“String by string, the lights weave a tale of love, joy, and festive cheer.”
Today is cloudy, but it is warm, in the 50’s. It will be cloudy all day. I am staying put today. My cold is back, worse than it had been. I’m going to stay nestled under a warm afghan and hope to feel better. The dogs will love it. Nala sleeps beside me against the the back of the couch while Henry sleeps at the bottom by my feet. They are comfortable. I am not.
I love Christmas carols. It doesn’t matter how often I hear them. I play them all, over and over because their time and season are limited. My mother used to play the albums on her hifi. We had the Bing Crosby album which I think every family in America had. My mother had her Frank Sinatra Christmas. I had Guy Lombardo. We had albums from Firestone and W.T. Grants, each record had a variety of singers and songs and new albums came out very year. I have four of the Firestone collection. I sing along with each of them.
We used to stencil the picture window. We used glass wax on Christmas stencils. It was easy. All you did was dab the glass wax on the stencil and voila, the stencil was transferred to the window. All of the figures were white. I remember Santa the best. He was a bit roly poly, was coming out of a chimney and was waving. We had trees and Santa in his sleigh with the reindeer. We took turns doing a stencil. The window was covered. We thought it was beautiful.
School seemed to last longer and longer the closer we got to Christmas vacation. The nuns had to work harder to keep us busy and quiet so they had us reading stories or coloring, most nativities. I remember a lot of brown and blue. The baby always had yellow hair.
We kept the tree lit, but the window candles didn’t go on until the late afternoon when the day started to darken. No one had white lights in the windows. Ours were orange but there were other windows with red or green lights. We always took a ride to see the lights. There was a lot of oohing and aahing. We went to Saugus to the street where very house was covered in multi-colored lights. The traffic moved slowly, all the better to see everything.
This year I have noticed more lights. I move slowly so as not to miss anything. My head swivels from side to side. I ooh and aah!
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December 17, 2023 at 2:51 pm
Hi Kat,
Another sunny day but warmer with a forecast high temperature of 66°.
When I was a kid, all the paintings and pictures of Jesus depicted him looking like a Northern European. He was depicted with blond flowing hair, blue eyes, and with a small nose. Your comment that the kids in your elementary class always colored the baby Jesus in the manger with yellow hair made me think about the depiction of traditional Jesus. I’m curious if when you were in Ghana did people have pictures of Jesus looking like a Negro man, or maybe depicted as a Semitic looking man? All the depictions of Moses in recent times made him look very Semitic with dark hair or later in his life with gray hair. Charleston Heston comes easily to mind.
Jews never had this issue because of the prohibition in the Ten Commandments to making graven images. Only in the 20th century did depictions of the deity even existed.
December 17, 2023 at 4:11 pm
Hi Bob,
It is still dark and dank here. It is also chilly despite it being in the low 50’s. The chill gets to the bone. In my books, Jesus had brown hair. He looked like most of the men I knew. I don’t remember too many depictions of Christ in the local churches in Ghana. They didn’t have stain glass windows and had few statues. I did see a painted figure inside one church who was black.
I think you’ll find hids interesting: