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Super
8: Christmas
This is part of a series of articles based on images from my 1970s home movies. For more details, click here. These pictures document how my little family celebrated the holidays four decades ago.
Inside, in the week before Christmas, gifts began appearing under the tree in the living room. A few of these were from my fathers business associates or other friends, but most of them were presents that we had bought for each other. |
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When we moved into this house back in 1963, Mother didnt want evergreen needles falling on her new white rug, so we never again had a real tree. First we tried a space-age aluminum one with needles made from strips of foil. Its unsafe to attach electric lights to a metal tree, so we limited the ornaments to red balls and lit the tree externally, using a spotlight with changing colors.
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I helped her try to identify each object. I think the double-ended measuring cup was marked in ounces if you held it one way but in milliliters if you inverted it. (Back then, the U.S. was supposedly in the process of converting to the metric system.) |
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All the bounty even a ceramic planter in the form of a frog was displayed under the tree for the rest of the holiday.
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In the dimly-lit church, I discovered a Christmas tree illuminated with white bulbs.
Notes: Ten years earlier, using Polaroids very sensitive 3000-speed black and white film, I had photographed the same porcelain angels by candlelight. I once made another toothpick tree for my grandmother. You buy a few hundred wooden toothpicks, dip the end of each into a little glue, and insert it into a Styrofoam ball. Then you stack these spherical porcupines into a conical shape atop a Styrofoam ring, spray on some fake snow, add ornaments including an angel on top, and set the tree on a cake plate for all to admire. I had a movie titling kit consisting of vinyl letters which could be stuck onto a red panel, a black panel, or a transparent panel in a wooden frame. Thats how I shot the first image in this article, through the plastic. In my earliest days of watching television, I thought this was how they keyed the credits at the end of a show: they must have painted them on a long piece of glass which they raised in front of the camera lens. The next five images, exteriors of our house, actually come from not from 1973 but from 1974. When you see a wider image, its a panorama stitched together from two or three frames that were shot while the movie camera was panning across the scene.
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