Our celebrations of the holiday are about traditions these days. There is the usual nostalgia in stories we tell each other about what we used to do, like caroling door-to-door. The support group where Steve and I met and became best friends had on a couple occasions gone out caroling in St. Paul. The group was fairly small, perhaps a dozen of us who could carry a tune and remembered by heart one verse of the standards. (Nobody, but nobody, knew more than that single verse, or at least didn't admit it in a crowd which didn't. We'd wind up singing solo and that wasn't to be dared!)
Trees were always a part of it, and presents, of which certain ones still hold memories, some good, some not. Church services not so much, since the holidays mostly were occasions to stay home, with services on the nearest weekend, though that same group which caroled also knew which church had a great musical midnight service where everybody could sing along with the choir, and a few of us were able to attend.
The Nutcracker was a part of it once my kids arrived, and I'm talking about actually going to the ballet, including with a nursing infant, which totally scandalized my mother. The best of those Nutcracker memories came later, down in southern MN at the in-law's farm, just after an ice storm. My daughter was old enough to sit in a toboggan dressed head to toe in a snowsuit and all the extra layers for warmth, while I pulled her down the driveway in a combination of farm-lit ice and fog, making the whole trip magic, its silence penetrated only by the crisp-crisp-crisp of boots and rare vehicles passing on the highway. We were transported back in the heart of that ballet, away from stresses and conflicts back inside the hundred-plus-year-old farm house with alcohol flowing much too freely.
Winter weather was a part of every memory, whatever the individual reality, and we'd try to rival each other in tales of how cold and how much snow, and how big the snowmen were or how long the sledding hills. All from long previous years of course since those activities are long abandoned by old bones and, more to the point, no longer having snow in our winters at all in the south. There aren't even warm jackets or boots in the house. We're also on the cusp of little to no snow for white Christmases back north, as we hear from the younger generations still living up north whom we'll be joining for the next years. Climate change and El Nino are pushing winter weather into the past for many of us, though the TV news will always find snow somewhere, mostly accompanied by huge pileups due to drivers unused to the need to slow way down in winter conditions. Those of us who put up with many decades of ice and snow this time of year tend to shake our heads and assert our certainty that we'd never get caught in one of those pileups.
But there was a singular event today which really made me feel much too old. It involved an annual tradition of putting up old fashioned bubbler lights, the kind, for those who don't know, that heat up in the bulb and a long thin tube of boiling colored liquid bubbles up from there to the tips. I grew up with them, Steve also. When our kids were young, each of us were able to locate and purchase new strings of them when they were back in fashion for a short time again, with the foresight to invest in replacements bulbs as well. We combined our supplies when we combined households. During the years the trees got smaller, most of the decorations got sent to new generations with children, but the bubbler lights stayed here. One recent year there was no tree for them but they got taped to the front of a glass display case - the outside, since the case was full - though the bubbling lights were reflected by the rear mirrored surface.
But there likely will be an issue with the lights. The last two spare bulbs broke in the process. Next time one breaks, we'll be down to one string and some back-up bulbs. I went online after the tree was finished to see if more strings were available anywhere. OK, how about more bulbs, then? After half an hour and a whole lot of things which came as close to being bubbler lights as printed "blueprints" could come, and that's assuming the tiny print actually was of the real thing since I couldn't tell, and even more things which had no relation to them whatsoever except having "bubble" in their name, I located one bubbler light. Not a string of them. Not a supplier of them. One single light.
It seems they now have the status of "antique". Good for them. I don't need old ones, replicas would be delightful if somebody were so kind as to start manufacturing them again. Especially since that one bulb would cost $35. Plus $15 shipping.
I guess we're antiques too. I'm pretty sure our replacement parts prices will have gone up by around the same percentages. But would our value? And will we break as easily?
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