Tag Archives: ThrowbackThursday

Not Yet Christmas

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Alistair Sim meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come in the 1951 "Scrooge."
Alistair Sim meets the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come in the 1951 “Scrooge.”
Today is the first day of my husband’s Christmas vacation, while for me it’s the eighth vacation day. As luck would have it, he woke up with a slight fever and other cold symptoms this morning. If it isn’t the same bug I had a couple of weeks ago, then I’ll probably come down with it right about the time I’m suppose to go back to work. Fun, no?

Other than finishing the Christmas Ghost Story (whose title is currently “Whips for the Wicked”) and copy editing, I haven’t gotten any writing done so far this vacation. Some years I manage to get a lot of writing in during my time off for the holiday, but most years are more like this. There are enough things I need to do (finish shopping, mail last minute things, deliver gifts, visit people, clean, cook, change my mind about what we’re cooking a zillion times, watch Christmas movies, sleep in, and spend time just staring at the tree while listening to Christmas music) that very little writing gets done.

That’s okay. One’s mental and creative batteries can get a recharge from at least some of those holiday activities. Being an introvert who does a really good job of faking extroversion, it’s complicated. I get a lot out of spending time with people I love. And I really enjoy those moments when a loved one is overjoyed with a gift you gave them. Heck, I get a charge when I see someone being really excited by a gift someone else gave them. And my time spent with some of my favorite Christmas movies, particularly the ones that make me cry, is good for both my soul and my creative subconscious.

Just this morning I found myself once again explaining to my Aunt Silly, who is probably the biggest extrovert in the family, why I don’t mind having Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with just Michael and I. Yes, I love my friends and family. I enjoyed the time spent with several on Thanksgiving, and everyone who came to the party, and all the visiting I did with family members on Tuesday. And yes, on past Christmases I’ve loved watching my nieces opening presents on Christmas morning with their Grandma. I just don’t need that all the time.

Grandma with myself and my almost-twin cousin.
Grandma with myself and my almost-twin cousin as babies.
And I have to admit, Christmas with the extended family hasn’t been the same since Grandma died. I sometimes miss the big boisterous Christmas Eves when you never knew which shirt-tail relatives would pop in next to say “Merry Christmas” and see everyone. Grandma’s biological children, adopted children, step-children, and honorary children and their kids and grandkids would often make an appearance. Not to mention some of the children and grandchildren of Grandpa’s siblings some of whom still lived nearby. And it really was a wildly extended group.

I remember one day in High School not long after Mom, my sister, and I had moved to southwest Washington (after my parents divorce back in Colorado), a classmate whose name I hadn’t learned, yet, walked up to me and said, “I think we’re cousins.” We weren’t actually related by genetics, it turned out. She was the daughter of the step-son of one of my mom’s adopted father’s sisters. (Say that three times fast!) By the usual definitions, we weren’t cousins, but her entire life she had called my grandmother “Aunt Gertie.” And that was to distinguish Grandma from her other Great-aunt Gertrude, because Grandpa George (Mom’s adopted dad) wasn’t just married to a Gertrude, one of his sisters was also named Gertrude. So she had both an Aunt Gertie and and Aunt Gert.

But what made those big get-togethers work was Grandma. She was happy to see whoever showed up, and her laughter and love poured out and infected all the rest of us. So even when the relative was someone that you couldn’t remember precisely how they were related, they loved Grandma and she loved them, and that made everything feel right. Without the glue of Grandma’s love, some of us are just that awkward person who used to spend some holidays together.

Our lives have drifted in different ways. I’m an out queer guy who votes for Democrats and Greens and Socialists, and then complains that my own choices for elected official are too conservative. That makes me the polar opposite of a bunch of my relatives. That’s not the only way I’m an alien to some of them. Even my cousin who’s an engineer and works for Intel has never quite understood what a Technical Writer/Information Architect actually does, for example.

And don’t get me started on the gulfs between me and some folks on Dad’s side of the family!

I’ve digressed a long way from where I meant to go with this post. It’s nearly Christmas, yet not quite. There are lights on the trees and presents beneath it. Stockings are hung. Soon there will be mulled wine steaming in the kitchen. Cookies will be consumed. The NORAD Santa tracker will be consulted a few times. Carols will be sung. If I play my cards right, I might convince my poor, sick, hobbling-on-crutches husband to kiss under a sprig of mistletoe.

A can’t wait to see what Santa brings us!

Presents under the tree

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My sister and I with our presents Christmas morning at my paternal grandparents; house.
My sister and I with our presents Christmas morning at my paternal grandparents’ house. My guess is I’m about 9 years old in this pic. (Click to embiggen)
I remember lots of Christmases being asked to pose with my presents so one of my grandparents could take a picture. I remember it happening a lot. Some years they would have several of the kids pose together. Some years, particularly when one or more sets of cousins were present, they’d arrange a photo first with one, then the next kid, and the next until we were all done.

I don’t have very many of those pictures. I’m not sure which extended family member ended up with them. The picture above is one of the very few I have in which my sister appears with me. I don’t have any with my cousins. And since I never spent a Christmas with my younger half-siblings, I don’t have any with them, either. In the modern era of digital image sharing, I suspect that if people take that particular kind of picture that it gets shared with all the relatives who sent the kid a toy. I know that part of the reason this particular scan is such low resolution is that for a while one of the standard processing options you could ask for when sending film in to get photos made, was you would receive one image that was about 3 inches tall by 5 inches wide, and then printed on the same chunk of photo paper two smaller images, about one-and-a-quarter inches by one-and-a-quarter. Besides the two duplicate images being a lot smaller, they were also cropped square, so some of the image on the left and right was lost.

The idea was you could take some scissor and cut off the two duplicates from all the pictures and share them around. That’s how this picture, take at my paternal grandparents’ house, maybe by my grandparents, wound up in my other grandma’s photo album. One of the miniature duplicates was mailed to her.

The other reason the picture is a bit hard to make out is that the photo was printed on a faux-linen texture photo paper. The texture introduces some noise into the image. And over time, the parts of the texture that is raised tends to rub of and lose part of the image.

I cropped this down a bit to cut out the boring parts of the room in hopes the picture would look a bit more interesting, but the resolution at which it was scanned, plus the tiny size of the original are conspiring against me.

I remember the robot and kept it for years. It walked back and forth, the chest panel opened up and these sort of laser canon things folded out and made a lot of noise while the robot’s upper body spun around. In my early teens the robot started falling apart, so I disassembled it and tried to figure out if I could rebuild any of it into anything useful or cool. I never quite liked any of the things I transformed it into.

I don’t remember who gave that one to me, though based on the size my guess would be my paternal grandparents. I have a lot more memories of poking and prodding presents under the tree during the days and weeks leading up to Christmas than I do of opening presents Christmas morning. I loved lifting the presents, turning them this way and that, figuring out the relative mass of different parts of the package to get an idea of the shape of whatever was in the box. Guessing what materials the gift is made for by the weight, density, and most importantly the noise it made as it moved in the box.

It’s why my maternal grandma always set up at least one box with extra things inside (buttons, bolts, little bells inside mint tins, et cetera) to make weird rattling noises. And it’s one reason I don’t feel like a Christmas tree is complete until there are wrapped presents under it. It isn’t that I want a lot of gifts. I just want some wrapped boxes to try to guess the contents of. And to have days to check it out and think about it. It’s the puzzle and the potential of things in might be that seems to get the little kid in me most giddy.

There’s also the pretty paper and ribbons and such. Especially back when a lot of the presents would come from relatives who lived far away and would mail them to us. All of the wrapping would be different. One aunt might have wrapped on the presents in cream-colored paper with images of holly leaves and berries, for instance, and another had silver paper with snowflakes. I remember some wrapping paper would have images that weren’t just a few abstract or cartoon characters, but would be a fully illustrated Christmas scene, such as a family decorating a tree, or people going sledding. I like trying to compose stories for those pictures.

I now enjoy giving presents a lot more than getting them. Some years I try to wrap everything in similar paper. I seldom stick to it, though, because there is also certain wrapping paper I find that I think a particular friend or relative will really like it. Or it reminds me of them in some way. I seldom survey anyone afterward, but sometimes someone will comment on the cool wrapping paper, and that makes me feel as if I accomplished the mission.

I probably think about this sort of thing a lot more than other people do. But it’s a pretty harmless obsession. And it adds a bit of bright color to the world, so that can’t be bad.

Grandma’s houses… and other things

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Christmas at my Grandma's, age 4. There are a surprising number of pictures of me with that Tonka steam shovel in later years.
Christmas at my Grandma’s, age 4. There are a surprising number of pictures of me with that Tonka steam shovel in later years. (Click to embiggen)
“Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go…” as the song says. My paternal Grandmother lived for most of my life in a five-bedroom house that Grandpa built when I was 2 years old. And for as long as my parents were still married to each other, nearly every Christmas and Thanksgiving (a lot of the Easters) was spent at that house. When I was very young, my maternal Grandmother lived in the same small Colorado town as my paternal Grandparents, so I got to see her (and my Great-grandparents) at least briefly for each of those holidays as well.

Grandma lived in three different houses during that time… Continue reading Grandma’s houses… and other things →

Storms, Brains, and Reanimated Flesh – more of why I love sf/f

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The creature meets the innocent girl... © Universal Pictures
The creature meets the innocent girl… © Universal Pictures (Click to embiggen)

I don’t remember when I first saw the 1931 film Frankenstein, directed by James Whale. I also can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the basic story of Frankenstein. I don’t know for sure what my first exposure was to the myth. I remember watching more than one of the Universal Studios Frankenstein movies with my mom when I was young. I remember one particular time watching it with my mom and my sister, my sister was maybe four or five years old and kept asking questions. I was getting impatient, and Mom told me I had been exactly the same way when I had been my sister’s age.

What I do remember, very clearly, is that I always felt sorry for the monster… Continue reading Storms, Brains, and Reanimated Flesh – more of why I love sf/f →

Nuclear Dinosaurs and Tragic Heroes – more of why I love sf/f

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Image from the 1954 Gojira (click to embiggen)
Image from the 1954 Gojira (click to embiggen)
I don’t remember precisely when I saw my first Godzilla movie. I was probably four or five years old. When we were living in the parts of Colorado where all the TV stations we received came from Denver, one of those channels had a Saturday afternoon movie called Science Fiction Theatre (or something like that) which seemed to almost exclusively show Japanese sci fi films. So there were a lot of Godzilla, Mothra, and other kaiju films that I saw during this time.

Often when there were parts of the plot that didn’t make sense to me, Mom would explain it away as the problems with translation. She had already explained about how the movies were originally filmed in Japanese, then dubbed into English. So anything else that seemed odd or illogical was because of that. It didn’t occur to me until later that part of the process of translating it for an American audience also sometimes involved editing the film, taking out scenes or cutting them short.

Godzilla was, of course, my favorite… Continue reading Nuclear Dinosaurs and Tragic Heroes – more of why I love sf/f →

Infinity In Your Mailbox – more of why I love sf/f

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Cover of the Science Fiction Book Club edition of the 1975 edition of the Annual World's Best SF series edited by Donald Wolheim.
Cover of the Science Fiction Book Club edition of the 1975 edition of the Annual World’s Best SF series edited by Donald Wolheim.
I joined the science fiction book club at three different points in my life. The first time was when I was about 13 or 14 years old, and had no idea what I was getting myself into. My mom was not very happy when the first package of books arrived. Fortunately, my paternal grandmother found out about it before my dad did and was able to run some interference for me. So this wasn’t one of the incidents that led to a beating, but it was a close thing.

I wound up doing extra chores at my grandparents’ house to earn the money to cover it. Dad let me remain a member for a year, strictly limiting what I was allowed to order until I’d met the obligation so I could quit the club. I wound up with a bunch of books. And they were hardcover—they were cheap hardcover, but still more sturdy than the paperbacks that most of my collection consisted of before then.

The second time was the summer just before I turned 18, and at least I had a job and was earning my own money.

The book club reeled you in with the introductory packet: for a token payment of two cents, you could choose something like six books from a list. There was a little asterisk statement about paying shipping and handling, which was always more expensive than you thought it would be. But compared to paying full price for the hardcover version when they first came out, it was still a bargain. After that you received a monthly mailing, and if you forgot to return the card that said, “send nothing at this time,” you’d get whatever that month’s book was. You could choose other books out of the mini catalog that came in each month’s mailing. And again, the prices weren’t bad, even with the shipping and handling.

The killer was if you didn’t return the card in time. Because you’d receive books you didn’t want, and usually wound up paying for them because returning them was more of a hassle.

The other downsides were that generally the books were a few years old. They usually didn’t become available to the book club until the original bookstore sales had dropped off for the hard cover, and then the paperback release. The amount of money the authors received was less than for bookstore sales, though most writers who have been willing to talk about it seem to take the attitude that a sale is better than no sale.

When I was living in redneck rural communities, back before the existence of the Internet, a book club was a means to get books that you otherwise might not ever know existed.

The second time I joined, I picked every anthology that was on the list for my initial package. Which included two different years of Donald Wolheim’s Annual World’s Best Science Fiction collections. I loved those kinds of anthologies, because I got a bunch of different stories by different authors. One tale might be a space adventure, another a dark exploration of the nature or identity, another a humorous examination of the future of crime, and the next might have a wizard outwitting a god. Anything could be between those pages!

And I didn’t even have to order one of the books to get a bit of that thrilling sense of wonder. Half the fun of the book club, for me, was reading the catalog each month. Because books and authors I had not heard of—even after I had moved to a slightly larger town that actually had a book store, and not only that more than one!—each received a paragraph or two of description, along with a picture of the cover. So even if I didn’t order the book at the time, later if I saw a copy in a used bookstore, or saw other books by the author, I had a better idea of what the book would be like than I would get just from reading the cover blurbs.

Every month I received a colorful display of dozens of imagined worlds, ranging from high fantasy to gritty near future sci fi thrillers to epic space battles between empires to individual journies of discovery. And all I had to do was, every now and then, buy one of those wondrous books. It was really a small price to pay for infinity.

No wonder 14-year-old me had thought nothing of the consequences when I taped two shiny pennies to a piece of card stock, scribbled my name and address on one side, then swiped an envelope and stamp from Mom’s desk. An infinity of wonder would be mine!