Christmas 1955

Christmas 1955 - I was seven years old and my little sister was age two when this photo was taken of our Christmas tree and all the loot underneath it. My Dad was a veteran of WWII, he had just gotten a good paying job as an engineer and we had moved out to the San Francisco suburbs only a few years earlier. My Mom was the stay-at-home kind.

The motivations for practicing Duck-and-Cover drills at grade school were beyond my comprehension; I was living in total middle-class heaven. Needs I didn't even know I had were met with excess. I could look through the Sears Catalog toy section and be reasonably assured that some of those treasures would end up under our tree. The only downer for the season was when I opened a gift that turned out to be a shirt or sweater - I felt gypped.

I must have gotten an new bicycle every-other Christmas. The toys were always cool - Erector sets, Tonka trucks, Lionel train, even an Atomic Canon once. These things made up for my Dad drinking too much on Christmas Eve and my Mother going to be crying. I took the toys in my room and played by myself with the door closed. These were times of excess - materialistic and alcoholic... and everything in between.

My parents struggled. My mother went to a psychiatrist and took Milltown. My Dad drank. There were no marriage counselors (other than the Catholic priest) and no self-help empowerment books. My parents foundered in guilt, self-pity, anxiety and cruel words between them.

A Christmas of "stuff" never really seemed to make up for it, though it did provide escape. I wasn't able to truly escape until I went away to college. And even then, I had to return home during Christmas break. Nothing had changed.

Today my wife and I spend practically nothing on Christmas; we don't buy gifts and we don't even attempt to compete with the other grandparents showering our grand kids with toys. We put up lights on the house and a lovely Christmas tree... it even has an angel on the top. We Atheists celebrate the holiday like most everyone does, with family and friends and good food, wishing for peace on earth and good will toward us all.

A stitch in time

Several years back my wife convinced me to buy a new suit. My job didn’t require that I wear one at the time, but the thinking went something like: well, you never know when you might need to wear a nice looking suit (like maybe for your funeral). So my step-son and I hit the local mens boutique and outfitted ourselves (under the wife’s oversight, of course) with nice new charcoal double-breasted wool suits. My set of dress ties date back to the 70’s; some of them I inherited from my father. I opted for a “tie-less” white shirt that buttoned at the collar – no tie required. We looked rather dapper.

I have always been a bit puzzled why mens (dressy) fashions never seemed to change over the decades. You can look back to the turn of the century (the earlier one) -- mens suits still look pretty much the same. I am not sure why that style held for so long; the suit jacket really doesn’t provide any significant practical protection against the elements, and the standard business tie has no function whatsoever that I can determine. What’s with that!??

For a short period of my career working in a bank I had a "leisure" suit, it was blue - that is "sky" blue!. It was the Disco era -- What can I say; I was only following orders!!

Further back in the 70’s they tried to get Nehru jackets into the public consciousness. How stupid was that?! The hard fact is that the standard business suit is the uniform of the American Male; we don’t take kindly to influences, either political or fashionable, from Europeans or anywhere else. Adopt or die. I just saw the Chinese ambassador discussing the world tensions mounting with Korea in a press conference on TV -- he was wearing a snappy looking western business suit. China probably knocks-off millions of copies of the latest Yves Saint Laurent design daily. Still, one international man of mystery is indeed trying to break the business suit mold -- Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan. Check out his suit here - this is a guy who clearly likes to chart his own course.

Forbes Magazine came out with an article about the most expensive business suits. Turns out you can pay upwards of $10,000 for one. I’m not all that sure it would look all that much better than one off the rack at Sears…but probably a woman could tell the difference.

I hadn’t worn my double-breasted suit in a while so I pulled it out of the closet and looked it over… discovered a moth had eaten a hole in the lapel. [sigh] I guess I can just pin a carnation over the hole. God knows I sure don’t need another new suit right now.

Men stopped wearing hats, it is so claimed, when John Kennedy went without one on his inauguration. Too bad, I wish President Obama would have reversed the trend and worn one to his inauguration. Hats are cool.