So, night before last at around 8pm I suddenly had this brilliant idea: I would go down to the basement and search through about a dozen steamer trunks and footlockers to find ALL of the family slides; find ONE PARTICULAR SLIDE out of hundreds no, make that well over a thousand; convert the slide to a digital file with the slide scanner I bought more than a year ago and had never used nor even taken out of the box; spruce up the image in case it had faded over the past 49 years; crop it and make it as nice as possible and put it on a flash drive and take it over to Walgreens before work at 6am yesterday & have an 8×10 print made so I could give it to my sister when I brought all the gifty things for the grand-nieces & nephews over to her house at noon so that everything would be done and delivered before the snowstorm hit…
Mission accomplished — and, hurray for me, it only took until 1:30am to get the photo into halfways usable shape!
That’s my sister and me (and I?) in the photo. It was taken in December of 1960, the year my sister was Lucia at the American Swedish Institute.
She was 12, I was 8. Angelic, ain’t we?!
God Jul och gott nytt år to all, and to all a good (quiet, peaceful, lucid) night.
~
This is wonderful. My Google alert picked this up. I am staff at the American Swedish Institute and we are always looking for great pictures for the archives. It would be wonderful to have a copy of this- would you mind sharing it with us?
We are also asking people to submit memories and photos to our website right now, using memories@americanswedishinst.org.
In any case- thanks for posting this- what a sweet image.
Nina Clark
Director of Programs and Exhibits at ASI
Are those candles burning? Do they still allow that here or in Sweden?
I talked to my sister about this yesterday. She tells me she remembers lots of details about her Lucia gig from nearly 50 years ago. Like how the crown weighed at least 40 pounds, for one thing.
..Which answers Bart’s question: No, those weren’t actually lit candles. The Lucia crown was a metal frame with about a dozen flashlights welded onto it. Each flashlight held at least 2 batteries and had a C7 bulb for a “flame”. No wonder the thing was so heavy. Uff da!