how sometimes parents didn't say they loved you, but they worked for you and nagged you and kept you safe, which was the same thing. It made me cry. Thinking about it still makes me cry.

And the Bumpus hounds were played by rescue dogs to boot!

A Real Thanksgiving Treasure

Audiences loved 1972's The House Without a Christmas Tree enough that a sequel was made for Thanksgiving of 1973.

The original special was based on the childhood memories of Gail Rock, a Nebraska native who later worked in Hollywood. For this sequel, Rock also drew on her Nebraska schooldays, but star Lisa Lucas added something to the mix. She reportedly asked Rock if she could add a horse to the story, and that's how the pinto horse, the titular Treasure who combines with the story to make a double meaning, was included in the mix.

Addie Mills is a bright and artistic 11-year-old with dreams of becoming "a painter and living in Paris" growing up in 1947 Nebraska with her dour widowed father and supportive grandmother. Her mother died when she was just a few months old, leaving her father withdrawn and embittered. Things had come to a head the previous Christmas, told in The House Without a Christmas Tree, and father James' character is just beginning to thaw in this outing. But he won't thaw to crusty curmudgeon Walter Rhenquist, an elderly farmer who owes him money for digging a pond. The pond, states Rhenquist, leaks. Of course, retorts James, I told you that you chose the wrong place for it.

In the meantime Addie, along with taking part in a radio play about the first Thanksgiving and using her talents on a mural of the event at school, is absorbing some of the real meaning of the holiday. She broaches inviting Rhenquist to Thanksgiving dinner, with the predicted response from her father, and ends up hiding away leftovers and biking them out to the old codger. While he also initially responds with hostility, Addie's charm and her best pal Cora Sue's quirky honesty wins him over. Eventually he allows Addie to ride and groom his horse and, although he calls her bossy, becomes friends with her.

Like its predecessor, Thanksgiving Treasure tells a very low-key story, one of real people rather than fantastically handsome/beautiful folks in big apartments with lots of expensive clothes, or comic idiots. Sadly, in a cost-cutting measure, CBS filmed all the Addie Mills stories on soap-opera quality videotape, which gives them a very cheap look. Conversely, it gives the stories a reality-TV quality, as if you are peeking into the life of a child in 1947.

To me these peeks bring back so many childhood memories that it seems there are two nostalgia factors, the show itself and the life it reminds me of. I knew very few "new" homes back then. Our 1951 Cape Cod, my Confirmation godmother's home, and my Uncle Nicky's house were three of the newest homes I knew. All of my other relatives lived in older homes, with furnishings and decorations that harked back to Addie's era or earlier. Several of my D'Ambra relatives lived in the old company homes for the Cranston Print Works ("the Village"), built much earlier in the century. My godmother's home was built in the mid-1920s and my friend Penny's house appeared to be from the 1930s. My dad's childhood home dated from the turn of the century, as did the triple-decker that my aunts lived in, made with the kitchens bigger than the "parlour" that was only used for best or for television. My Maccarone cousins lived in a home that had been a wealthy man's showplace years earlier.

So when I look into Addie's home I see familiar things: beadboard in the kitchen, and the big black cookstove with the stovepipe that goes into the wall, the vintage wallpaper in the living room and the homey knicknacks, Grandma's wringer washer (almost everyone had one still tucked away in the basement for when the automatic washer didn't work) and James' stand ashtray. It brings me back to old-fashioned candle fixtures, metal kitchen cabinets, worn paisley-patterned wallpaper on stairwells with dark marks from years of hands touching it, Bakelite radios and treadle sewing machines and iceboxes pushed away in corners, lopsided sofas, traditional Morris chairs, Christmas trees still hung with lead tinsel and World War II-vintage clear Christmas ornaments paired with newfangled bubble lights, stark iron radiators with valves that needed periodic bleeding, glass paneled doors with glass doorknobs, stoves with warming shelves and hot water tanks, linoleum floors, braided rugs on hardwood floors that need refinishing, all overlaid with the faint scent of baking, coffee, and furniture polish. Warm smells and memories of family gatherings at Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving: hot coffee, steaming macaroni with homemade "gravy," freshly-baked apple pies, chatter, warmth...home. In the end it's why Addie is not just a friend I visit with each year, but part of a family I remember and rejoin each year, if, as the song says "only in my dreams."

Rudolph Day, July 2009

The purpose of Rudolph Day is to keep the Christmas spirit all year long. One can prepare Christmas gifts or crafts, watch a Christmas movie, play Christmas music, or read a Christmas book.

For our July edition, it's time for "Christmas in July"! Cool down with these:

Hey! Remember Glass Wax stencils? I used to do this every year with our front window, including reusing the reindeer stencil four times to get all eight tiny reindeer and the camel and wise man stencils to get all three of them. The stencils would get soaked and limp if you used them more than once, so you did one reindeer pair, then did other stencils, then another reindeer pair once the stencil had dried a little, and so on.

Read a 92-year-old book by George McKnight about St. Nicholas: His Legend and His Role in the Christmas Celebration and Other Popular Customs (here's a flip book version, too).

Remember the first animated Christmas special ever made for television? Nope, it wasn't A Charlie Brown Christmas, or even the stop-motion animation of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It was, in fact, the 1962 Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, which was scored by two Broadway veteran songwriters, and adapted directly from Dickens' tale, with a delightful framing sequence that has the nearsighted Magoo as an egotistical actor playing Ebenezer Scrooge in a Broadway play (with a great song about Broadway to boot). Now there's a book about the making of this special by Darrell Van Citters that's a delight as well, telling how the idea of the special came about, how it was made almost "in tandem" with UPA's Gay Purr-ee, and of the changes that were made to the story to fit it into a 52-minute timeslot. So if you've ever wondered if the scenes with Scrooge's nephew Fred, with Ignorance and Want, and with Belle and her husband were ever included in the original teleplay, you'll find out here. (The one mystery about the story that everyone asks about, why the Spirit of Christmas Present came first, is sadly not solved; in the original script the ghosts were in the proper order.) There are also nice tidbits about the actors—I didn't know Paul Frees' death was actually a suicide!—and the production (the original sponsor was Timex, and the minute the author mentioned the commercials I could remember them). If you are as big a fan of the story as I am, you will want to order it directly from the Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol site. If you are interested, but not fanatic, it is supposed to be available for general release, i.e. Amazon.com and the like, in the fall.

This site about producer Abe Levitow also has a page and some clips from the Carol.

Rudolph Day, June 2009

The purpose of Rudolph Day is to keep the Christmas spirit all year long. One can prepare Christmas gifts or crafts, watch a Christmas movie, play Christmas music, or read a Christmas book.

It's now six months until Christmas!

For our June edition, let's go back to the 1950s and some great black and white video from YouTube!

1950 movie theatre Christmas ads

More vintage movie theatre Christmas ads

Movie theatre Christmas films: Christmas 1955 and New Years 1952

Newsreel of London at Christmastime, 1953 (silent)

Santa Claus' Story, a tale about monkeys celebrating Christmas!

Santa Claus' quiz show, another odd movie short

"A Christmas Dream"

1950s Christmas photos done to "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (strange music choice!)

There are still those among us who were there Sunday afternoon, December 6, 1964, watching a new Christmas treat which we did not know would become a holiday classic. On that Sunday, in place of their weekly university competition, College Bowl, General Electric presented their "Fantasy Hour" featuring the stop-motion tale of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. If you are a Rudolph fan, Rick Goldschmidt's The Making of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a must, a slim volume chock-full of "Rudolphy" tidbits. Goldschmidt goes all the way back to the early days of the partnership of Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass and describes the production of the story, and the volume is filled with one-of-a-kind photos of the production staff, including the Japanese studio where the stop-motion animation was done. A big treat is the inclusion of Romeo Muller's original script, where you can see all sorts of things changed: Sam the snowman originally as a different type of character, a "maternity" seal, Donner being injured, and a different ending for the "Bumble" among them. Enjoy!

Old Times

I bought a feather tree today!

I brought some of my mom's old ornaments home last year; not many, because I incorporated most of them into gift display bottles, one for me and the others for my cousins who always helped my mom with her Christmas decorations. I had three of the old 1950s glass ornaments left, plus a red plastic boot, two plastic Santas, and four snowmen. Then I had a couple of ornaments I had made when I was younger, which my mom always included on her tree. I wanted some way to display them, and they really didn't fit on our tree (physically, not theme-wise or anything).

I remembered that about a year ago I had parked in downtown Marietta one day and walked around to the various stores. "Way back when" the stores had been for shoes and clothing, or hardware, and had included banks and other businesses. Now they are selling antiques or food or are little boutiques and specialty stores. I had visited one antiques store where the woman sold various size feather trees in a back room.

Anyway, after paying a holiday visit to the hobby shop, we came home by downtown and just providentially found someone pulling out of a parking space. Downtown was mobbed, because in the square they had a Santa Claus and there were several dozen children in line to see him. Later we did walk around the park and absorb a nice draft of Christmas spirit, but first we walked down to the store I remembered.

Apparently she has quit having a feather tree area (it's taken over by rugs), but she had one feather tree left! I brought it home and decorated it with Mom's old ornaments, two homemade ornaments someone had given me, and the gilded walnuts I had made back when we were first married and our tree wasn't as full of ornaments.

It doesn't quite look antique, but it looks like a feather tree should, decorated simply with treasured ornaments. At some point I'll probably make or buy a bead garland for it, maybe an antique-y-type star for the top.

The Scent of Christmas

I've got three cookie sheets of wine biscuits cooling on the stove and the house smells like Christmas. There's only about 45 of them, but I'm the only one that likes them around here; they'll last a month and be a brief reminder of childhood holidays.

Mom and I baked cookies every year: not just wine biscuits, but almond bars and molasses cookies and butterballs (I think they call them Danish wedding cookies in the bakeries: flour, butter, a little vanilla, sugar, chopped nuts, rolled into little balls, coated in confectioners' sugar). Most would go in bowls on the stairway to be brought out for company or on Christmas afternoon, but she'd always arrange an assortment for friends and family who didn't already bake them (my godmother, Sherrye's parents, Cindy's parents) in a paper plate with red and green and silver-wrapped Hershey's kisses scattered among them.

If you went to my aunts' homes you saw the same thing, except on large platters, sometimes with wandis (which are fiendishly difficult to make) and jam-center cookies. Scattered with the Hershey's kisses would be the little boxes of torrone, with their bright scenes of the Italian countryside, and they would be all wrapped in cellphane with a big bow in the center.

I used Mom's baking bowl, which now has a hallowed place in the china cabinet, and thought of her as I kneaded. The recipe (top of page) is her own adaptation, I think of my Grandma Lanzi's. She cut down on the sugar, of course. To this day I don't like sugary things; I don't even like raisins because they're too sweet. They aren't quite the same without Papá Lanzi's homemade red wine; it was very strong and gave the cookies a vivid flavor. I use Gallo's hearty burgundy, but it's only a fair substitute.

Daddy used to dip them into coffee, and then cocoa after he quit drinking coffee. I just liked them straight, sitting cross-legged under the Christmas tree writing yet another story and watching something like Charlie Brown Christmas or Rudolph or The Homecoming. Those were nice times.

"The Meteorology of Love"

I saw this after I bought my Christmas card stamps today.

Every Christmas,
as my mailbox
is snowed in
with cards,
I shovel aside
the expected,
keep looking
for the friends
who don't write;
who've moved, don't
forward their mail,
or stop
sending cards;
somehow become lost.

My husband says
to think of the cards
I do receive;
Kodaks of plum-
cheeked babies,
long, long letters;
to think of the friendships
that last, skein back
through years, fit
like old sweaters.

But I still think
of the friends
that drift away
like snowflakes,
their loss
a wind-
chill factor:
the cast off stitches,
the unwound yarn.

...by Barbara Crooker

Monday Madness

Let's talk about holidays... Depending on where you live and what religion you are, you may celebrate different holidays and at different times of the year than others. But most of us do celebrate at least one holiday a year. Let's share! =)

1. Which of the holidays that you celebrate, do you feel is the most important?

Most important? Thanksgiving, because it's important to stop and say thank you for whatever good or positive things happened to you during the year. You don't have to say it to a supreme being and it doesn't have to be a prayer. But just being alive is a reason for thanks.

2. Which holiday do you most enjoy?

Ah, now that's Christmas. I love the colors and the music and the lights and getting together with folks you love. Gifts are nice, but they aren't important.

3. Is there one holiday that your family tries to get together every year? If so, which one?

We get together with James' family on Christmas, just not always Christmas day, because it's such a hassle. James usually has to work the day after and we can't just sit and relax and talk because we have to drive the nearly two hours home early to get ready for work the next day and the traffic is crazy. (I'll never forget that head-on collision I so narrowly avoided several years ago on Christmas morning. The thought of it makes my skin crawl.) Any one of the twelve days of Christmas is appropriate!

4. Share one special memory from a past holiday.

Oh, golly, this is the one I always talk about. You're free to skip to the next question if you've heard this one more than once.

When I was a girl we always went to my Grandfather's (Papá, Dad's father) on Christmas Eve and later Christmas Day (occasionally for dinner on Christmas). This was always down in the cellar, which was partially belowground; you entered from a door in the back and stepped down two steps. This was a average-sized room with an old bedroom dresser used to keep table linens in (at Christmas it had candy dishes and plates of cookies on top), a big table that held at least a dozen people, a black old woodstove that had been converted to gas, a built-in china cabinet and a old deep sink. In an alcove under the stairs was my Grandma's old treadle sewing machine and on a tall shelf an old Bakelite radio. (This was only half the room; the other half was partitioned behind boards and was the boiler and clotheslines to dry clothes on wet days and the summer clothes and some shelves with tools and nails, and also an old icebox.) The stone walls were painted grey (the cabinets were a dark red and made of beadboard) and in one corner was the door to Papá's frigid-in-winter wine cellar (Papá made his own wine, including a rich deep burgundy that I miss every time I make wine biscuits). Probably anyone would have seen it as homely and even shabby, but I loved it. My Aunty Margaret would cook quantities of macaroni and dozens of Italian cookies and we'd all eat around the big table which was covered with a new oilcloth every year (but you could check underneath for previous year's patterns, like layers in a archeological dig).

We would save pennies for weeks and then bring a bag and everyone would play Po-ke-no, a pot each for center, corners, and "bingo." Then all the men would play poker while we kids sat and listened to the women talk.

At that point I would go upstairs, ostensibly to the bathroom on the second floor, but always because I wanted to see the house all quiet and glowing for Christmas. The upstairs hadn't been redecorated since the late 40s or something like that and it was like stepping into a time machine. The kitchen had metal cabinets and a big old Roper stove that had been bought for my grandmother before she died in the late 1950s, but she seldom got to use it because everyone ate downstairs. Aunty Margaret took care of the house and the kitchen table was always covered with a pretty checked cloth and had little decorative candy dishes on it: Christmas candy and torrone and these citrus candy slices in lemon, orange and tangerine. Next to the kitchen was a room called "the den" that had an old sleeper sofa and a green linoleum floor and not much else, but if you went through the glass door of the kitchen to the front of the house there was the dining room, with heavy brown Victorian-like table and chairs and sideboards and the front window where the Christmas tree always stood. Next to the dining room was the parlor with its old-fashioned reddish wallpaper and there was always an uncle who had come upstairs, ostensibly to check the football scores but in reality to get away from the racket, who had fallen asleep in the chair or on the sofa with the lights low and the television murmuring.

All the lights were off elsewhere except for the tree and the candles in the window. It was like some magical place where you might step through the gateway of time if you just knew the way and come out in another era. I always liked to sit on the floor and look up through the tree from the bottom. With the tinsel and the big C7 bulbs and the old ornaments it was in itself a glittering passage to Times-Gone-Past. It was a good place to sit and think about Christmas and the people below and the years they had seen: the rising fortunes of the Twenties, the Depression, the sacrifice of World War II, the schizophrenic Fifties.

Miss it. Hurts sometimes.

5. Name one holiday coming up, that you're really looking forward to, and why.

Well, Christmas, silly. :-) Our first in the new house. We can finally be in the same room with the Christmas tree, instead of it being upstairs and seeing it going up and downstairs and on Christmas Eve only. And a little Christmas village; always wanted a small one. And the Twelfth Night party.

Maybe someday I'll even do the cake with the bean in it. :-)

Excitement in the "Big Apple"

They're polishing up the trumpets and doing a last fitting for Santa Claus in New York for the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade (warning: site requires Flash 7).

I still miss the old CBS parades. Originally (or at least when I first watched them in the early 60s) they were hosted by Captain Kangaroo. Then William Conrad took over. He sat on a warm plush "men's study" type set with a big fireplace sipping a toddy as he introduced the different segments, which switched to the guest announcers actually freezing out there in the cold, especially in Toronto (Eaton's Santa Claus Parade) and Detroit (Hudson's Department Store parade). I think the Santa parade is still held, but it's not sponsored by Eaton's anymore (I believe the store has gone out of business). I wonder if they still have the Storybook Land theme for the floats. It seems old hat for today's kids who play Nintendo and listen to I-Pods. I think I read the Detroit parade is still going on, but no longer sponsored by Hudson's. I'm not sure any of the Hudson's stores are still around, but their subsidiary, Target, is everywhere.

The old Gimbels parade, of course, in Philadelphia, is long gone. Macy's (ooops, Macy*s), overcame their old rival years ago and then managed to eat up Atlanta's Davidson's and Rich's stores, Boston's venerable Jordan Marsh and Filenes, and dozens of others. The more famous Philadelphia parade has always been the Mummers' Parade at New Year's, but I'm not sure it's broadcast nationally any longer.

The kiss of death at CBS for me was when they began broadcasting the Hawaiian parade. Yawn. Who wants to look at dopey flowers before Christmas?

"Will You Be My Valentine?"

I guess we were pretty typical as mid-60s elementary school kids.

The boys wore their hair short and parted to one side or the other. The occasional cowlick or bowl cut appeared. They wore button-down shirts—often "cowboy shirts" with piping—and pressed troussers (often courderoy in this winter season, or wool). The girls were in dresses, skirts and blouses, or jumpers. Short hair was popular (especially with moms who had to wash that hair), held back with a headband. They wore sturdy Oxfords or Hush Puppies, or strap shoes. A few extroverts whose moms allowed it wore patent leather dress shoes and might have had their hair permed. Ringlets were still popular, too, and hair bows. To stay warm during a long walk to school or at recess, the girls often wore snow pants under their dresses; these came off in the morning along with the thick winter coats and hats and scarves and rubber boots that fit over your shoes and were stowed in the chaos known as the cloakroom behind folding bulletin-board doors.

Valentine’s Day didn’t start immediately after Christmas as it does now. Yuletide was allowed to wind down past the new year before the candy started to appear, but it was only at the tail end of January and into February that schoolchildren started to gear up by surveying what classroom valentines were for sale in the eternal delight of the 60s child, "the five and ten"—Woolworths, Newberrys, McCrory, Ben Franklin, and whatever other local store plied the trade.

The least expensive Valentines, most endorsed by Mom, were just plain little hearts and cupids and other cartoon-like boys and girls or animals wishing each other a happy day or professing love or affection. Girls' Valentines featured dolls, flowers, cute animals, and lots of hearts. Boys' Valentines would more likely have their youthful protagonist in a train engineer's uniform or spacesuit, or would feature trains, cars, airplanes, or construction equipment. Specialty cards, like those with Disney characters or the cartoon heroes of the day like Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, or theme cards involving real-life race cars or spaceships or television programs were pricier. There was always one, larger Valentine in the box reserved for the teacher; the most common design was some sort of a blackboard with the message written in white "chalk." These were purchased and (sometimes) laboriously signedover and over for twenty to thirty classmates until the day you could dump them in the big box on the teacher’s desk. (Mom always insisted you make out one for everyone in the class, even the kids you didn’t like, so it would be "fair.") In the lower grades, the teacher decorated the box herself, usually with white or pink construction paper. White was favored since then the hearts could be made in both pink and white, and on it in red crayon would be neatly printed the grade and the teacher’s name.

As you grew older the teacher would allow the best artist in the class to decorate the big box. It was an honor to encrust the box with layered hearts or tissue paper flowers, although some students always wanted input on the design.

One February art class closest to the fourteenth was always reserved for making Valentine cards for your mom and dad. Copious piles of white, pink, and red construction paper (sometimes black was added for a cool shadow effect) were plied into service. Sometimes the teacher purchased foil-like cupids or hearts to embellish each card, and lace paper doilies were always a favorite for backgrounds for mothers' cards. Some kids brought in magazine cuttings to further add to the decorative effect. Twenty-five children wielded twenty-five snub-nosed scissors, folding a red sheet in half and carefully reproducing the lopsided teardrop shape with the flat side that would open up into a really-truly heart. The more ambitious children cut odd shapes from the edge and the interior of the folded heart and what unfolded was a confection in "lace" design. These hearts, plain or cut-out, were layered with smaller or larger hearts and then stacked together permanently with the inevitable paste (the flicking paste brush sending bits of white everywhere, including on the clothing and hair of unsuspecting classmates) and cheerfully crayoned with greetings.

We also cut out hearts, again both the plain and lacy variety, to decorate the bulletin board at the back of the room or on the pivoting cloakroom doors, white or red scalloped edges surrounding our best designs.

Later, at home, you would happily hand the now-stiff hand-fashioned card to Mom and/or Dad with a proud "Happy Valentines Day!" and Mom and Dad would admire it and then set it on top of the television console or on the kitchen table, leaned up against the vase of flowers Dad had brought for Mom so everyone could see it. If you were lucky, Dad would take Mom out to dinner and you could come, too, although in most households this was postponed to the Sunday closest to the holiday. Still fresh in your Sunday dress or suit, you'd all troup out to a nice restaurant whene the waiters wore suits and there were cloth napkins instead of paper ones and white tablecloths.

In that Valentine afternoon at school, however, you had received your own haul. The Valentine box was opened and the cards distributed. A few girls shyly smiled at a few boys, and a few boys embarrassedly tucked special Valentines away. There was the constant squeal of a few girls who had received sarcastic comic cards from the few whose moms had not supervised their card purchases and were sticking their tongues out at the guilty, laughing boys. Afterwards, there might be cupcakes and punch or some chocolates Hershey kisses and then it was time to run home and show Mom your cards (after carefully anointing a chosen favorite classmate with that ultimate winter valentine, a snowball!).