Christmas is coming/you can't put a price tag on that

I'm going to wallow in nostalgia here, because it's my blog and I can do what I want to.  These pictures are from an article about a book, Mid-Century Christmas.  I start with that one because we had those ornaments in my house.  We had the Shiny Brite round ones, and also the weird shapes:  one looked vaguely like a cluster of grapes, most like shapes not found in nature, some vaguely "space age" and "stream lined," but still pretty much the size of those balls above.

They were soon "old-fashioned" and replaced with handmade ornaments and dated ornaments and simply less shiny ornaments.  We also had some much larger round glass ornaments, deep blue, that went on the aluminum tree we put up for a short time:

That's not exactly the tree we had, but close enough.  It had a color wheel, too, which was supposed to change the color of the tree.  That worked better in concept than in reality.  The branches shot up at sharp angles and the color wheel (a flood light with a disc divided into quarters and primary colors for each quarter, which rotated slowly in front of the light) sat on the floor, throwing light up onto the bottoms of the branches, not at all dousing the whole tree in light, not even in a dark room.  We hung the huge blue balls on that tree, and turned on the color wheel, and it was....well, it was "modern."  I thought one year about hanging the tree from the ceiling, but the branches would have to have been glued into the pole that held them, and my father never would have tolerated my attempts at a mounting in the ceiling for the tree's base.  The tree lasted a few years, then was relegated to the attic in perpetuity (where all the larger Christmas ornaments dwelt 11 months of the year), and long before I could get my own house and take it, the aluminum tree was given away, along with all the glass Christmas ornaments.  By that time, of course, they were so out of style they were back in style, so too late.

Now I have to content myself with the 8mm movies my father made at Christmas, silent stuff with bad lighting (I still remember the light bar, a row of 4 flood lights which threatened to set the curtains on fire with their glaring heat and blinding brilliance.  We were always squinting on Christmas morning, according to the official record.)  I can't watch them, though, because I no longer have a projector nor have I paid to convert them to DVD, and now that I think of it, I'm not even sure where they are anymore.

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.