Merry Christmas!

Rice pudding, lingonberries and Swedish meatballs from Ingebretsen’s await!
…But no lutefisk (Bah!)

Posted: December 25th, 2003 under General.
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Christopher Radko’s Got My Number

Couple weeks ago I went with a friend to the General Store in Minnetonka for their annual pre-Christmas after-hours sale. This little event runs from 9pm to midnight one Thursday night in December, and as usual, it was wall-to-wall bedlam, with a great deal of elbow-jostling and shoulder-bumping going on (all good-humored, thank God).

About halfway through the festivities I stopped dead in my tracks like I’d been pole-axed, and just stood, quietly quaking, in front of one particular display. All memory circuits were blown; all nostalgia sensors overloaded. What, pray tell, would have induced such a state ? Let me reduce it to just two words:

SHINY BRITE

Christopher Radko, the Thomas Kinkade of the Christmas ornament industry, has added a “new” line to his highly lucrative empire of mouthblown, handpainted glass ornaments, and in doing so has proven that he has his fingers firmly planted on the pulse of boomers all across the country (me included.) He has revived Shiny Brite, a line of Christmas decorations that was ubiquitous in America in the ’40s. There are glass ball ornaments, some painted with horizontal stripes, others with indentations in the middle like shiny silver-edged craters. There are candlesticks with faux wax and flame-shaped bulbs. There are bubble lights, twirly lights, old-fashioned tinsel, and a half-dozen or so other items that have one big thing in common: We all had them in our homes when we were growing up.

They’re even packaged in the same style boxes , with the ecstatic blurb “Just like
Grandma’s!” added - - like we couldn’t see that!?! Jeez Louise, for years millions of us unpacked those identical boxes every December when it was time to get the tree up and decorated. The pricing is a little different these days, tho. Back in their heyday, a dozen Shiny Brite ornaments could be had for thirty-nine cents at Woolworth’s. Today, a box of a dozen of the same-size Radko-revived items will set you back nearly $50.

Still. I was fairly trembling with longing in front of the display, and it took me nearly 45 minutes to get past it. In the end, I decided against getting the $46.95 box of a dozen ornaments which are EXACTLY like the ones we had on our tree when I was growing up, and settled for buying a single ornament for $3.95. It’s a silver ball with white and pink horizontal stripes, an exact duplicate of one of the last remaining ornaments from my parents’ stash. I dropped the original a couple years ago - - I still wince thinking of the sound of that 50-year old memory getting smashed to a million paper-thin glass shards…..

Read more about the history of Shiny Brite here.

Posted: December 24th, 2003 under General.
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Peter Jackson Rules Again

Wednesday night the 17th we all went to see RETURN OF THE KING. Surly Elder Teenaged Unit [SETU] went with 3 or 4 of his usual mob, and we took SYTU [Surly Younger Teenaged Unit] and 3 of his usual cohorts with us. 7PM showing. Sold out. When some idiot started flashing a laser pointer at the screen before the lights went down, you could almost feel the suppressed rage in the rest of the audience. I had to force myself to stay seated and not stand up to shout at Mr. Moron: “One more flash of that thing, and you… are… going to be… PUMMELLED!” Thankfully no one had to resort to violence; the bozo wised up and put the frickin’ thing back in his pocket.

For 3 hours and 29 minutes we gasped, we cheered, we wept, and we kept having to pick up our jaws from the floor where they’d dropped in sheer amazement at the sights on the screen. Peter Jackson changed quite a few things, as in the first two films, but by now we trust him, and somehow– mirabile dictu!– it all worked, from beginning to end. I honestly can’t think of any movie-going experience I’ve had up til now where I felt quite as thrilled and awe-struck and emotionally involved. Forget the nominations for Oscars, folks. Just give ALL of ‘em to Jackson and his mighty crew. Praise them with great praise!

An interesting thing I noticed about the design of the city Minas Tirith: Jackson et al. seem to be evoking Moorish Spain in it’s fullest flowering. Just a touch here and there; echoes of medieval Cordoba, when that city was the epicenter of Western learning and enlightenment, and a vibrant melting pot of Moorish, Christian and Jewish cultures. I can’t find a photo that shows them, but when you’re watching ROTK note the decorated arches in the great Hall where Denethor, the Steward of Gondor conducts his audiences- - then go look at interior views of Cordoba’s Mezquita, built at the zenith of the Mudejar style. And then, look at all the mosque-like domes scattered across the Minas Tirith skyline. And even the narrow streets winding between high, whitewashed walls with flowers and vines trailing down…

****

Lest you think I came to this obsessive state about LOTR just recently, or because of the Peter Jackson films, let me dissuade you from that assumption immediately if not sooner. No, no, I was one of those ur-geeks who discovered the books when I was 12 years old (OMG, that’s 40….FORTY….4-0 years ago!). I first saw the now infamous “pirated” Ace Books paperback edition of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING at the Rexall Drug store at 54th & Lyndale in Minneapolis. It was such a strange-looking, mysterious book- - I just had to have it. I believe it cost me 75 cents, which was actually pretty steep for a paperback at the time.

I got up to about page 2, and was so lost and befuddled I decided to put the book away for a while, until I could get my hands on THE HOBBIT which, Tolkien wrote, was an earlier story set in Middle Earth. A few weeks later I got that book and read it in two days- - a real speed record for me. Not to give THE HOBBIT short shrift, but I sped through it at first because I mainly wanted to dive back into the odd, red-orange paperback once I’d gotten my bearings in the Tolkien universe. On second approach, ‘Fellowship’ made a lot more sense, and the further I read the deeper I fell into that Sense of Wonder state that, once experienced, you long for ever afterwards, for the rest of your life, although you encounter it very infrequently and, sadly, less and less often the older you get. I believe that age 12 is the prime time for that first, irrevocable plunge into Sense of Wonder. When you’ve been there, you never forget it.

I quickly acquired the other 2 volumes of that “pirated” edition: THE TWO TOWERS and finally THE RETURN OF THE KING…

Damn. The links to those cover images aren’t working. I’ll fix that as soon as I can. It feels very important to me that I show you those spooky, striking, primary-colors covers: red for ‘Fellowship’, yellow for ‘Towers’, and blue for ‘King’. I see them in my mind’s eye when I think of the three volumes of LOTR. No other editions seem quite right.

OK, I took out the bad links and think I found a better one. Try this.

Posted: December 20th, 2003 under General.
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Kinda sounds like a Scandinavian newspaper to me. You know: “Velkommen til en Tild Blog dag forbundet! Alle den newsposten det ar fit to print!” …whatever that means. It’s appropriate, I guess - - me being half Norwegian and half Swede.

Actually, now it sounds more like Yosemite Sam swearwords: “Oooh, Tild blog dag forbundet that rabbit varmint critter!”

Whatever. I’m Tild, and this is my blog. Welcome, welcome!

Posted: December 15th, 2003 under General.
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TROLLS ARE NOT FED HERE.
PLEASE REQUEST IMMEDIATE
ASSISTANCE FROM YOUR MENTAL
HEALTH SERVICES PROVIDER.

Posted: December 13th, 2003 under General.
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