Putting up the Lights!

It’s that time of year. Typically I try to do it in Thanksgiving week but I’ll be out doing it tomorrow. Yes – it’s the time of year to put up the Christmas lights… the outside Christmas lights. These days I have a nice set of lights that I have stored perfectly and that clip right into place… nice and neat. And although it’s going to be cold (mid-20’s) it’s all organized, ready to go and will be a fairly easy job.

Growing up, not so much.
Growing up, putting up the lights was a chore. It was usually my Dad and me, and sometimes my younger brother. There were a few reasons that putting up our lights back then was so much work.

To begin with – we used to put up a lot of them – all around our big deck and the entire perimeter of the house. Not a big house, but a lot of second story work. We also never seemed to do the exact design twice. I think that it was due more to the fact that every year another string would stop working or go missing.

We used the big lights back then – the type where you screwed each bulb in – and it sometimes took forever to get them all working, and they got really hot and burned your hand if you grabbed them for too long. Probably the biggest thing was that we had to nail every string up, and we used old style brads and hammers. Nothing like holding trying to hold the lights taut, hold the tiny brads in place and trying to swing the hammer in the snow or cold weather.

I have vivid memories of being very cold and wet when putting up lights… but they’re still good memories because they make me recall the great Christmases that I had growing up. It seemed like back then all of the neighbors in good ol’ suburbia put up lots of Christmas lights. Then - in the early ‘70s, we had the energy crisis and everyone became very energy conscious. It was rare to see lights up on any house for awhile and it was pretty depressing. It seemed that many of the people never started putting lights up again after that… kind of used it as an excuse.

Anyway – this would be a great weekend for you all to get your light up! Let’s get those neighborhoods a-glowing!

Bangs, Backpacks & Britches

Bangs. Did you have “bangs” when you were a kid? I know they were a big thing for girls, but remember how cool it was as a guy to have bangs? It was awful when it was haircut time – if you were like me, then mom did all the haircutting when you were young. She cycled through the styles… buzzcuts in the warmer months, and a decent covering throughout the rest of the year. How's that for an awesome school picture? circa 1968.

I think my favorite was having bangs, ‘cause I loved it when they got long. It felt so cool to have them over your eyebrows and getting in your eyes. Of course we were emulating the Beatles and the more we could look like the Liverpool Lads, the cooler we felt. And we also used to let the hair grow and hang down in front of our ears so we had “sideburns”. Then we kind of looked like Mr. Spock, and that was really cool, too.

As we got into High School, the bangs grew into “long all over” hair, with us constantly trying to whip our heads to keep it out of our face. And this eventually gave way to styled hair at “hair studios”. Oh, what a interesting hair tale we traveled.

Backpacks.
We never had them in school. We carried our stuff in our hands. We had books, Pee-Chees and notebooks, and we carried them. If the weather was bad, we put them inside our coats. We kept the supplies we used at school in our homeroom class and/or in our lockers. The fun thing about Pee-Chees was how we altered the drawings on them. More on that some other time.

These days kids seem to have everything and are prepared for a weekend camp-out every day that they go to school. Often the backpacks are bigger than the little kids hauling it. A change of clothes; a local bus, regional train and international airplane schedule; seeds and starter plants to plant their own garden… who knows what’s all really in there. I just know that we seemed to get by just fine with a lot less.

Britches. At some point in my life, I grew up enough to be wearing “pants” or “jeans”, or maybe even slacks. This did not, however, change the fact that my grandmothers would still comment on what a nice pair of britches I had on. It’s just one of those funny words that has, for the most part, gone the way of other words like trousers, stockings (guys socks – my dad still says this) and canvas high-tops.

What things do you remember having when you grew up that have been "replaced" or "improved" today?

The Snow of '68

We have our first prediction of snow in the next couple of days. I do enjoy the snow, and that’s largely because I grew up in Seattle where we didn’t have much of it. There were a couple of good snow storms when I grew up, but they were the exception, not the rule.

I do remember that we had a big storm in ’68. This happened to coincide with when my folks decided to do an addition to our home. We had the dining room addition foundation poured, walls and roof framed, and the contractor had just opened up the wall between our kitchen and the new dining room when the storm hit. And it was a big one – dumped 3 feet of snow in a short amount of time. You guessed it – we ended up with snow in our kitchen. My mom wasn’t too happy, but we did get a good story out of the experience, though.

It did make for good sledding, though, which was a rarity in our area. Living above the Puget Sound we had some good hills. So – with the big snow – we all got some great nights of sledding fun. We rode a route that started right by our house and, if you did it right, could take you all the way to the beach. The normal stopping place was about half the way down. The funnest thing I remember was that one of our neighbors had a big black lab named Tucker. They’d keep him at the midpoint until a bunch of us piled there, and we’d all rope our sleds together and he’d haul them all up the hill for us. It was one of the coolest things to us as kids.

We get a lot of snow here in Pullman where I live now, but my funnest memories are of the few times we had big snow where I grew up.

Halloween's a-comin'

It’s coming up in only a couple of weeks – one of every kids most favorite days - Halloween. I’m sure that it’s as much of an exciting time today as it was when I was growing up. There was nothing that caused us such anticipated joy and excitement as trick-or-treating on Halloween.

When I tried to figure out why it was such a big deal, I think it’s because we realized that WE were in control of our destiny! All that was required was that we spend a little bit of time planning and we could make an incredible haul. I remember sitting down with my friends and trying to draw a map of the neighborhood, and even the adjacent neighborhoods… we had big plans to hit as many house as we possibly could.

There were a few places we had to make sure to hit, since we knew from previous years that there were good treats to be had there – one house even used to give away full-size candy bars! We had to work fast, but we also had to maximize our time out in the streets. We would negotiate with our moms as to how soon we could start, and how late we could stay out. The older we got, the longer we got to be collecting free candy. It was great!

When we were really young, we had plenty of fun fancy costumes (remember that face-mask smell?) and were the pride of our moms as we went door to door and received many an “Awww, aren’t you cute! Who are you tonight?” By the time we reached our tweens and early teens, it was just a matter of putting on some ragged clothes, scribbling a beard on your face with mom’s or your sister’s mascara, and “ta-dah” you were a bum! Grab the biggest pillowcase you could find and make for the road, there was candy to haul in tonight!

We had fun! There wasn’t the fear unknown people, or harm from candy that may have been tampered with that kids might be faced with today. It was basically a good, clean, fun type of experience and one that brings back plenty of pleasant memories still today.

Do you have some favorite memories or stories from your youth as a trick-or-treater?

The Ice Cream Truck

There was nothing that would lift the spirits of the entire gaggle of neighborhood kids quite like the approaching sound of the ice cream truck. Also called the Popsicle man, or Popsicle lady, depending on who had the route that summer.

Typically, it was late afternoon and the end of a long day of playing outside. The whole neighborhood was out and nearing the end of our energy. As soon as we could begin to hear the silly little music a bunch of thoughts would start to go through our heads. Would mom say it was ok to have an ice cream? Where was the truck – it was always so hard to tell where the music was coming from? Did we have time to run home to get money from mom and get back in time? There were so many choices – what would you get? Although, all of the sudden we had plenty of energy to make sure that we got home and back in time to get catch the truck.

There are a couple of things to note, here. First off, as kids, we typically didn’t have money in our pockets. Not that we didn’t have money, we just didn’t carry it with us. Secondly, this was very likely the highlight of the day for many of us. We’d often be hoping and praying that the truck would come because it was very special. And lastly, our mom’s didn’t have freezers stocked full of ice cream treats. This really was a treat, and especially because there was a lot of variety to choose from – and some things you might not ever get otherwise.

It was a sweet, cold treat on a long, hot day and one of the great memories of growing up!