Welcome to The Antique Christmas Lights Museum, where you'll find information about the development of electric Christmas lighting in America during the 1900-1960 time period, the years this collector considers to be the Golden Age of electric Christmas lighting. Here you'll learn all about twentieth century electric holiday lighting in the United States, and see how it has changed over the years.
George Melachrino for your atomic Christmas party.
Fairy On The Christmas Tree
I am going to be posting listen links for some of my favorite Chistmas songs. These will just be quick entries without elaboration so that I can get them circulated on my new Blip FM stream. There will be kinks, I will work them out later. The tracks are hosted on rapidshare.
Santa's Too Fat For The Hula Hoop
Ricardo Montalban earned his place in Christmas Music History when he sang "Baby It's Cold Outside" in the movie Neptune's Daughter. This marks the first of more than 50 years of recording this beatiful duet. They are being taken down all of the internet, but here is a link to a site that has the imbed from the original scene.
Today's post is a double dipper. The same post going up on both of my blogs. Decorating the public garden for Christmas is where my passion for horticulture and Christmas come together. Along with the whole horticulture crew I decorated a 30 foot spruce with ornaments. The main thing that made this possible was the availability of large shatter-proof ornaments at a local big box center. Without this I would have needed a lot more money. These 10 dollar ornaments have been 4 to 6 times that online.
The first time I saw that sturdy Spruce I wanted to decorate it for Christmas!
There is an image here of my boss on the ladder that gives you an idea how high up the ornaments had to be placed. What you cannot get a sense of is the difficulty in getting the ladder positioned to keep the climber and safe, not to mention the ferocity of the wind.
Here, now, for your listening pleasure, Big Balls of Holly proudly presents Christmas At Our House. Recorded in 1958 this album features the dulcet tones of Martha Tilton as well as the golden digits of George Mather at The Console.What we have here is a classic Christmas recording from some big time and long time Christmas music players. This is the record that was referenced in The Captain's Yuleblog a couple of seasons back, so read that again, please. The great find here is God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. This is the original release of the Thurl Ravenscroft version of this song. Mr Ravenscroft is most famous to Christmas music fans for having sung "You're A Mean One Mr. Grinch." IF that is news to you, yes you are thinking or the correct version and like all of us you thought that Boris Karloff sang that. Karloff did the narration of the original cartoon and Ravenscroft did the song. I am also adding the beautiful Martha Tilton version of Jingle Bells to my primary Christmas playlist, and straight to my ipod. It is interesting to note a couple of facts here. Ravenscroft and Tilton lived through just about all of Christmas music recording history and died within a year or so of each other in 2005 and 2006. Also, on the Martha Tilton tribute website neither these songs nor this album are listed in her discography. If you know any TIlton fans, make sure they see this share. Finally, I am adding a listening link for another Thurl Ravenscroft song. I do not have the record, but rather, found this at WFMU's Beware of the Blog.
Christmas At Our House
Santa's Too Fat For The Hula Hoop
Union Blowmold Christmas Mouse Final Price $38.50Wow! This is pretty cool. Lots of people collect blow molds. Usually people are collecting these because they had something similar as a child, or that is to say, their parents did. What we have here is what I call a crossover. An item that moves from personally nostalgic to generally nostalgic. What I mean is that this item makes you feel like displaying it for Christmas even if you have never seen it before today. It's early in the year, but I think this will go for more than 50 dollars. If we were in December this would make $75 easy.
