North Pole 911

Santa and his team of reindeer didn't always look this way.

This is how they looked the first time I saw them, their base sticking out of a garbage can at a really grungy estate sale.

And this is what I saw when I pulled it out. (What, you don't pull stuff out of the garbage at estate sales?) Broken and tangled, but with promise.

I found this guy abandoned in another room. I took both pieces to the clerk, and she looked at me like I was nuts and charged me a dollar.

Santa was a perfect fit. You can even see where the reins had been attached. The only modification I made was unscrewing the bottom and removing the old light fixture inside. I'm not comfortable with vintage lights. In fact, I am terrified of them. I'll just leave you with this advice: If you buy a string of old Christmas light sockets and want to see if they work, make sure the string is unplugged before you screw in a light bulb to test them. If you screw the light bulb into a live socket, make sure you're not wearing a fuzzy sweater. If you're wearing a fuzzy sweater, and the light bulb makes a loud POP! and ZZZT!, check to see if a spark has caught your sweater on fire. If a spark has caught your sweater on fire, remember what you learned in grade school: Stop, drop and roll. It works.

Once Santa and his sleigh had been repaired, it was time to introduce him to some other Santas. These three are candy containers from the 1940s and 50s. The one on the left has a hole in his mitten where a lollipop can be inserted, but I keep forgetting to buy lollipops. There's plenty of time for that.

Some goofy Santa snow globes, found on different trips to the thrift store.

And a large Santa light, a yard sale find. He also came with an old light-bulb-and-cord attachment, which I am not using but will probably replace. I think he'd look pretty impressive lit up.

They're living on the shelves formerly occupied by the turkeys, along with some spare plastic and celluloid deer.

Today's wrapping paper is another Tie-Tie print, this one called "Christmas Decorations" from 1946. The little sidebar photos are kind of hard to see, so I'm uploading them on flickr too, a few at a time. There's a whole group for vintage wrapping paper over there - great stuff!

In the meantime, I'm recovering from a Christmas ornament overdose. I'm feeling about Christmas ornaments the way a florist feels about roses the day after Valentine's Day. In the past week I have wrapped and mailed, I don't know, maybe 300 ornaments that I sold on eBay. (For which this soon-to-be-paying-tuition-mama is extremely, extremely grateful.) On Sunday, the youngster for whom we will soon be paying tuition urged me to decorate the Christmas tree. He was interested for the first 20 minutes. Then he vanished. Occasionally he would reappear and make a Zen-like observation like, "It is always good to have more." (That is a direct quote.) Hours and hours later, when all of the ornaments had been hung, I was not exactly in a festive Christmas mood. But I will be soon.

 

Comments

[Lavender Dreamer]

I have spent the past hour looking at your photos of Christmas decor! I love everything...it brings back such good memories! I was born in the early '50s and some things look so familiar! What fun I am having!