Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Archive for the ‘Memory’ Category

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.”

I’m posting this in memory of my mother, in honor of her birthday. She loved this song, and I often hear it in my head as I sort through all these old photographs, seeing her (and too many other loved ones now gone) in all the old familiar places…Pheasant Hill Street, Westchester Circle, Columbus Street, Swift’s Beach, Crystal Park and more.

My aunt has Alzheimer’s Disease. Both my parents died young, and when I see my aunt fade away, I know I’m losing one of my few remaining connections to my parents and their generation.

During one visit with my aunt in the nursing home, I reminisced about what a great dancer she had been. “Do you remember?” I asked her. “You could do all the dances. You taught for Arthur Murray.” I was just talking, I didn’t think she was actually listening. But when she heard the name Arthur Murray, she jumped up and launched into a lively rendition of the song Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry. She knew all the words and did the whole dance routine, with lots of turns and kicks.
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Photojojo has a great service for Flickr users — you sign up, authorize access to your Flickr account, and twice a month they send an e-mail message with a few of your photographs from a year earlier. The selection apparently uses Flickr’s interestingness formula, so you tend to get photographs that got a lot of views, comments, notes, etc.

Of course, this service doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself — it’s certainly easy enough to search your archives by date or browse through your sets to find pictures from last Halloween, last Thanksgiving, or whatever. I probably spend more time going through my old photographs than most people, all 4,000+ of them. But there’s something quite nice about getting these messages and see a little gallery of favorites from the previous year. Sometimes it makes me happy, and sometimes sad. Sometimes it reminds me to get in touch with a friend or family member and say something like “I was just thinking about the day we went to the orchard and bought that big pumpkin last year, remember how much fun we had?” Often it makes me want to go out and take more pictures.
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