Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen » Holidays

Happy Father’s Day!

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:48:04 +0000

Happy Father’s Day to all my friends who are dads, who are celebrating with their dads or who are missing them. I’d also like to honor the grandfathers, uncles, teachers, neighbors and other good men who provide support to kids whose fathers are not around — a little of the right kind of attention can make a big difference in a young person’s life!

Memorial Day

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:53:21 +0000

Happy Mother’s Day

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sat, 08 May 2010 18:17:47 +0000

May Your Easter Be Happy

Elizabeth Thomsen — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:51:11 +0000

Another great postcard from CardCow.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:20:01 +0000

Photograph by Nickolas Muray for McCall Style and Beauty, George Eastman House on Flickr

Taking Down the Christmas Tree

Elizabeth Thomsen — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:08:44 +0000

Day 6: January 6, 2010
I usually take the Christmas tree down on New Year’s Day, but this year I waited a little longer. It always feels sort of sad taking the ornaments off, and tossing the tree out into the snow. But this year’s tree was full and beautiful and served us well, so I have no regrets.

Happy New Year!

Elizabeth Thomsen — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:51:36 +0000

Another great old postcard from CardCow.com.

A Christmas Carol

Elizabeth Thomsen — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:45:23 +0000

Merry Christmas to one and all!

Here’s my favorite holiday story, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, beautifully illustrated by Arthur Rackham and presented and preserved in several formats by the Internet Archive.

And if you’d rather listen to the book, I recommend the Librivox A Christmas Carol version 2, read by Glen Hallstrom, otherwise known as “Smokestack Jones.” You can download the files in many formats from the Librivox page for this audiobook, or download or listen online at its Internet Archive page. Librivox recordings are free audiobooks of public domain titles, read by volunteers.

A Christmas Carol, Illustrated by Arthur Rackham

Embedded from the Internet Archive

A Christmas Carol, Read by Glen Hallstrom

Embedded from the Internet Archive.

Ozzie’s Busy Christmas

Elizabeth Thomsen — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:48:46 +0000

This is one of my favorite Christmas sitcom episodes. Ozzie Nelson is just not feeling the Christmas spirit, and decided he wants to keep things simple this year. No Christmas lights on the house, and the Christmas tree can wait. He finds himself tricked into singing with a group of carolers, but that’s all he’s going to do. But then he gets talked into playing Scrooge in the Men’s Club production of A Christmas Carol, and playing Santa at the Christmas Eve party at the orphanage. He finds himself practicing saying “Christmas! Bah, humbug!” and singing the bass part of “Deck the Halls” while climbing the ladder to hang those lights, and getting more and more worried about how he’s going to fit everything in. But Harriet, David and Ricky pitch in and help, and everything works out just fine.

This is the 1956 Christmas episode of the Ozzie and Harriet program, as rebroadcast in 1964 with an introduction and postlude. We get to see how the Nelsons changed in the intervening eight years, and see David and Rick’s wives and children, and hear the dreamy Rick sing “The Christmas Song.”

Christmas Music and Memories

Elizabeth Thomsen — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 19:16:22 +0000

I’m working on my Christmas playlist, and I want to put in songs dedicated to family members no longer with us. For my mother, it’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” for my father, “Good King Wenceslaus,” for my brother Peter, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

But I am finding it more difficult to choose the right one for the living. For my sister, I think it would be “We Three Kings.” Not sure if she now considers it her favorite, but she certainly enjoyed dramatically singing the more depressing verses when we were young. For me, it’s definitely “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” but I’m not sure anyone knows that. For others in the family and some of my friends, I have some ideas, but I’m really not sure.

Does everyone have a favorite Christmas song? What’s yours, and why? Do you know the favorites of your parents and grandparents? We should record these things — I am currently working on family trees for both sides of my family, and I’d be much more interested in knowing the favorite Christmas songs of my grandparents, great grandparents, etc., than in finding their graves or figuring out if they were really born in 1896 or 1897.

Maybe people should put this in their wills — I hereby request that my heirs and their descendants play ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ once each year, and think of me.

For my mother, here’s her favorite, as sung by Judy Garland in the movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”