Christmases Past (No Need for a Ghost to Show Me)

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I opened up one of our boxes of physical photo prints the other day, when I moved it from the space that the Christmas tree, bought on Saturday, now occupies. The photos are only partly organized, but even so I found some holiday images from the days before digital photography.

December 1997

The first time we took Lilly out, who appears here in one of those baby-hauling slings. We went to Lincoln Park on an unusually warm December day, including a visit to the conservatory, which had a display of poinsettias.

December 2000

One of the Christmases in the western suburbs.

December 2003

First Christmas in the northwestern suburbs, and first one for Ann.

December 2006

Ann and Lilly with a Santa Claus — maybe the one who used to appear at the office of the Realtor who sold us our house. That’s pretty much a Realtor sort of thing to do for the holidays. By this time, Ann was learning about the jolly old elf; and Lilly had given up on literal Santa, but was game enough to visit with her sister.

Christmas Tree Shopping Over the Years

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Various sources said there was a full moon out there on Thursday the 12th, but clouds obscured it. Still, for December, the day was a warmish (40s F.) and Friday will be likewise, they say. Time to acquire a Christmas tree.

The tree-selling business where we’ve bought maybe a half dozen trees over the last decade has vanished. During the warm months, the lot featured a nursery, next to a private dwelling where the proprietors lived. In December, it had a large stock of Christmas trees. Got one there just last year.

But not quite every year during the 2010s. One year we went to a church lot some miles north of home; can’t remember why. Another year, we found a tree at a parking lot of a downmarket retail property. And yet another time, when I waited too long, a tree came from the last-resort expedient of a big DIY store.

That reminded me of the time in my youth, sometime in the early ’70s, when we didn’t get a tree until Dec. 23. Pickings were slim.

Then there was the time in London when we had no intention of getting a tree to decorate the flat we’d rented in East Ealing. A few days before Christmas, however, we were returning to the flat from the train station, and spotted a small tree abandoned and naked on the sidewalk. Maybe three feet tall. So we took it back and somehow made it stand up and decorated our serendipitous tree with something or other. Pieces of paper, ribbons, I forget what.

Now the lot we’ve shopped at over the years is empty and all of the accouterments of the nursery — the large shed, mostly — are gone. There are no Christmas trees for sale but a sign says the house is for sale. That’s that.

No Fond Memories of Record Hole

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I pinned this to the wall behind the front door today. It’ll be there until I will be obliged to take it down. Why there? Just a passing whim. I was tired of it lying around my office.
Record Hole bagIt’s a plastic bag and a relic of the 1970s or the ’80s at the latest. Not only that, a souvenir from San Antonio. At one time, Record Hole was a local chain of record stores in that city. Or so I believe.

The brand is long gone, and so far I’ve found only one trace of it online — a passing mention in an article about a different and surviving record store, as of 2016. Not that I’ve looked very hard. But Record Hole is so obscure that it didn’t even make in on this list of defunct retailers, which includes Record Bar, Record Town and Record World.

Some time ago, I picked up the bag at my mother’s house — again on a whim — and brought it back home. She’d been using it to store odds and ends. I might well have bought a record at a Record Hole and left it with her 40-odd years ago. I didn’t buy many records, but I did buy a few. Or maybe my brother Jim bought something there.

At one time, Record Hole was established enough to air local TV ads. I vaguely remember them, because they featured a primitive animated version of ’70s-record-listening dude.

record hole bagWho was sitting on a record on a turntable. Trippy, man. The store’s motto, which is also on the bag but upsidedown and backwards in my picture: Whatever music plays in your head, we can put in your hand.

Plastic bags, though they may last for centuries in landfills, are notoriously ephemeral when it comes to being saved elsewhere. Sure, it’s still worthless now, but some happy descendant of mine might make a fortune off the bag in, say, the 23rd century, when the notion of plastic bags and records are historic curiosities that excite collector interest.

Put a Light in Every Country Window

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Winter temps have kicked in, but at least Monday’s drizzle and mist didn’t become ice. Now we have dry subfreezing conditions. Tolerable.

Meandering around online recently — often the best way to find anything interesting — I came across “Put a Light in Every Country Window.” A song about rural electrification in Australia. Can’t say I’ve ever heard one of those before.

Put a light in every country window,
High-speed pumps where now the windmills stand.
Get in and lay the cable so that one day we’ll be able
To have electricity all over this wide land.

Catchy tune. Wasn’t long before I found the liner notes of Folk Songs & Ballads of Australia, recorded in 1964 by Gary Shearston, a star of the Australian folk revival (another thing I didn’t know about).

“A song from the pen of Don Henderson, one of Australia’s best and most prolific contemporary songwriters, who has travelled and written throughout the Eastern States,” the notes say. “This song was written three years ago after a journey through the area of the giant Snowy Hydro-Electric Scheme.”

Of course it isn’t the only song about rural electrification. Surely Woody Gutherie’s “Roll on Columbia” counts as one, and maybe “Grand Coulee Dam” does indirectly. Considering how many songs Gutherie wrote, there are probably others too.

There’s also this recent oddity about Rural Electric Cooperatives, to the tune of “The Battle of New Orleans.” It’s interesting, but a little hard to listen to.

Millennium Park Skating Rink ’19

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Walkabouts in Chicago aren’t so bad in December as long as temps hover above freezing and the wind isn’t too strong. Those are the conditions we had over the weekend, so we spent a while downtown. Took a look at the Millennium Park Christmas tree.
Millennium Park ChicagoWe wandered past the skating rink, just below the Bean.
Millennium Park Chicago

The rink is also in shadow of much larger structures.
Millennium Park ChicagoEarlier, on a street a few blocks to the west, a family asked me directions to the Bean. I think I gave them good directions. I’m glad that even in the age of Google Maps — a really good urban navigation aid — people are still asking other people for directions.

Space Ghost, Osaka Winter & Anticipating Australia

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Not long ago, I dug up a letter I wrote in Japan, dated December 8, 1991. At the time I was preparing to travel to summertime Australia. I’m impressed by the references to obsolete things: VHS, travelers cheques, international land-line calls that need to be scheduled.

The other day, in an unusually listless moment, I decided to watch the Space Ghost tape you sent. As I mentioned, I only had the vaguest memories of that cartoon, and none at all of Dino Boy. There’s nothing especially remarkable about either… SG seems like it was a pretty minor effort, slapped together without regard to originality, a sense of humor, or more than the rudiments of the art of animation. In short, dreck. Ditto for DB.

Today I was off, and some of the time I was at home, cleaning up and re-arranging the furniture a little. I went to the grocery store early in the morning and rode my bicycle around the park late in the afternoon. The day was cool and cloudy. Almost pleasant. This time of the year in Chicago would already be down-coat weather most days, but Osaka makes up for the fierceness of its summers during its mild winters.

I can’t remember that I’ve told you about the upcoming trip. The ticket and visa are squared away, and the itinerary is as complete as I care to make it. I bought some Australian dollars the other day. Some Australian travelers cheques, actually.

I’ll call you from Australia on Saturday, Dec. 28 your time. It may be a little earlier or later than usual, owing to differences in time zones, and my location on that day. I might be on the west coast by then (Perth), or maybe not. This time of the year, the east coast (Sydney) is 17 hours ahead of U.S. Central. They have daylight savings too. I believe Western Australia doesn’t have DST, so that would put Perth only 14 hours ahead of Central. Regardless of my place, I will try to time the call to fall between 8 to 10 your time. It is possible that I will be in transit at that time, in which case I will call 24 hours later.

I’ll also try to get a letter to you in the mail, perhaps after Christmas. And a few postcards from various places. If you have anything to mail to me, remember that Dec. 20 is the last day I’ll pick it up in Osaka for three weeks.

I was pretty hard on Space Ghost. That was before his revival in Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which I’ve only heard about, never seen, but which seemed to give him a new fan base. At least, that’s what I assumed when I saw a reveler decked out as Space Ghost at the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in 2006.

I don’t care. It was still a substandard cartoon, product of the ’60s Hanna-Barbera cartoon mill.

Thursday Hey Nonny-Nonny

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Not bad weather for December so far. Above freezing and sunny today and yesterday. This can’t last.

This week I noticed the first installation of solar rooftop panels on my street, though not in my part of town. A good thing to do, I suppose. But my on-the-fly, rough calculations go like this: Cost to install: x. Savings on energy each year: a small, maybe minuscule fraction of x. Tax-credit support for the project: you’ll find out after considerable paperwork and wandering through the fun house that is the tax code. So another fraction of x. Years to recoup investment: many.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s changed or was never right. Could be that Greta will come to my front door someday and personally shame me about my non-solar house. I know the cost of solar panels is way down, but that’s only one cost component, and I also know that any home improvement project costs more than published estimates, or the contractor’s estimates, or more than you think it should, or just more period.

Schaumburg Town Square here in the northwest suburbs is decked out pretty nicely with lights this year. Here are trees along the square’s square pond.

Schaumburg Town Square Christmas lights

The clocktower and its plaza are gold and silver.

Schaumburg Town Square Christmas lights

The first time, I think, I’ve seen the clocktower itself arrayed in sparkling gold.

Closer to home — at home, in fact — I recently made a clip of the dog perched in one of her favorite places, the stairs. Lights feature in this clip as well. Strange, eerie lights… either an easily explainable reflection from the dog’s tapetum lucidum inside her eyes, or the animal is sending me telepathic beams to relay one simple message, Feed me more.

On a more somber note, two deaths have come to my attention recently. Both of people hardly old.

RIP, Craig Bloomfield, PR man and commercial real estate writer, and professional acquaintance of mine. Also, roughly my age. I don’t remember the last time I spoke to him, though it’s been a number of years. I have some pleasant memories of PR lunches with him back in the early 2000s, especially at the Russian Tea Time in the Loop.

RIP, Debbie Gregg, eldest sister of a very old friend of mine. I spent a lot of time with her brother Tom in the early ’70s, and Debbie was around sometimes. She was about the same age as my eldest brother. Tom and I haven’t been in touch much as adults, and I probably haven’t seen Debbie in 30+ years, since Tom got married, but it’s still a sad thing to hear.

GeGeGe and Many Torii

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Other places that Yuriko visited during her recent stay in Japan included Mizuki Shigeru Road in Sakaiminato, Tottori Prefecture, and Fushimi Inari-taisha, a Shinto shrine in Kyoto.

Mizuki Shigeru Road sports more than 100 statues depicting characters created by Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015), a manga artist best known for a series called GeGeGe no Kitarō. I’m not a manga aficionado, or even very interested, but his characters are so widely known in Japan that even I recognized some of them, by sight if not by name.
Most of them I don’t recognize. But they are interesting.
I understand that Mizuki drew much of his inspiration from yōkai, a broad class of monsters, spirits and demons in Japanese folklore. I believe it.
Yuriko said that she hadn’t visited Sakaiminato before (though we did go to another part of Tottori once together) and that the statues are fairly new.

I recognized another place she visited, however: Fushimi Inari-taisha, a shrine whose precincts feature many, many torii. And almost as many steps.Fushimi Inari-taisha

Fushimi Inari-taisha

Fushimi Inari-taisha

I’m pretty sure, but not absolutely sure, that I visited Fushimi a good many years ago — nearly 30 — and climbed many steps through many orange torii.

Japan ’19

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Yuriko returned recently from a couple of weeks in Japan. Besides time with family, she visited a number of interesting places in the Kansai and a little beyond, such as the Adachi Museum of Art off in Shimane Prefecture, which hugs the Sea of Japan coastline northwest of greater Osaka.

Never made it up that way myself. The museum, which features a large collection of works by Taikan Yokoyama and other artists, is also known for its garden. Looks impressive.Adachi Museum of Art

Adachi Museum of Art

I’d have to see it myself to compare it to Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu on Shikoku — the most breathtaking Japanese garden I’ve seen. But best not to invent rankings for places like that anyway.

Also of interest: she visited not only the Tower of the Sun (Taiyō no Tō) on the former grounds of Expo ’70 in Osaka, she went inside.

That wasn’t possible when I was in Osaka, though gazing at the exterior was something I did from time to time. I’ve read that the interior only opened permanently last year after renovations to the structure, with the artwork inside refurbished too. It’s a depiction of the Tree of Life.
tower of the sun interior osakaWow. I’d like to see that as well sometime. Along with the Maishima Incineration Plant (which Y didn’t visit this time).

Neon Santa

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Most of yesterday’s snow is gone. If winter were like that all the way through around here, that would suit me. Then again, that would also probably mean Texas-like summers and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet for starters, so never mind.

Christmas lights and decorations are sprouting rapidly in our neighborhood, some modest, some modestly gaudy. No one here goes for the full Griswold, or even a half or quarter Griswold.

As for Christmas in the stores, all that sprouted weeks ago. Still, sometimes I see new things. New to me, anyway. Like a Neon Santa.

Available at a warehouse store I visit sometimes. Could have been mine for about $30, but I passed on it. I also noticed that it isn’t actually neon. In our time, it’s an LED Santa.