Wonderwall 16

Looking A Lot Like...

Perhaps I'm not perfectly qualified to be a completely unbiased judge on this matter; perhaps I view all of this through a warm, magic haze of nostalgia. But all these "vintage" decorations all seem to me to be vastly superior to most modern versions of Christmas cardboard. Most card decorations of today have flat colors and are "cartoony" in the worst possible sense of the word. These old decorations have gleams and glints and shades of color, and, while they are far from realistic, they are "cartoony" in the best sense of the word. Cute without being cutesy; simple, but not simplistic. Full of character while remaining iconic. Why can't they just keep running these, or do they do so somewhere more blessed that around here?

Thanksgiving As I Remember It

Every November when I was in elementary school the teacher and her aide would put up a fall display on the cork-board, featuring not only Thanksgiving imagery but things like autumn leaves, corn shocks, and squirrels. I managed to track down some pictures of these and present them here as things that evoke some of my strongest memories of Thanksgiving. These were the days when the holiday still had a slight air of reverence and formality about it; if you didn't actually dress up for it, you still wore better clothes than usual. This was before "turkey day" turned into a sort of bilious belch between Halloween and Christmas. Most of these cut-outs were made by a company called Dennison.