American Graffiti.

Because we don’t get snow around here very often it’s a special thing. That might explain why I’ve seen so many snow figures, and while normally I’d grumble about the ongoing cold it helped a lot of those snow figures stay around even after most of the snow that just blanketed the ground had melted away. A lot of them were the standard oversized snowballs stacked on top of each other. Many years ago I was in Russia in late December. Some friends and I went to Gorky Park and built a regular snowman using kopeks for the eyes, nose, and buttons. The Russians who walked by seemed confused by what we were doing—ours was the only snowman I saw the entire time I was there. I also wondered what Maxim Gorky himself would have thought of it. He didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. If only there’d been a Daniil Kharms Park…

Anyway I love creative snow sculptures like this one I found. I like to think it’s a gryphon—one of my favorite mythical beasts for obvious reasons, standing guard over the small quad where it was placed. Or maybe it’s a sphinx, though I was able to safely walk around it without having to answer any riddles.  

Nashville usually gets only one major snowfall, enough to blanket everything, every winter. That’s just enough to keep it exciting. In places that get more snow more often, where it’s measured in feet rather than inches, it’s routine, something people are prepared for. Here it shuts things down. A day before it snowed I went into one of the giant home supply stores and walked by a handwritten sign that said “No Snow Melt, No Snow Shovels”. Fortunately I was looking for something else. I also went to the grocery store where shelves were cleared, people stocking up on bread, eggs, and milk. Fortunately I was looking for something else.

It started overnight so we woke up to a world silent under snow, tree branches already hanging low, the street empty. By noon people were out, the first footprints breaking the swaths of white. Sleds came down from overhead storage in basements, kids sliding up and down the street. Their laughter sailed through the crisp, clear air and was absorbed by the snow. Cold weather keeps us inside but snow calls to us.

When nightfall came the world took on a lavender glow.

By the second day the reality starts to settle in. Plans have to be changed. It won’t last but there’s no way to know exactly how long it will last. I check the supplies, calculate how many days we might be able to get by. I probably should have gotten more laundry detergent but I was looking for something else. A path needs to be made from the door to the yard so the snow that’s already tamped down won’t melt and freeze into a skating rink. Cars are moving slowly up and down the road which is too clear now for sledding. Birds chirp their discomfort. The snow I see falling isn’t coming from the sky; it’s shaken from tree limbs and blown from roofs.

Soon things will go back to normal. Snow will turn to slush, slush will turn to puddles. For now, though, snow has changed everything.

Source: Wikipedia

My neighbors moved out in early December. I went over and helped them move some stuff out of their attic, though we had trouble figuring out where to put it because their den was already packed with boxes. That’s what happens when people live in one place for more than three decades: they accumulate a lot of stuff. That reminds me of George Carlin: “That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time.” I know my neighbors had some arguments about whether they needed so much stuff, and how much of their stuff was shit, and while they left some stuff behind I don’t think either of them could agree whether it was enough.

Their house is empty now but I know soon the developer who bought it will do the same thing he’s done with three other houses on our street: he’ll knock it down and build a new house that’ll be at least four times bigger and two, maybe three storeys. They’re downhill but the new owners may be able to look down on us.

The empty house also makes me think about the painting Last Day At The Old Home by Robert Braithwaite Martineau. Martineau studied under the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, who also painted some moralistic scenes, but it’s more like those satirical paintings by William Hogarth: stuffed with details, and every detail hammers the point home. On the far left there’s the dying tree seen through the window, the grandmother weeping while a man—according to Wikipedia he’s the butler—holds the keys to the house, but he could be a realtor, purchasing the house for a nouveau riche owner who wants the trappings of old money. The youngest child, a daughter, looks at her grandmother sadly. In the middle the mother half-heartedly tries, and fails, to take the glass of liquor her son is holding. Or maybe she could use a drink herself. Son and father are raising their glasses in a toast. The son looks anxious, uncertain, but the father looks like he’s saying, “Well, them’s the breaks!” The armor on the mantle probably symbolizes the family’s proud, chivalric history, hollow now, merely a decoration.

Also according to Wikipedia it’s the father’s gambling, symbolized by the painting of a horse in the front left corner, that’s led to the family’s ruin. I’ve read other interpretations that it’s a warning against the dangers of alcoholism—the father drank up all the old wealth and is not only still drinking but is passing the love of alcohol on to his son. I saw the original in an exhibit years ago and spent a long time admiring the details. It’s a large painting which makes it impressive. But the message was so heavy, so obvious, I also thought it was funny. Addiction is a terrible thing—there’s nothing funny about how it destroys lives. But Martineau was just so earnest it’s less of a study of the toll addictions take on families and more like a Victorian version of Reefer Madness. The fact that  he used his friend, Colonel John Leslie Toke, and family, and their home, Godington House, as models is also funny to me, even though there’s no hidden message there. I don’t think Martineau was subtly calling his friend a spendthrift, gambler, or alcoholic—there’s nothing subtle here. It was just convenience: he had a friend who could pose for his “This is your centuries old home on [insert vice], kids!”

About thirty years later Toke would sell Godington House, but this wasn’t art imitating life. The house had been in his family for more than four hundred years but the world had changed, and 1895 was a very different time even from 1862 when Martineau made his painting, which further undermines the painting’s thesis. It was mostly changing economics and the rising middle class, among other things, that led to the decline of the so-called “great families” that had persisted for centuries, not moral turpitude. Godington House passed through a couple of private owners and is now held by a non-profit trust, which seems like a good way to preserve all that stuff.

Calendars may be the oldest form of corporate swag. Pinup calendars were a gas station staple for decades. Banks and pharmacies used to give them out, and among the gifts in Allen Sherman’s Twelve Days Of Christmas, between the green polka-dot pajamas and the simulated alligator wallet, is “a calendar book with the name of my insurance man”. Maybe their heyday has passed but in the library where I work a few of us still look forward every year to the Harrassowitz calendars which always feature pages from medieval manuscripts and other artworks, usually from German universities and museums.The 2025 calendar features manuscripts from the University of Bremen.

Harrassowitz is a company based in Germany that works with publishers and libraries. Rather than dealing with hundreds of different publishers libraries can order through Harrassowitz. Among other things this is helpful with multi-volume reference works that are published over years, even decades because publishers, especially the small academic publishers that specialize in things like multi-volume reference works, don’t always keep the best records. Harrassowitz, on the other hand…well, there’s truth in the stereotype that Germans are incredibly efficient. Once at work I got a volume of, I think, a Phoenician etymological dictionary. The library had previous volumes but hadn’t gotten one in over twenty years and had no record of an order. I emailed Harrassowitz to say I thought they made a mistake. The answer was, “No mistake. We’re sending you the next volume in your order.” After a little digging, which involved going down to a dusty basement room and pulling an old, dusty binder off a dusty shelf, I sent an apology to Harrassowitz. The last volume had been published before the library started using computers. The people at Harrassowitz made sure we didn’t miss the next one.

With service like that I think we should be sending them a calendar.

JJ’s (now closed) Coffee Shop.

When I heard that more than a hundred Christmas trees were stolen from a Boy Scout troop in Tennessee my second thought was, what’s the value of a stolen Christmas tree? My first thought, obviously, was, what kind of jerk steals a bunch of Christmas trees? And this wasn’t a spontaneous one-person job either. You don’t just wander through a Christmas tree lot in an oversized coat and discreetly slip a ten-foot blue spruce into your pocket. Although if you can do that you should perform that trick for Penn & Teller, but that’s another story. This was clearly some southern Charlie Croker and his gang. As for the value I asked a friend who’d worked on Christmas tree lots and he just said, “You’d be surprised.” Good Christmas trees can go for a lot of money, which may be why I see so many Scout troops selling them around this time of year, and why there have been multiple tree thefts around the country. I’m sorry the troops are taking a pretty big financial hit and also that the Scouts generally now have to worry about extra security.

As a former Boy Scout, and Eagle Scout, myself I also feel like I missed out on something since my troop never sold Christmas trees. We made a lot of money from car washes—we were lucky that our regular meeting place was a church that was right on the corner of a very busy intersection. A few times a bona fide eighteen-wheeler drove in and offered us fifty bucks for a “wash”, which was really an act of charity since most of us weren’t much taller than the tires. We also made a fair amount from rummage sales and raffles. Selling Christmas trees would have been a lot of fun. I’d guess some of the Scouts get to spend the night among the trees which, for me, would have been a lot of fun because I’d never have thought anyone would actually steal any trees. So much for that.

One of the sad aspects of this story is that live Christmas trees take a long time to grow and then are only used for such a short time. At least that was my first thought. Then I remembered that sometimes as soon as the 27^th or 28^th of December I’ve seen trees piled up at a local park. They’re turned into mulch which gets donated to local parks, including Radnor Lake. I’ve been a regular hiker and volunteer at Radnor. One of my jobs has even been spreading mulch on trails. I’ve probably walked on, and spread the remains of, former Christmas trees. I know it doesn’t help the troop but at least there is a bright side that, stolen or not, all those old trees will still benefit people in the coming year.

There’s a whole spectrum—pun very much intended—of holiday lights decorating houses. As a kid I loved brightly decorated houses and begged my parents to get lights for our house. My father finally did and we put strings of red, white, green, and blue bulbs around the holly trees at either end of the house. And that’s when I realized outdoor Christmas lights aren’t that exciting because I spent most of the time inside the house and couldn’t see them. We also lived on a cul-de-sac so the only people who ever saw them were our neighbors and the exceptionally rare person who took a wrong turn after dark.

Some houses, mainly the more expensive ones, use strings of solid white lights, which I think is really dull. Whatever holiday you’re celebrating should be celebrated with festive colors. Plain white lights are for any time of the year and belong inside the house. They’re for your kitchen, your bathroom, and the attic or basement where you store your holiday decorations for at least ten months of the year. (Don’t get me started on people who start putting up Christmas kitsch in September.)

A few houses are decked out with solid blue lights, though, and I like the simple, cool austerity. Here we rarely get snow, even at Christmas, and there’s something about the solid blue that, to me, evokes polar landscapes. Maybe it also brings back some childhood memories. My mother baked a wide range of holiday cookies but one of my favorites were simple star-shaped sugar cookies blue with food color, each one with a sugary silver ball—they’re called dragées—in the center. My grandparents also had a solid white Christmas tree they put in their living room. They strung it with multi-colored lights and plastic icicles, but it was the blue lights that stood out most to me.

As beautiful as I think they can be, though, I wish the tree in the front window had some color. The holidays should be festive—white lights on your tree are for any time of year.

Source: Wikipedia

I saw a kit for a gingerbread house in the store. It reminded me that I still don’t understand the point of gingerbread houses. When I was a kid I’d see them in stores, maybe in displays at the mall, and sometimes at school. Sometimes classmates made them and brought them in to show off. All that left me wondering, hey, when do we get to eat the gingerbread house? If anyone did I wasn’t around to get a piece. And I wanted a piece. I loved, and still love, gingerbread, and also ginger ale, ginger beer, ginger snaps. When it came to Gilligan’s Island I wanted to hang out with the Professor, but that’s another story. A friend of my parents who loved to throw dinner parties made homemade gingerbread, and it’s still the best I ever had. It was thick and soft, more like cake than bread, and she’d lightly drizzle it with a lemon sauce. Such intense flavors shouldn’t work together but they did; the lemon heightened the spiciness of the ginger.

Now that we’ve got a whole series that asks the question Is It Cake? a gingerbread house might seem, at best, retro—and maybe that’s part of the appeal. There’s a nostalgia factor. The history of gingerbread in Europe goes back over a thousand years; in the Middle East and beyond it goes back even further since it was brought to Europe by returning Crusaders. In the 17th century guilds controlled the production of gingerbread for most of the year, but at Christmas and Easter anyone could bake it—anyone who could afford it, anyway. Ginger was a very expensive import then, though by the 19th century it was easier to get. Charles Baudelaire sent gingerbread as a gift to friends, and recommended “English gingerbread, very thick, very black, so close that it has neither holes nor pores…”

And I also found this from The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett:

[T]he most renowned essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old Bowden house made of durable gingerbread, with all the windows and doors in the right places, and sprigs of genuine lilac set at the front. It must have been baked in sections, in one of the last of the great brick ovens, and fastened together on the morning of the day. There was a general sigh when this fell into ruin at the feast’s end, and it was shared by a great part of the assembly, not without seriousness, and as if it were a pledge and token of loyalty. I met the maker of the gingerbread house, which had called up lively remembrances of a childish story. She had the gleaming eye of an enthusiast and a look of high ideals.
“I could just as well have made it all of frosted cake,” she said, “but ‘twouldn’t have been the right shade; the old house, as you observe, was never painted, and I concluded that plain gingerbread would represent it best. It wasn’t all I expected it would be,” she said sadly, as many an artist had said before her of his work.

It sounds wonderful but she still doesn’t answer the question, did they eat the gingerbread house?

When I heard that cassettes are making a comeback my first thought was, Talkin’ ‘bout my generation! And then I thought there are so many reasons that makes sense. Cassette tapes are, like vinyl, or, for that matter, CDs or even the much maligned 8-track, a way to have the songs you love without worrying they’ll disappear due to copyright or other issues. Back when I had my first iPod songs would disappear from my iTunes library, or would still be listed but would be unplayable for reasons no one in Apple’s customer service could explain. With cassettes as long as you’ve got a player—and there’s a new generation of cassette players which are fueling the comeback—you can listen to your songs and you also don’t have to worry about an outside company collecting your listening and feeding it into an algorithm to spit targeted advertising at you right in the middle of a song.

The thing that made cassettes even better than vinyl, CDs, or those much maligned 8-tracks, though, was that you could record your own at home, and usually for not much money. I had a portable cassette player/recorder from when I was a kid, and as a teen got a two-deck boom box which meant I could copy songs from one cassette to another.

Here’s a question I wish I’d thought to put on social media somewhere and probably still will: what was your first mixtape? What was special about it?

I still have several mixtapes friends made for me even though I don’t have a cassette player anymore. I keep them partly for sentimental reasons but also for the playlists. The first mixtape I ever got, which, unfortunately, I’ve lost, wasn’t even given to me by a friend. A guy in my high school history class overheard me say I’d never heard Stairway To Heaven. A couple of days later he came in with a mixtape. He was also the first person I knew who had a CD player which made building mixtapes a breeze for him. In addition to Stairway it had a good dollop of other Zeppelin songs, some Pink Floyd, and The Who.

Every song on it was older than I was but still new to me. Mixtapes were a great way to find new music. I discovered Lou Reed, The Cocteau Twins, and Bauhaus through mixtapes friends gave me. I was listening to Tracy Chapman before Fast Car exploded all over the airwaves because someone gave me a mixtape with a couple of her songs. More recently the first Guardians Of The Galaxy movie well ahead of the comeback with its Awesome Mix Vol. 1 which sold about eleven thousand cassettes.

Friendships, and romantic relationships, were formed, or strengthened, over mixtapes. Even adults I knew made mixtapes for each other. An older woman I knew went through a really awful divorce. A few months later she made a mixtape for her ex-husband and mailed it to him. It was songs they’d loved together. It was a heartfelt way of saying goodbye to their marriage and to him.

Among the mixtapes I I still have was given to me by one of my oldest friends. He titled Hey! Nice Hat! That’s an inside joke, as are the liner notes he wrote. Like our friendship it’s an eclectic mix: Beethoven’s Ode To Joy from the 9th symphony, Monty Python’s Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, the original theme from M*A*S*H, Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus, R.E.M.’s Orange Crush, and about twenty seconds of MC Hammer’s She’s Soft And Wet. That’s another inside joke.

Yes, cassettes are also limited—mostly to an hour, but that just made the selection of songs on a mixtape even more special. Cassettes are coming back. I hope mixtapes are too. And I’d still like to know: what was