It's funny; one day images seem contemporary and then what feels like just a few years later, they're called vintage. That probably has more to do with the swift passage of time than the way images are classified. At least that's the way it seems now that I'm getting into vintage territory myself.

These vintage Christmas images seem very familiar to me. Even though I grew up in the sixties (I told you I was vintage), a lot of the Christmas images we had back then had this Victorian look too. The cardboard Christmas decorations we stood up in the windowsills and taped to the windows were of old fashioned Santas and other Christmas images. No matter how we packed the Christmas ornaments away the year before, they all seemed to be covered with the flocking we used to create the look of snow on our Christmas tree. Somehow anything connected to Christmas had at least a little of that snow stuff on it and felt slightly fuzzy. And just as the vintage Christmas images on this page are getting a new life, apparently so is tree flocking. I just saw a display of blue and pink flocked Christmas trees at Michael's craft store the other day.

It makes me happy to share these vintage Christmas images because it gives me a chance to relive days that were so much simpler. I didn't have to put up the Christmas tree or even pay for it. Nor did I have to decorate the rest of the house or clean it to get ready for holiday company.

My jobs were 1.) to decorate holiday deviled eggs with various designs resembling faces by using vegetable pieces, 2.) to try not to break too many low-hanging glass ornaments on the Christmas tree and 3.) to not let my mom catch me opening presents and re-wrapping them before Christmas. I don't think I was very good at this last job. By the time I was 10, my mom threatened to give all my presents to the Goodwill if I didn't stop messing with them. It's not that I was a bad child; I just had an out-of-control combination of impatience and curiosity.

My poor mother eventually resorted to lying to keep me from touching the really important presents. (I think she gave up on the rest.) One Christmas, I was getting a much begged-for bicycle. I'm not sure where she hid that, because that truly was a surprise when I got it. But she did wrap the white and yellow basket that was to be attached to the bike. As she put the over-sized puffy-looking package on the fireplace hearth, she told me I wasn't allowed to touch it under any circumstances because it was glass and highly fragile. Her fib worked, because even though I did poke at it a few times, I didn't attempt my usual unwrapping and re-wrapping routine. I remember being offended that she had lied to me once I opened the package and saw that it was an unbreakable bike basket. It never occurred to me until many years later the depths to which I had pushed my mother. But I didn't give it a second thought at time. Once I got that new sparkly metallic-blue bike from Sears, with its bell, banana seat, sissy bar, handlebar streamers and big white and yellow basket, I simply got on it and didn't get off again until sundown.

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