A few days ago, Jane (Jane’s Jewels) posted an article reminiscing about corner stores where she group. I grew up outside of a farm town and we had a dime store that was very similar to the corner store, but her post triggered something else I had forgotten about.

We had a hardware store in town that I loved going to when I was a kid. I wasn’t interested in what was being sold at the hardware store as much as I was the atmosphere. (Well that isn’t completely true because I bought my BBs for my BB gun there. Remember when BBs came in a yellow cardboard tube with a black cap?)

The store always had a distinct smell of metal and wood. If you have walked into a wood working shop you know the smell I am talking about. A mixture of tools, grease, wood, metal and such.

The store walls were lined with wooden drawers that contained all sorts of nuts, bolts, washers and nails of various shapes and sizes. They didn’t have prepackaged nuts and bolts. You bought what you needed and paid for it by the pound. There was a big metal scale that they would weight your items in then package them up in small brown paper bags.

One thing I always like about our town was the fact that most of the buildings on the main strip where very nostalgic. It would have reminded you of something from the early 1900s.

Sadly, regulations and competition have put almost everything out of business there. The hardware store, the dime store, all three gas stations, the barber shop and the restaurants are all gone. Don’t get me wrong, it would still be nice place to live, but a lot of the nostalgic feel has disappeared as new business are being built out on the outskirts of town while the buildings downtown remain empty.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I would love to go back to traditional Christmas decorating. I don’t know why things changed, maybe it is because I don’t have any kids of my own, but over the years I have steered away from decorating for Christmas completely. It isn’t from being a Christmas humbug because this is my favorite time of year. To be honest, right now I only put a tree up for my cat. She loves to climb in it and go to sleep, so for safety reasons I only have a couple dozen of plastic bulbs on it and nothing else.

When I think back to my childhood, decorating for the Holidays was a huge event in my house. I can still remember the rides to the tree farm. I would look at every single highway sign on the way, trying to find the one that advertised the tree farm, so I would know when we were getting close. We would then look through every tree until we found one we thought was the perfect height and size.

Decorating was also just as fun. After putting the worst side of the tree facing the corner of the room we would string the lights. Of course then you would have to plug the lights in and begin replacing every bulb that didn’t light up. Remember when Christmas lights were made of glass and actually screwed into a socket instead of the plastic plug in kind we have today?

Once all of the bulbs were light up we would then get out the colored glass ornaments. My mother would have us place the ornaments so that color of the ornament matched the color of the light it was next too. This would bring out the color of the ornament even more.

We used other odd ball ornaments (like the pixies and the birds I talked about in a previous post) to fill in bare spots or holes in the tree. After all the ornaments where in place we would string the garland, taking care to make sure the spacing was even on all sides.

Next came the tinsel. I have heard of houses that used to place one tinsel at a time on a tree. Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that, but we would grab a handful of tinsel then run it down the tree from top to bottom, letting the needles grab the tinsel naturally.

When the tinsel was finished the final touch would be the star at the top and then mom would put candy canes all around the tree that we would get to eat through out the month.

I have to admit we had beautiful looking Christmas trees. We could barely wait for night to come so that Dad would turn the Christmas tree on. I can remember sitting in the living room and just stealing glances at the tree now and then while watching old black and white Christmas movies.

Sounds kind of nostalgic but I would like some of that simplistic “magic” again.

(Had to change my post for today. What I wanted to post wasn’t working right so I am switching to this one until I figure it out.)

Day 2: I don’t know if most towns had this, but when I was growing up in the 70s our town would have coloring contests every Christmas. The local paper would have several small Christmas scenes to color (much like a mini coloring book) with each scene representing a local business.

I would cut out and color all the pictures and then on our next trip into town, mom would take me to the stores so I could put my picture in the contest bin.  A drawing would be held and the lucky winner would get a gift certificate or an assortment of store goodies.

I remember winning once at an art hobby store which was fantastic for me as I loved to draw and color.

Did you have something similar in your town?

I had to add the “Something Like That” to the title. I am one of those skeptics that do not believe in “ghosts” per say but there has been an event or two in my life that I cannot explain. When Martha, a blogger from “Plowing Through Life”, posted a childhood memory of a witch in her neighborhood, this memory came back to me.

The town where I grew up had it’s share of haunting rumors. Everything from a portal to Hell that was located in a church cemetery to a headless man that appears on a bridge when you honk and flash your lights. All of which we pursued vigorously to no avail. (I am not really sure what we would have done even if we did find a portal to Hell. lol)

There is one story though, that I have no explanation for. It was not uncommon, during the nights my friends stayed over, for us to sneak out of my bedroom window into the foggy, dead of night to go exploring the great outdoors. It was on one of the nights that we decided to check out an old abandoned house that was about a country block away.

When we reached the back porch of this house there was a sign on the door stating “For all of those who dare to tread, Grandma’s spirit isn’t dead.” We all had a good laugh and the house was locked up so we moved on to explore other things in the yard as we joked about Grandma’s spirit.

Several months after that I was helping my father out in the yard. The sun had almost set completely and I happened to look in the direction of that old house when I noticed there was a light in the attic window. At first I just figured it was drifter who let himself into the house and had lit a candle. Earlier in the year I had seen signs of a drifter underneath a bridge that was close to the house.

The whole thing struck me as odd so I went into our house and grabbed my father’s binoculars to take a closer look. The light was not a candle, but a bulb in the ceiling. An electric bulb… in a house that had no electricity.  I never saw that light on again after that night.

I know, the story wasn’t very scary.  I guess when you don’t believe in ghost you don’t find many of them, but it is an event in my life that I will never been able to explain. I am glad that Martha triggered that recollection.That was a fun adventure.

Anyone have their own personal ghost story from the 70s?

Let’s here about your Halloween memories from the 70s!

Halloween is my second favorite time of the year. I don’t have any special memories myself as a child of the 70s (my parents didn’t celebrate Halloween), but I loved horror films and haunted houses non the less.

My fondest memories would be from the 80s. We didn’t have the Internet back then, so the only way to hear about the greatest haunted houses was word of mouth. I can remember hoping into the car and traveling an hour or more to another city just on the breath of a rumor. Of course those rumors never panned out to be as awesome as implied, but I think half the fun was just getting there.

What are your memories?