Posting an entry for those of you who like to stick around the internet even around Christmas. You know how when you drive around late on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day you look at stores and stuff to see what’s open, and you’re like hey! Look, White Hen Pantry! I’m like that. I’m like a convenience store. Except not.
I would have been on more in the past couple days, except I’ve been working on redesigning the site. If everything turns out okay, soon this weblog will be on the front page of Poundy.com where I’ll post short updates like this along with links to the longer journal entry pieces. So I’ve been playing with code and Photoshop and Getting My Christmas On in between. Now that I actually have this bloggy venue to write about it, I am starting to see how much of a holiday geek I can be sometimes. Or maybe it’s because I really worked Christmas this year. This past weekend I finally got to ride the Santa Train, which was just as dorky as I hoped it would be.
If I can stand to stuff a little more Christmas into my, um, my Christmas Experiential Repository, or whatever, I might try and go to Marshall Field’s on Thursday, because I haven’t been in years. One of my gifts to my grandma (I can say this, right? She doesn’t get on the computer. She watches PBS mysteries, and sometimes, for kicks, COPS.) is a book called Christmas on State Street: The 1940s and Beyond about all the old Chicago department stores and they way they’d do things up for Christmas. Looking through the book I got a spooky feeling because even though a lot of those stores were gone by the time I was growing up, their names and swanky logos were familiar from the garment boxes and old newspapers that we used to pack our Christmas decorations; so much of what I knew about Christmas referenced a somewhat earlier time, and the way I understood it, Christmas came from a slightly fancier version of downtown where people wore dressy hats, even though I sort of knew they didn’t anymore. And there were also the el trips with my grandma down to Field’s and Carson’s and Wiebolts, where we’d shop and look at the windows and we’d go to the Walnut Room at Field’s. We probably did not go to the Walnut Room as often as I remember. We may have actually gone just once, because getting in to eat under the big tree in the Walnut Room at Christmastime is a legendary pain in the ass, and perhaps after waiting for three hours in line my grandma told me I’d sure as hell better remember it (except she wouldn’t say “hell” in the Walnut Room) and I guess I did remember, and several times over.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
