What goes “oh oh oh”? Santa walking backwards.
It’s the eighth and just a few days before Christmas…time is flying! ISue and I are on our bestest behaviour cause the lbig guy is surely watching to make sure who is being good and who is being bad!
Today is a full day as you will see but first a Christmas Memory (I am a poet and I know it, because, my toes are Longfellow’s!)…please Santa, don’t mark me down because of that!
Christmas Memory #8 – No Rust Here
Fads come and fads go, some should have never came! It’s 1958 and Mom, being an avant guard artist bought this horrible thing…an aluminum Christma tree.
An aluminum Christmas tree is a type of artificial Christmas tree that was popular in the United States from 1958 until about the mid-1960s. As its name suggests, the tree is made of aluminum, featuring foil needles and illumination from below via a rotating color wheel. The aluminum Christmas tree was used as symbol of the commercialization of Christmas in the highly acclaimed and successful 1965 television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which discredited its suitability as holiday decoration. By the mid-2000s aluminum trees found a secondary market online, often selling for high premiums.
A 1937 issue of Popular Science advocated spraying aluminum paint using an insect spray gun to coat Christmas trees causing it to appear as if “fashioned of molten silver”. We were ready to find some old buy spray if it would keep the aluminum mess out of the house!
So Mom puts this horrible thing up in the living room next to the tiny front window…it was kinda like the leg-light in “A Christmas Story” but this time, dad was the one embarrassed by the alumunim tree.
Mom even dug out some of the large silver balls (see previous memory) that she made years earlier to adorn this metal nightmare!
To add insult to injury, she also bought the stupid color wheel which was even worse…creek,,,squeek,,,grind….creek…snap! The whole night while the wheel “turned” sounded like an auto crash was happening in the front of the house!
We frowned at the “tree” and all it did was smile back in many changing colors!
We had a real tree in the den (back of the house) and that’s where Dad and I put our presents.
We were happy on Christmas Day when the tree came down and it was packed away hopefully to be lost during the next year. Mom put up that travesty one more year and we teased her as much as we could get away with.
I have no idea where it went but I can guess Dad had something to do with it!
Ratchet forword 50 years and on eBay the stupid thing we bought for $20 is selling for between $250 and $500 depending upon the condition… Can you believe it?
Winter Wonderland time! Old Ranch throws a “shin-dig” with Santa, bouncy houses, snow, and lots to eat. We go every year with Joe and Amy and the boys. Amy’s Mom and Dad also join us making it a great brunch!
Every time we get together, Amy thanks me for letting me know what she is in for with Joe and the boys! Alex, Joe, and I are look-a likes!….and act-a likes! Maybe not a terribly bad thing?
So we head for home only to return after a two hour nap for an evening with the gang having dinner and dancing at Old Ranch!
Iris has hr joke sheet circulating 
Beer sipping lessons underway!
We depart Old Ranch again about 9:20 PM and head home to watch a movie and then a Madam Secretary before crashing. No tookies tonight as we have been around food all day! Enough is enough!
