My wife and her 90+ father and I were reminiscing about Christmases past the other day when someone mentioned tinsel. When I was a kid we strung this tinsel on the Christmas tree that looked sort of like it was made out of lead. Even though it must have been pretty inexpensive we laboriously separated each strand and hung them individually on the tree and then, when the holiday was over, we carefully placed each piece of tinsel back on the card it had been stored on and slipped it into the box so we could reuse it next year. We started wondering whatever happened to that magical stuff and that led us to wonder about other things from the not so distant past. For example, another thing we used to do at Christmastime was to dye GlassWax with food coloring and use stencils, that I think came with the GlassWax, to decorate the windows with wreaths, candles and other Christmasy things. When was the last time you saw that?
One of my favorite Christmas presents was a genuine Hopalong Cassidy cap gun set with two six-shooters, two matching black holsters and a black gun belt with cartridge loops. I had great fun shooting those cap guns and making the whole house reek of gunsmoke. The kids in my neighborhood used to love playing cowboys and indians (guess that's not PC these days, but cowboys and native Americans just doesn't have the same ring to it) or cops and robbers with cap guns. We'd play that for hours, but it just wasn't the same if you ran out of caps. Another thing you could do with caps was to put a couple in this thing that was shaped sort of like a hammer. When you pounded it on the sidewalk the caps exploded and shot a thing that looked sort of like a badminton birdie up into the air and, usually, onto the porch roof. That was fun, especially when you got to crawl out of the bedroom window to retrieve the feathered missile from the roof. What happened to those rolls off caps? I guess they don't make them anymore because I can't remember the last time I saw a roll. And whatever happened to those sort of bull roarer things that had a crepe paper streamer and you could swing it through the air and whirl it around until you were dizzy? I guess it was the girls who liked those things, but I can't remember the last time I've seen one of those either. Another toy I liked was slot cars. When I was in my late teens and early twenties they were as popular with young adults as they were with kids. You could sink a lot of money into a slot car, which you would then take down to the local hobby store where they had a slot car track set up so you could race them against the cars of other nerds. They were a lot of fun. I guess maybe video games have taken their place these days. They're pretty realistic, but just not the same. You can't smell the rubber and oil like you could with the slot cars and you can't get creative and find ways to make them go faster and hang tighter on the turns. Oh well, at least Slinkies are still around. Of course, now they are multi-colored and I think the springs are plastic or something; but at least they aren't extinct yet.
Between the smoke from cap guns and soot from coal-fired furnaces the wallpaper in our house used to get pretty dirty. So every spring the whole family would be enlisted to clean it with wallpaper cleaner. That's something I haven't seen in years either. It was kind of like Play-Doh. It was usually either pink or green when you started using it. By the time you finished kneading it and wiping down the wallpaper it was a dirty gray, like the last slushy snow of spring before the sun wins out over Old Man Winter and makes it hibernate for another year. People still have wallpaper but I guess the fuel we use to heat our houses these days is so clean that there's no need to clean the walls. Or maybe folks just paint over them when they get dirty. So bye-bye wallpaper cleaner.
When you wanted to clean yourself after a hard day of scrubbing wallpaper there was always soap-on-a-rope. Of course you only needed that if you had a shower instead of a bathtub. Because when I was a kid, at least in my neighborhood, if you had a shower it was something you rigged up yourself in the basement. Soap-on-a-rope was a bar of soap that had a piece of string or rope through it so that it would hang over the shower head. That way you didn't have to worry about dropping a slippery bar of soap and then trying to retrieve it from the shower floor. I guess maybe shower gel has replaced it these days. In any case, I haven't seen soap-on-a-rope in ages, although I did Google it before I wrote this post and discovered that it's still being made.
A couple of handy items we used to have were a kitchen matchbox holder and a sink strainer. Every house had a matchbox holder on the kitchen wall to hold a box of those big wooden safety matches. You needed them to light the burners on the gas stove after the pilot light crapped out. Sink strainers are those triangular-shaped, perforated pans that you sat in the corner of the sink. You put your table scraps in them so that the liquid would drain out before you put the garbage in the trash can. I haven't seen either one of those items outside of an antique store in so long that I thought they had gone the way of the dodo. It only took a quick Internet search, though, to reveal that they are still around, though hard to find.
For those who were too busy to bake their own bread or milk their own cow, and couldn't get out to the local A&P to pick up milk and bread, there was home delivery. The milkman stopped by every other day and dropped your milk off in a specially-designed, divided wooden box on your front porch. Bet you haven't seen one of those in use in a long time. The bread man didn't leave his stuff on the porch. He brought fresh bread and baked goodies right to your door. But not anymore. Home delivery of bread and milk is one of those things you only see on old reruns of Mayberry RFD these days.
After dinner you could take some of those baked goodies into the living room and nibble on them while you watched the black and white TV. In our town there were only three stations and the broadcasts came from different cities that were in different directions from the house. That meant that the antenna, which was mounted on an aluminum tower on the side of the house (another relic of days gone by) would only pick up a strong signal from one or two stations. If you wanted a strong signal from the other station, you had to climb up the tower to turn the antenna, or you could buy an Alliance Tenna-Rotor, which let you use a box inside the house to turn the antenna with a little motor at the top of the tower. State of the art for 1950, but long gone now.
Well, enough whining for now. Still, I can't help wondering whatever happened to drive-in movies, Topo Gigio, Black Cow candy, fuse boxes, party lines ...
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