onnie (The Spirit of Chr…): Hey, it’s almost Christma… Michelle Tan (Hubie The Christm…): You never fail to brighte… Colyn (The Spirit of Chr…): I was just telling Onnie … Colyn (It's The Most Won…): My husband is a big kid w…
What that means is, every day, between whatever day you're reading this and Christmas Day, we'll post something about Christmas. It might be a trip to the store or down memory lane, a peek at presents or at lights on the houses down the street ... just a way of celebrating the season. We hope you enjoy!
Ho ho ho, everybody, and can you believe it's already The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, again? Well, it is, and I have the Starbuck's Christmas Blend to prove it. Oh, wait, that's the Thanksgiving Blend ... well, it is December, and thus it's time for the 2nd annual Christmas Countdown! Stay tuned for page after page of exciting action and heart-warming commentary.
Ah, who am I kidding, I got as far as five entries last year before I succumbed to any number of distractions that kept me from making this anything more than pitiful attempt at holiday cheer. Plus this year we're spending pretty much every free minute, and more than a few paid minutes, working on the house (bathroom update: the drains are almost roughed in!), leaving me more than a bit pressed for Yuletide chit-chat. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to, at the very least, match my output (Christmas-wise) from last year, sharing stories of Christmas Past, Present, and Borrowed From Other Sources. Such as the following article I found in the January 1941 issue of Popular Science magazine, which details, (with photographs) ...
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The Birth of a Bauble copyright 1941 Popular Science Magazine
In its first year of operation, the world's only mass-production factory for manufacturing glass Christmas-tree ornaments, the Wellsboro, Pa., plant of the Corning Glass Works, has turned out more than half of all the new decorations which will bedeck American trees this season. At the rate of 400 a minute -- approximately 2,000,000 a week -- the brightly colored globes have been pouring from the production line. Six months of intensive work by Corning engineers made possible the ingenious machines which turn a pound of glass into thirty average-size ornaments. A ribbon of molten glass enters one end of the production line and a steady stream of bulbs which have been shaped, silvered inside, and tinted outside, comes out at the other end. One hundred and eighty different sizes, styles, and colors are produced at the Wellsboro plant. Formerly, most of our glass Christmas-tree decorations came from central Europe, where families of craftsmen formed and tinted them by hand. [Ed. note: A subtle allusion to the fact that most of central Europe wasn't making Christmas-tree decorations when this article was published because the Nazi's were bombing the living hell out of them at the time, and for years to come] Machine methods not only speed up production but are said to turn out more uniform globes.
1. This control room feeds air and gas to the tank furnace of the Wellsboro, Pa., plant of the Corning Glass Works, where a mixture of sand, soda ash, and lime is turned into dainty bubbles of glass to adorn America's Christmas trees.
2. Down a hopper into the furnace comes the carefully mixed ingredients. It takes about three weeks to change a batch of the raw material into usable glass, which is of almost the same kind as that used for electric-light bulbs.
3. From time to time, a sample of glass is taken out of the furnace for testing. Just as an expert candy maker can tell when candy is ready to take from the stove, so a skilled glass worker can judge the quality of glass by eye. The viscosity shows when the glass is ready for use.
4. New Material is added little by little until about thirty-five tons of glass has been prepared. Guarded by steel shields from the 2,800 degree heat, a workman pushes the finely ground mixture onto the molten mass.
5. Shielding his eyes from the blinding glare of the flames with a window of dark glass, a workman peers through an opening in the furnace, whose heat reproduces in miniature the conditions on the sun.
6. Streaming from the furnace, molten glass enters the "ribbon machine," which carries it along between rollers like a moving ribbon. This machine is also used in the manufacture of electric-light bulbs.
7. As the ribbon goes along horizontally, clinging to the underside of a moving belt, puffs of compressed air blow through it from above to form bubbles that grow in size until each is plucked off between the halves of a mold moving up to meet it.
8. Clamped inside the mold, the bubble of glass is blown up to the desired shape. In the picture here, one of the molds has been opened to show how the glass sphere is formed with its neck attached. Molds are changed to make ornaments of any type.
9. Asbestos "hands" on this rotary transfer mechanism take the hot, shaped bulbs from the molds of the ribbon machine. Then, turning from a horizontal to a vertical position, they lay them on a belt ...
10. ... which carries them to the "lehr" for cooling. It takes the globes about twenty minutes to pass through this forty-foot machine, where the temperature is lowered gradually to prevent strains.
11. Emerging from the lehr, the bulbs are carried by a moving belt past girls who remove broken pieces. At this stage, the clear glass spheres resemble soap bubbles floating on a stream of water. A pound of glass makes thirty average-size globes.
12. These girl inspectors are examining the globes for imperfections. Modern machine methods used at the Corning plant not only permit greater speed of production, but also turn out stronger and much more uniform ornaments.
13. Picking up bulbs at random from the moving belt, this inspector holds them against the polariscope, in which polarized light reveals any strains created in cooling.
14. Another type of polarized-light testing instrument is seen here. When a bulb is held up in front of the lighted screen, tell-tale iridescent patters show lines of stress or tension which might make it break easily.
15. Here girls are putting the bulbs on racks in a machine for silvering and coloring. First, chemicals are sprayed up through the necks to give a mirrorlike [sic] surface inside ...
16. ... then the racks pass through the dye vats where baths of brilliant color give them the outer tints of read, blue, green, gold, and silver that add sparkle to trees on Christmas Day.
17. After, the dye has been dried quickly by heat, the necks are cut off by an automatic machine. Occasionally, however, one of the bulbs gets by the machine. It is the job of this girl to catch such strays and cut off their necks by hand on a Carborundum wheel.
18. At the end of the long production line, the globes are sorted and broken ones are removed. Now they are packed in partitioned cardboard boxes.
19. Enough ornaments to cover a whole forest of Christmas trees are contained in these cartons stacked in a warehouse awaiting shipment. Two million are turned out every week.
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WOW!!! Did you have any idea what the USA used to be capable of doing, before we outsourced everything to Walmart? True, we were on the brink of war in January of 1941, and by December 7th of that year I'm guessing the Corning Glass Works of Wellsboro, Pa., had switched most of their glass production lines over to lenses (for cameras, binoculars, and bomb sites), searchlights, and other baubles of a more military persuasion.
But for a few glorious months, anyway, an amazing amount of technology and human labor were devoted to nothing more than making beautiful glass balls to hang where all could see them, catching the twinkling lights on a winter's eve, and helping to spread a message of hope, peace, and love.
Well, you've got to start somewhere. And on that note, welcome to this year's Christmas Countdown, and may all your baubles be bright!
or, The Best Christmas Presents of All Time, whether or not I got them. And mostly I didn't get 'em, simply because like pretty much everybody else I knew growing up, our parents didn't really have any money. Oh, sure, they had enough to pay for boring stuff like school clothes and food, and the occasional dinner out at Burger King, and we could always count on Santa bringing us one thing on our list that we really, really wanted ... but face it, kids are rotten little greedy monsters (I was, anyway) and the differences between the lists of "What I Asked Santa For" and "What Santa Actually Brought Me" were rather disparate.
Not that I'm complaining in hindsight; actually I can't remember a Christmas where I was truly disappointed in anything I got. It's just that there was always some other kid down the block who got something incredibly amazing and expensive for Christmas, which of course they would tell you all about, and that kid was always the kid I knew just well enough to talk to but not well enough that he'd let me play with whatever cool thing he got. Creep.
So, anyway, at the top of my list of Best Christmas Presents of All Time, #1 has to be: An Electric Car. And by Electric Car I don't mean something ecological and trendy by today's standards, none of that, what I'm talking about is a scaled-down racing car (or really any scaled-down car, could be an Edsel for all I'd care) with an electric motor, that you could actually sit in and drive down the sidewalk. The ultimate in cool.
And yes of course these are ridiculously expensive (the Ferrari in the picture is $600, not including shipping), your average kid would crash it in a week, assuming he was still driving it, which he wouldn't be because in reality it has a top speed of five miles per hour, meaning you can even walk faster, and nothing spoils speeding along in your new Ferrari like being passed up by little girls on their bikes (with training wheels, even). I didn't say it was anything resembling practical, but who wants a practical Christmas present anyway?
I never knew anyone who ever got an electric car for Christmas, or for any other gift, but I heard stories of friends of friends who had these. But these friends of friends also had a swimming pool -- built-in, of course -- and at least one step-parent, both things that just didn't occur in my world and were more than a bit frightening in their own ways.
Number 2 on the list, just a fraction of an inch below number one, is: An Erector Set. Preferably with a motor and about 47,000 pieces, most of which you'd lose within an hour of opening the case, while trying to build an attack robot and succeeding only in cross-threading four wheels together into something vaguely resembling a wobbly roller skate.
I never got one of these either, though I remember (probably wrongly) my friend Robert Thomas (whose initials were RAT, which we all thought was hilarious) having an Erector set, which I envied him for. If it was him, that is. Anyway, whoever had one of these, I envied him. It was missing a bunch of parts, enough so that there was always one less of whatever it is you needed to finish making anything functional (e.g. you'd have three wheels if you needed four, seven angled pieces if you needed eight, etc.).
An Erector set is usually priced at a dollar amount that is tantalizingly in theoretical reach of asking Santa for one of these, but even so it would mean getting a less-featured number of pieces -- and is there nothing worse than getting a set of something that is just the step below the level of the set you really want? -- and, importantly, it was expensive enough that you knew that Santa would bring you the Erector set and the Erector set only. And no kid that I know wants to blow his entire Christmas wish wad on one thing and one thing only. Better to get half a dozen Matchbox cars and a garage, than an Erector set. It was a hard call, but you've gotta work the odds when it comes to Santa.
And taking the bronze for Best Christmas present of all time: The Thingmaker. Preferably the Fright Factory edition, but I would have turned cartwheels over any version.
The Thingmaker was a toy made by Mattel in the 1960's, back when toys were toys and Mattel was more than an importer of cheaply made, lead-painted junk (no offense). The basic Thingmaker sets came with an open-faced oven, a cooling pan, tongs, plastigoop, metal molds and a few little accessories like paints, feathers or other adornments. How were all of these items married so that they produced rubber bugs, shunken heads, and other wonderful things? Tongs go into the side of the mold, plastigoop goes into the mold, mold goes into the hot oven, mold comes out of the hot oven into the water.
If you did everything right, you had a nice, dry, rubbery replica of the mold, sort of like the chemical set version of an Easy Bake oven, if only marginally less tasty. If you undercooked the piece then you ended up with a toxic, sticky ball of goo. If you overcooked the piece, you had to get a knife or needle and start digging the stubborn goop out of the mold. If you cooked the mold the right amount of time, but were greedy and didn't let it cool long enough, you would get burnt.
Can you guess why I knew I'd never get a Thingmaker for Christmas?
But the toys were extremely popular way back when, and quite a number of spin-off sets were produced, including:
Creepy Crawlers -- the original toy to fall under the category line of 'Thingmaker.' It contained molds for a surprisingly large variety of creatures, and even included small clear-plastic wings to attach to the flying insects. An offshoot of this was the Giant Creepy Crawlers set, which featured larger insects, one to a mold (whereas the previous set's molds allowed the creation of two smaller creepies at once).
Fright Factory -- a charmingly digusting set which allowed kids to create 'scary' items such as little skeletons, shrunken heads, and even vampire teeth to wear to school, the dentist's office, etc.
Creeple Peeple -- a set for producing weird little creatures (like Gumby as drawn by Salvador Dali), complete with arms and legs, that one could stick on a pencil to make little figures.
Fun Flowers - this being the 1960's, kids could make their own little plastic flowers in a variety of designs and colors.
Fighting Men - for producing little plastic toy soldiers. Actually one of the more innovative sets, this one allowed to kids to also create little weapons and accessories for their very GI Joe-like little warriors.
Sort of along those lines, I was never into GI Joes, for some reason. Playing with dolls, even macho dolls, was not something my friends and I did. We'd pretend we were astronauts or spies or whatever, but miniaturized versions never held much appeal. Though later on, when I was a freshman in high school, my friend Leon had a bunch of GI Joes that we would blow up with his stash of illegal firecrackers, but I don't think that counts. And I digress.
Back to the Thingmaker: At a garage sale when I was a teenager, I found an old Thingmaker set for sale, for a dollar, and I was overjoyed. I took it home, set it up, and discovered that all the plasticgoop bottles had dried out (or set up, or cured, or whatever you wanna call it). Talk about a major bummer. Not that this stopped me from poking around in the bottles with a knife and seeing if I could rejuvenate it somehow, but no dice. I'm sure I threw it out in disgust, and I'll bet that if I'd kept the box (it was in the original box, with all the original parts and instructions), I could sell it on ebay for a tidy profit. How times do change.
Tomorrow: Christmas presents I actually did get (whether or not I wanted them at the time)!
Yow, it's almost Christmas and I'm woefully behind in my update duties. Not that I suspect anybody is actually reading this thing, but on the off-chance you are, thanks. And sorry for being woefully behind et cetera.
Anyway, if you're still with us, please give a listen to the Christmas Jukebox, which contains a few carols I suspect might be be unknown to at least a few listeners. I say that because these are tunes that I like and searched the web for and darned if I could find any copies, so I was forced to drag out the ol' record player to get some of these. Apologies for the scratches.
You can see what's on the jukebox, and even play some tunes, by clicking on the Jukebox picture above (or the menu choice on your left). It will NOT start playing automatically, you have to choose a song (if any!), I hate those automatic music playing web pages even more than you do!
It's less than two weeks till Christmas and I've managed to get most of my Christmas shopping done already, which is really an amazing thing if you know me. I've been known to roam the halls of Fred Meyer at 5:45pm on Christmas Eve (they close at 6) in hopes of finding that special item for, oh, pretty much everybody on my list. But not this year! Okay, I've still got a few items to pick up, but nothing major, and I haven't sent my Christmas cards yet, but still, not too shabby.
I don't know the date on this picture -- that's me on the left, my brother Arno on the right, and Santa in the middle, natch -- but based on the fact my brother was still a cute little tot and hadn't morphed into the troll he looks like now, I'm guessing it's gotta be 1969 or 1970, in Los Angeles, CA, where we were born and where we lived until 1971. I don't remember anything about this photo, don't have a clue what I wished for on my Santa List, but I'll bet it was a great Christmas and I got at least something I wrote to Santa for. I know, because the Big Guy always came through, maybe not with everything I asked for but always with something good.
The lead-up to The Big Day was a big deal in our family, and though I'm foggy on most of the specifics, it always involved decorating the front room windows, usually with Glass Wax. The photo here is NOT a Glass Wax window decoration, but my dad's own artistic creation way back when, probably before I was born, and you can probably guess that he's a pretty good draftsman in his own right. But for mere mortals with limited time and/or painting skills, nothing beats Glass Wax for window decorations, which my dad did every year (that I remember, anyway), and I always thought that everybody in the world put Glass Wax window decorations up every Christmas.
How it works was, you picked up a can of Glass Wax at your local store (probably Fedco, that was the place to shop when I was a kid in LA), and dug your Christmas stencils out of the garage (if you didn't feel like springing another fifty-nine cents for new stencils ever year), and then you take a rag, pour some Glass Wax on it, hold the stencil against the window, and dab Glass wax in the stencil cut-out area (on the glass). Then you carefully take away the stencil, and when the Glass Wax dries, you're left with a translucent pink-ish image of, say, Santa Claus, an elf, holly, a Christmas tree, whatever. Then you repeat the process on other parts of your window, or windows, until you've got the Christmas scene you desired.
I love Glass Wax window stencils. I remember next to nothing about how they actually looked on the window, but in my mind's eye there is nothing that says Christmas like Glass Wax windows stencils.
Except maybe Christmas music on the records player. Oh, yeah. We had this Zenith Hi-Fi Console Record Player and Radio that my dad got from a neighbor lady, I think -- he still has it -- and it's about six feet wide, three feet tall, two feet deep, and takes about five minutes for all the tubes to heat up. But when they do ... ah, that mellow Zenith sound. It's the optimal platform for the playing of Christmas music, all on LPs with dozens of scratches, sleeves all beat to heck by us kids, which is really how Christmas music should be played. I remember listening to the Ray Connif singers, Julie Andrews, The Living Strings (we must've had about a dozen Living Strings LPs, from Christmas music to sea chantys), and much, much more, all wonderful and necessary for the complete Christmas experience.
And I specifically remember one particular Christmas record that burned itself into my brain: Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanian's "Twas The Night Before Christmas." Their cover of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," complete with wacky sound effects and actual dialog between Rudolph and Santa, is an absolute classic that never failed to reduce me to tears of laughter. I'd bring my friends over just to play them "Rudolph" and we all thought it was hilarious. True, we were about ten and the height of sophisticated humor involved milk coming out of somebody else's nose, so there is that.
And I know all the words to "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (the actual title of the poem that is usually and wrongly referred to as "'Twas The Night Before Christmas") because of Fred Waring and the Pennyslvanians definitive version, which I can still sing by heart (including all the tempo changes).
Of course, in the end, no matter all the other cool trapping of Christmas, when it comes to kids and Christmas, it's all about the presents. Sure, the tree and tinsel and windows decorations and all that stuff is nice, but it's just a precursor to that wonderful morning when you wake up a five and run down the hall -- after waking up my little brother, if he hadn't woken me up first -- and into the front room and there, under the tree, are a whole bunch of wrapped packages that weren't there the night before and SANTA WAS HERE!!! HE EVEN ATE THE COOKIES AND DRANK THE MILK WE LEFT OUT!
Sometimes he (St. Nick) would sign the note we left for him ("Dear Santa, hope you're having a good night, here's some milk and cookies for your long trip, love Onnie and Arno P.S. We've both been really good this year"), which was always a major coup -- physical evidence of his existence! True, his handwriting was amazingly similar to my dad's, but that can easily be explained by the fact that most adults are all alike anyway.
Coming Monday: The Best Christmas Presents Of All Time (whether I actually got them or not)!
A few Friday's ago, November 30th, to be exact, the lovely Colyn and I made a bit of a day of things after work -- we took the light rail into town to work in the am, then took a walk downtown after work to enjoy the lights and Christmas cheer, went window shopping, had a nice little dinner, and then hot cocoa for Colyn and coffee for me at Moonstruck, finally taking the light rail home around 9-ish. 'Twas a very pleasant evening out, though I must say that by the time we got home we were both plum tuckered out.
We took a few pictures whilst wandering about, and you can see them by going to the Photos section on the left (under "Christmas in Portland 2007 Pt. 1"), or click on the photo of the Noble Fir sign to go right there!
While we were window shopping that evening, we passed a little store that sells Russian stuff, those little dolls that you stack inside each other, some Russian paintings, arts and glass work, that sort of thing. Colyn went inside to check things out as she appreciates all things artistic, and while I eventually joined her (and they do have nice stuff inside), I was initially most fascinated by their window display. Specifically, they had a little Santa that climbed up and down a ladder, and it is so cool! I want one!!!
I watched it for several minutes and then realized, our digital camera has a movie mode so I could take a clip of the little guy in action, which I present here for your edification and amusement:
I did find one for sale on ebay today (December 11), it's official name is "Stepping Santa," and the bidding is up to $36, plus $15 shipping. Apparently they still sell these brand-new, but upwards of $60. He's pretty cool, but not sixty-bucks cool. Sigh.
After the Russian store we checked out the mall, Pioneer Place, which is nicely but not overwhelmingly decked out in Christmas decorations, and our timing was great as we got there just as snow started falling, inside the mall. Really! Okay, not really "snow" in terms of ice crystals descending from the clouds, but "snow" as in little bits of soap foram blasted out of some kind of suds cannon on the top floor. Silly, but fun; it was a hoot to look down from our vantage point on the second floor, to the lower levels, where little kids (and even some adults) were scampering among the precipitation. Here's a little video clip of the storm in action:
The following Friday, December 7th, was the annual tree lighting ceremony in the Multnomah Village, so we went. It was scheduled for 6:42pm (seriously, 6:42pm) and we ran late so we didn't get there until after 7pm, but it was still quite lively in the Village -- there were crowds of people, and carolers, and some semi-talented musicians playing Christmas songs on the deck outside Starbucks, and all the shops were open, and basically it was just a lovely little way to spend an evening. Oh, and there was a horse-drawn carriage taking people for rides around the village! Being the village is just about a square block, it wasn't a terribly long ride as far as I could tell. But it was fun and it made for a lot of smiling faces, and a few slow buses (stuck behind a couple of horses who were happy to plod slowly along), though nobody honked, not even once.
Last but not least, on Sunday I helped my dad move some stuff, and in return he helped me pick out a Christmas Tree. Tthe lovely Colyn didn't come along, as she was feeling under the weather a bit, plus she's more than happy to leave Christmas Tree Choosing to those with lots of experience and/or who don't mind getting themselves all frozen and sap-covered going from one overpriced lot to another.
We managed to find The Perfect Christmas Tree, for twenty-five bucks, and brought it home and trimmed it to fit our stand, and gave it a good bath, to which you may be saying, "Did I read that correctly? They gave the tree a bath?" To which I say, okay, it wasn't a bath, it was a shower, but close enough and if you want to read more about it, check out the Photo Gallery!
Greetings, fellow babies and good Friday to you all. Today's little Christmas treat is a Christmas email card generator, or form, or whatever you want to call it. Just choose a holiday image from our little collection, write a few words to personalize it for a special friend, and then click to send it, via the electronic ether, to that special friend. We even cover the postage! Such as it is.
Just click on the stamp to send an Christmas E-Card! Or follow the link on the left menu!
Thursday 06 December 2007 at 2:44 pm
"The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery. It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand...It thrilled [Scrooge] with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black."
Brr, eh? That's from of course A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, by Charles Dickens, and I'm sure you're familiar with the story. But depending on your own Christmas pasts, or Christmas's past, or however you put it, you may not be aware of the long British tradition of ghost stories at Christmas. I can certainly relate -- back on Christmas Eve around 1972 or '73, when I was around ten years old, there was an episode of "Night Gallery" on TV, pretty late at night I'm sure, and I don't know if I talked my sister into staying up with me or vice-versa, but even back then I loved scary stories, movies, TV shows, whatever, if there's a ghost, I'm there. Scared, but there.
Anyway, I remember I was nervous about the show, it had something to do with this guy who inherits an old house that belonged to his dear departed Uncle Zachariah, and there's a trunk in an attic and you weren't supposed to move the trunk -- or something very bad would happen. Brr.
But I stayed up and we watched the show and good grief it scared the bejabbers out of me. My sister may remember differently but I kid you not that I remember that episode to this day, down to the the climatic scene where Uncle Zachariah comes to get the trunk.
I know I remember it very clearly because just a few days ago I managed to get hold of a copy of that very episode. It's called "Fright Night," not to be confused with a very good vampire movie with Roddy McDowell that came out in the 80's, you can tell by the hairstyles. In the movie, that is. But I digress.
I watched "Fright Night" (the episode) and while it's certainly no classic, I was a bit taken aback at how clearly I did remember it, over thirty years later; also it's actually still pretty creepy. What can I say, I don't like trunks in attics. Here's a clip from the show, where we finally get to see ... what's in the trunk. Not for the weak of heart or bladder! It's scary stuff! I'm not kidding! You've been warned!
Oh, just play the clip already ...
So that's a ghost story for Christmas from my own Christmas past, and while I didn't know it at the time, I was actually taking part in a great tradition of the sharing of ghost stories on the eve of the Nativity. And what's the appeal of ghost stories at Christmas, at least in the UK? Maybe because the holiday comes in the depths of winter when the nights are longest? Or that the season of goodwill renders all the creatures of the night powerless for a little while, making them curiosities rather than terrors?
Or maybe we just need a bit of fear to enhance our seasonal and/or traditional pleasures. And while probably the most famous yuletide tale of terror is A Christmas Carol, with its four reforming spirits (especially the last one!), there are quite a few more classics of the genre, with spectres of the supernatural who are, to put it mildly, far less benign.
As for what makes a Christmas ghost story a classic ... there is no formula to a good fright, but there are two recurring themes among the more memorable tales:
1) Sometimes the victims deserve their fate but often they are simply unlucky.
2) Part of the terror of these ghosts is their remorselessness. They cannot be reasoned with or bribed once roused. Neither do they obey man's or nature's laws, making it useless to try and outwit them. Those who try and escape too often find that a ghost's reach is very long.
Both the BBC and ITV have recognized the tradition of a seasonal ghost yarn and rarely a Christmas goes by without at least a supernatural film on or around Christmas Day. In fact, both channels have produced a special eerie drama for the occasion. During the seventies the BBC entrusted this job to an annual anthology series entitled, logically enough, A Ghost Story for Christmas, and some of the (rather ominous) titles include A Warning to the Curious, Number 13, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, and Whistle And I'll Come To You. Rosemary Hill was the producer and Lawrence Gordon Clark directed all but the final installment, and you've probably never heard of them either, but they were an effective team and together produced a rather highly regarded series of creepy Christmas shows.
Most of the stories in the series were based on the work of M. R. James, widely regarded as England's greatest ghost story writer. James wrote with subtlety, and had a fine understanding of human foibles and personalities, particularly academics and clergymen (James was, indeed, an academic and a clergyman). And while his stories are less well known on this side of the pond, his story "Casting The Runes" was made into one of the true classics of the horror genre, Night of the Demon. It stars, nominally, Dana Andrews and Peggy Cumins, and they're both fine, but they can't hold a candle to our title character, of which nightmares are made. Seriously, if there is an uglier and/or scarier visage in the history of monster movies, I don't know what it is. And don't tell me Alien because the Demon in Night of the Demon would eat Alien for breakfast. Brrr.
So anyway, ghost stories are part of my Christmas tradition now and what kind of host would I be if I didn't share a ghost story, or two, with you?
Many years ago now, when I was but a mere lad, I was given the gift of an 8mm movie camera. Okay, I wasn't really "given" the camera, I borrowed it from my dad.
And with this camera I was witness to many strange and curious events that, even today, cannot be explained as just the ramblings of a twisted mind. Well, okay, I guess they can be explained as the ramblings of a twisted mind, actually the ramblings of a couple of twisted minds if you count my friend Leon, who could be talked into making movies with me as long as I bought the film.
One summer day, while out for a stroll, little did Leon know that he was about to encounter something so foul, so evil, so horrifying ... and the nightmare was just beginning ...
Click the button below to experience that terrible tale of terror that is ... SKATEBOARD! ...
But wait, there's more! If you haven't already been reduced to a quivering pile of jelly ... can you pile jelly? ... anyway, if that wasn't scary enough, then experience the horror that was unleashed during the dreaded day of the HOOVER OF THE DAMNED!...
Pleasant dreams, everyone! More Christmas fun tomorrow!
Greetings, fellow babies and welcome to ... uh ... day 8 of the Christmas Countdown. Wait, make that day 9. So what happened to days 4 through 8, you may ask? What can I say, the elves are lazy this year. Plus something died in our heater vent at home, I kid you not, so my mind hasn't been occupied so much with visions of sugar-plum fairies as with visions of festering rat corpses. Which does very little to get one in the Christmas spirit, as it were.
But fear not, I'll make it up to you! Starting today, with a little yuletide game called "Dress The Snowman." Okay, it's not so much a game but a little interactive page where you can take your basic naked (G-rated) snowman, and add eyes, nose, mouth, hat, and other accessories so as to express your artistic urges, in a way that won't get you into too much trouble. All tools are provided, there's no charge, so what are you waiting for, get creative!
Click on the Etch-A-Sketch pad to Dress Your Own Snowman!
It's time for the Christmas Countdown!
2. Down a hopper into the furnace comes the carefully mixed ingredients. It takes about three weeks to change a batch of the raw material into usable glass, which is of almost the same kind as that used for electric-light bulbs.
3. From time to time, a sample of glass is taken out of the furnace for testing. Just as an expert candy maker can tell when candy is ready to take from the stove, so a skilled glass worker can judge the quality of glass by eye. The viscosity shows when the glass is ready for use.
4. New Material is added little by little until about thirty-five tons of glass has been prepared. Guarded by steel shields from the 2,800 degree heat, a workman pushes the finely ground mixture onto the molten mass.
5. Shielding his eyes from the blinding glare of the flames with a window of dark glass, a workman peers through an opening in the furnace, whose heat reproduces in miniature the conditions on the sun.
6. Streaming from the furnace, molten glass enters the "ribbon machine," which carries it along between rollers like a moving ribbon. This machine is also used in the manufacture of electric-light bulbs.
7. As the ribbon goes along horizontally, clinging to the underside of a moving belt, puffs of compressed air blow through it from above to form bubbles that grow in size until each is plucked off between the halves of a mold moving up to meet it.
8. Clamped inside the mold, the bubble of glass is blown up to the desired shape. In the picture here, one of the molds has been opened to show how the glass sphere is formed with its neck attached. Molds are changed to make ornaments of any type.
9. Asbestos "hands" on this rotary transfer mechanism take the hot, shaped bulbs from the molds of the ribbon machine. Then, turning from a horizontal to a vertical position, they lay them on a belt ...
10. ... which carries them to the "lehr" for cooling. It takes the globes about twenty minutes to pass through this forty-foot machine, where the temperature is lowered gradually to prevent strains.
11. Emerging from the lehr, the bulbs are carried by a moving belt past girls who remove broken pieces. At this stage, the clear glass spheres resemble soap bubbles floating on a stream of water. A pound of glass makes thirty average-size globes.
12. These girl inspectors are examining the globes for imperfections. Modern machine methods used at the Corning plant not only permit greater speed of production, but also turn out stronger and much more uniform ornaments.
13. Picking up bulbs at random from the moving belt, this inspector holds them against the polariscope, in which polarized light reveals any strains created in cooling.
14. Another type of polarized-light testing instrument is seen here. When a bulb is held up in front of the lighted screen, tell-tale iridescent patters show lines of stress or tension which might make it break easily.
15. Here girls are putting the bulbs on racks in a machine for silvering and coloring. First, chemicals are sprayed up through the necks to give a mirrorlike [sic] surface inside ...
16. ... then the racks pass through the dye vats where baths of brilliant color give them the outer tints of read, blue, green, gold, and silver that add sparkle to trees on Christmas Day.
17. After, the dye has been dried quickly by heat, the necks are cut off by an automatic machine. Occasionally, however, one of the bulbs gets by the machine. It is the job of this girl to catch such strays and cut off their necks by hand on a Carborundum wheel.
18. At the end of the long production line, the globes are sorted and broken ones are removed. Now they are packed in partitioned cardboard boxes.
19. Enough ornaments to cover a whole forest of Christmas trees are contained in these cartons stacked in a warehouse awaiting shipment. Two million are turned out every week.
WOW!!! Did you have any idea what the USA used to be capable of doing, before we outsourced everything to Walmart? True, we were on the brink of war in January of 1941, and by December 7th of that year I'm guessing the Corning Glass Works of Wellsboro, Pa., had switched most of their glass production lines over to lenses (for cameras, binoculars, and bomb sites), searchlights, and other baubles of a more military persuasion. 
or, The Best Christmas Presents of All Time, whether or not I got them. And mostly I didn't get 'em, simply because like pretty much everybody else I knew growing up, our parents didn't really have any money. Oh, sure, they had enough to pay for boring stuff like school clothes and food, and the occasional dinner out at Burger King, and we could always count on Santa bringing us one thing on our list that we really, really wanted ... but face it, kids are rotten little greedy monsters (I was, anyway) and the differences between the lists of "What I Asked Santa For" and "What Santa Actually Brought Me" were rather disparate.
So, anyway, at the top of my list of Best Christmas Presents of All Time, #1 has to be: An Electric Car. And by Electric Car I don't mean something ecological and trendy by today's standards, none of that, what I'm talking about is a scaled-down racing car (or really any scaled-down car, could be an Edsel for all I'd care) with an electric motor, that you could actually sit in and drive down the sidewalk. The ultimate in cool.
Number 2 on the list, just a fraction of an inch below number one, is: An Erector Set. Preferably with a motor and about 47,000 pieces, most of which you'd lose within an hour of opening the case, while trying to build an attack robot and succeeding only in cross-threading four wheels together into something vaguely resembling a wobbly roller skate.
And taking the bronze for Best Christmas present of all time: The Thingmaker. Preferably the Fright Factory edition, but I would have turned cartwheels over any version.
The lead-up to The Big Day was a big deal in our family, and though I'm foggy on most of the specifics, it always involved decorating the front room windows, usually with Glass Wax. The photo here is NOT a Glass Wax window decoration, but my dad's own artistic creation way back when, probably before I was born, and you can probably guess that he's a pretty good draftsman in his own right. But for mere mortals with limited time and/or painting skills, nothing beats Glass Wax for window decorations, which my dad did every year (that I remember, anyway), and I always thought that everybody in the world put Glass Wax window decorations up every Christmas. 
How it works was, you picked up a can of Glass Wax at your local store (probably Fedco, that was the place to shop when I was a kid in LA), and dug your Christmas stencils out of the garage (if you didn't feel like springing another fifty-nine cents for new stencils ever year), and then you take a rag, pour some Glass Wax on it, hold the stencil against the window, and dab Glass wax in the stencil cut-out area (on the glass). Then you carefully take away the stencil, and when the Glass Wax dries, you're left with a translucent pink-ish image of, say, Santa Claus, an elf, holly, a Christmas tree, whatever. Then you repeat the process on other parts of your window, or windows, until you've got the Christmas scene you desired.
I love Glass Wax window stencils. I remember next to nothing about how they actually looked on the window, but in my mind's eye there is nothing that says Christmas like Glass Wax windows stencils.
And I specifically remember one particular Christmas record that burned itself into my brain: Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanian's "Twas The Night Before Christmas." Their cover of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," complete with wacky sound effects and actual dialog between Rudolph and Santa, is an absolute classic that never failed to reduce me to tears of laughter. I'd bring my friends over just to play them "Rudolph" and we all thought it was hilarious. True, we were about ten and the height of sophisticated humor involved milk coming out of somebody else's nose, so there is that. 
"The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery. It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand...It thrilled [Scrooge] with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black."
During the seventies the BBC entrusted this job to an annual anthology series entitled, logically enough, A Ghost Story for Christmas, and some of the (rather ominous) titles include A Warning to the Curious, Number 13, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, and Whistle And I'll Come To You. Rosemary Hill was the producer and Lawrence Gordon Clark directed all but the final installment, and you've probably never heard of them either, but they were an effective team and together produced a rather highly regarded series of creepy Christmas shows. 
It stars, nominally, Dana Andrews and Peggy Cumins, and they're both fine, but they can't hold a candle to our title character, of which nightmares are made. Seriously, if there is an uglier and/or scarier visage in the history of monster movies, I don't know what it is. And don't tell me Alien because the Demon in Night of the Demon would eat Alien for breakfast. Brrr.
