Santa Claus before Turkey Day - Oh My!
Some people love the Christmas / Hanukkah / End-Of-Year / Winter Solstice celebrations so much that they hardly put away the decorations, before they start planning the next year's celebration.
When we are not reading books, we settle in for an hour or so after work hours to see what is on television, and we see the Red-Suited Wonder running all over the place already (that would be Santa for our international readers who may be unfamiliar with our customs).
He is equivalent to "Father Christmas", only he does not carry the switch that the some sterner European versions of Santa Claus carries. That is switch as in whip, not in on-off. Because, as we informed years ago, Father Christmas is also disciplinarian, and if their are naughty children, presumably he has the birch wooden switch at the ready.
At least that is what we are told by someone who had been born and raised in a couple of unnamed European countries. A quick search that we just did reveals that apparently there is a move to reform the custom, as it is too "frightening" in today's time for children, though we are reassured in any case, that even the sterner Father Christmas is never known to have actually used the whip / switch.
But we were certainly surprised to hear about it, it is a frightening enough prospect to contemplate given our contrasting benign and "jolly" American version of Santa who is usually pictured smacking his lips over a refreshing beverage.
And don't forget the holiday celebration begins officially with a Thanksgiving Parade in New York on this coming Thursday. We won't have a giant balloon, carried by a small army of volunteers, because we thought a giant inflatable book might be a little dull on network television.
We are not big celebrators of any of the holidays, because we are usually busy with the day-to-day details of running a book business. But between the ideas of a Black Friday and the newer Cyber-Monday, we feel we should make at least a symbolic holiday offering. Not exactly a "doorbuster", but in a virtual store, there are no doors, only "portals". And since people get rowdy on Black Friday in some stores, we skip the whole thing.
Not that we want to encourage excessive consumption, most of our merchandise is already attractively priced, especially since we have a lot of out-of-print items in our inventory, some of which are one of a kind.
And then before you know it in six weeks, it is New Years, and the Rose Bowl parade marches through Pasadena. Our claim to fame is that we actually went to Pasadena a couple of times for the parade. It was fun. The pretty girls look you right in the eye and smile as they wave. You can also smell the perfume of the flowers on the floats as they roll by, and you can see the actual marshal of the parade in all of their resplendent glory.
We saw Jimmy Stewart one time riding in an antique car, while he was still alive, and, Ricardo Montalban was riding atop a big yellow pyramid float, having something to do with Mexico, since the pyramid looked vaguely like the one at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan.
We were able to pull the pictures ot that from storage, and maybe we will put them online for your holiday admiration later. There is nothing like a big parade. And there there is something about an aging Hollywood star, riding on an imitation of an ancient Mayan monument on wheels, with the faint aroma of diesel smoke from the floats' engines wafting through the air to create a memorable moment that we can recall decades later. We see he was wearing a trademark white suit, made famous in all those Fantasy Island television episodes.
In Montalban's defense he looked much better in the "Wrath of Khan" the Star Trek movie which was released around the same time. And his biceps in that movie looked marvelous, unlike our own pipestem, book-holding appendages. So, honestly, he looked better than we did, even though at the time, we were decades younger than him.
We won't be sponsoring a float this year, revenues are a little down, and once again, our float idea for a giant shelf of books on wheels was voted down by the higher-ups as just a little too staid. That is because about 95 percent of our merchandise is old fashioned, hold-in-your-hand books. We do sell other items like compact disks, even a few DVDs. We have a list of over a thousand items - look at the link at the very top of the page where it says "Books For Sale" and click there to see a giant alphabetized list.
We have had a mint condition CD of Tony Bennett Christmas songs sitting on the shelf for a couple of years now, and we cannot believe that someone has not snapped it up.
If you are a Tony Bennett fan, or know one, it is the only "new" (actually it is years-old, but it is still in the shrink wrap) copy on the Internet, at least the last time we checked. You can click on the picture link to be whisked to the My-Lynx Associates website, where you can sign up in a minute. It is also available on other websites such as eBay and Amazon, but on Amazon it is lumped in with a bunch of other sellers, so it is a little harder to find. The eBay link is below the My-Lynx Associates picture link, we have a little store there on eBay that goes by the name of hitechandantique.com.
When we are not reading books, we settle in for an hour or so after work hours to see what is on television, and we see the Red-Suited Wonder running all over the place already (that would be Santa for our international readers who may be unfamiliar with our customs).
He is equivalent to "Father Christmas", only he does not carry the switch that the some sterner European versions of Santa Claus carries. That is switch as in whip, not in on-off. Because, as we informed years ago, Father Christmas is also disciplinarian, and if their are naughty children, presumably he has the birch wooden switch at the ready.
At least that is what we are told by someone who had been born and raised in a couple of unnamed European countries. A quick search that we just did reveals that apparently there is a move to reform the custom, as it is too "frightening" in today's time for children, though we are reassured in any case, that even the sterner Father Christmas is never known to have actually used the whip / switch.
But we were certainly surprised to hear about it, it is a frightening enough prospect to contemplate given our contrasting benign and "jolly" American version of Santa who is usually pictured smacking his lips over a refreshing beverage.
And don't forget the holiday celebration begins officially with a Thanksgiving Parade in New York on this coming Thursday. We won't have a giant balloon, carried by a small army of volunteers, because we thought a giant inflatable book might be a little dull on network television.
We are not big celebrators of any of the holidays, because we are usually busy with the day-to-day details of running a book business. But between the ideas of a Black Friday and the newer Cyber-Monday, we feel we should make at least a symbolic holiday offering. Not exactly a "doorbuster", but in a virtual store, there are no doors, only "portals". And since people get rowdy on Black Friday in some stores, we skip the whole thing.
Not that we want to encourage excessive consumption, most of our merchandise is already attractively priced, especially since we have a lot of out-of-print items in our inventory, some of which are one of a kind.
And then before you know it in six weeks, it is New Years, and the Rose Bowl parade marches through Pasadena. Our claim to fame is that we actually went to Pasadena a couple of times for the parade. It was fun. The pretty girls look you right in the eye and smile as they wave. You can also smell the perfume of the flowers on the floats as they roll by, and you can see the actual marshal of the parade in all of their resplendent glory.
We saw Jimmy Stewart one time riding in an antique car, while he was still alive, and, Ricardo Montalban was riding atop a big yellow pyramid float, having something to do with Mexico, since the pyramid looked vaguely like the one at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan.
We were able to pull the pictures ot that from storage, and maybe we will put them online for your holiday admiration later. There is nothing like a big parade. And there there is something about an aging Hollywood star, riding on an imitation of an ancient Mayan monument on wheels, with the faint aroma of diesel smoke from the floats' engines wafting through the air to create a memorable moment that we can recall decades later. We see he was wearing a trademark white suit, made famous in all those Fantasy Island television episodes.
In Montalban's defense he looked much better in the "Wrath of Khan" the Star Trek movie which was released around the same time. And his biceps in that movie looked marvelous, unlike our own pipestem, book-holding appendages. So, honestly, he looked better than we did, even though at the time, we were decades younger than him.
We won't be sponsoring a float this year, revenues are a little down, and once again, our float idea for a giant shelf of books on wheels was voted down by the higher-ups as just a little too staid. That is because about 95 percent of our merchandise is old fashioned, hold-in-your-hand books. We do sell other items like compact disks, even a few DVDs. We have a list of over a thousand items - look at the link at the very top of the page where it says "Books For Sale" and click there to see a giant alphabetized list.
We have had a mint condition CD of Tony Bennett Christmas songs sitting on the shelf for a couple of years now, and we cannot believe that someone has not snapped it up.
If you are a Tony Bennett fan, or know one, it is the only "new" (actually it is years-old, but it is still in the shrink wrap) copy on the Internet, at least the last time we checked. You can click on the picture link to be whisked to the My-Lynx Associates website, where you can sign up in a minute. It is also available on other websites such as eBay and Amazon, but on Amazon it is lumped in with a bunch of other sellers, so it is a little harder to find. The eBay link is below the My-Lynx Associates picture link, we have a little store there on eBay that goes by the name of hitechandantique.com.
Our own My-Lynx Associates Store
| Snowfall CD / DVD on eBay - qsell | |
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