WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY

Every December I like to include a special Christmas memory in my posts. So today I’ll tuck away the photos and narratives of excursions taken this Summer and Fall and instead dust off another Christmas memory.

As many of you know, I have no family members, but I am lucky to have many memories, a plethora of photos and this forum in which to recount those treasured moments. Today I’m going to reminisce about pins.

All that glitters … well, it must be a festive 1960s Christmas corsage.

In the early 1960s, I remember how glittery (and sometimes gaudy) Christmas corsages adorned ladies’ Winter coat lapels during the holiday season. In fact, if you poke around Etsy’s website today, you can buy handmade, vintage-style Christmas corsages. (And yes, they call them “vintage” a word which gives me consternation when it is something I vividly remember.)

On Pinterest and Etsy, there were several vintage-type Christmas corsages, but this one reminded me most of mine which you’ll see in a few paragraphs.

As you can see, it’s rather elaborate and large. Usually, bells, baubles, pinecones, snowman, elves, tiny reindeer, or even Santa himself, were attached to a base of holly and/or silver or gold “leaves” and there was glitter, lots of glitter, which usually got all over your coat and inevitably onto your face. As a youngster, I was convinced corsage glitter went airborne on its own.

Every year, Nanny, my maternal grandmother, bought me a handmade Christmas corsage from street vendors who were selling them in downtown Toronto where she worked. In those days vendors always loaded their carts in the holiday season with hot chestnuts and Christmas corsages.

By the time elementary school Christmas break arrived, the corsage pinned to my coat lapel had gotten a little smooshed from hanging in the cloakroom, or in the closet at Sunday school.

While I didn’t save that first festive corsage, I will show you what it looked like. I took accordion lessons for three years at the Ontario Conservatory of Music and Miss Barker and our small class gathered for a Christmas carol sing-a-long and accordion recital at a local senior citizens rest home, circa 1963. The corsage found a new place to look festive. It took up most of the top part of my dress. 

Ms. Barker played the accordion while the class sang.

And, then it was our turn to shine after endless afternoons of practice when I got home from school. I’m sure those practice sessions drove my mom crazy. Yes, I played a mean accordion back in the day. (This was a “starter” 12-bass red accordion; I graduated to a 120-bass black accordion shortly after this photo was taken.) I am sure I was crushin’ it here … (the corsage I mean).

Flash forward to a decade later ….

When I began working at the diner during college, Mom bought me Christmas pins, saying I needed to look perky and have some holiday flair. Customers would smile as my jingle bell pin tinkled merrily while Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” blared on the jukebox and I scrambled to serve customers on weekends and Christmas school break.

Then, when I began working in the 9:00 – 5:00 office world, I just kept adding holiday pins, scarves, earrings, hair ties and non-ugly Christmas sweaters. I could make a post some day just about Christmas clothing. Yes I was very festive in the month of December.

The merry little bell, pictured between Rodney Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman is 50 years old now. The incessant tinkling got on the nerves of a former boss at the law firm when, the morning after our office holiday soirée, he arrived at work with a hangover and asked me to please silence the bell. Oops.

I always wore my fun and festive duds and accessories proudly.

So, there is often a backstory for my cherished memory posts and here it is.

Deer, er … dear memories.

My collection of pins wasn’t just for the holidays.

You may remember my tale about Mom’s ill-fated silver locket she gave me to wear on Valentine’s Day, a cherished piece of jewelry for her, which chain broke or got caught in my coat and was lost in the snow way back in elementary school. And then she gave me her birthstone ring, an amethyst stone embedded in a swirly gold setting. I was twisting it around my finger and lost it at the movie theater. Here’s that post in case you missed it.

Now, I never would have entrusted another piece of jewelry to me and that time Mom did chastise me for losing the ring, but in the end she just “let it go” and was more forgiving than she should have been.

Mom had a story about quality versus quantity. She said she began her job as a bookkeeper with two wool skirts and a couple of pullovers for Winter and two cotton-blend skirts with a few white blouses for Summer. To dress up those Winter sweaters she bought pins and scarves and for Summer, it was pretty neckerchiefs. Mom tried to impress on me at an early age that quality was more important than quantity and also to strive to have a signature look, much as she had done on a shoestring. “Linda” she said “as you get older, you must have your own style and stand out in a crowd.”

Despite declaring that she would not gift me any more of her jewelry, Mom made one more exception. One morning, when I was still a schoolgirl, as Christmastime neared, Mom pinned three sterling silver deer onto my jumper and said “these were Mommy’s silver deer she bought with one of her first paychecks – now they are yours.”

I treasured that trio of silver deer and wore them on a sweater or cardigan for many years, even as an adult. When I thought about those dear deer recently, the kernel of this post was borne. I knew I hadn’t lost them; no, these sweet scatter pins were still nestled together in a tarnish-free jewelry box.

I opened the box – there they were, looking as bright and shiny as they did some sixty years ago when I got them from Mom. I pinned them onto a sweater to get this picture.

I was not content to just mention the deer, so I returned to rummage through the jewelry box and then a flood of memories enveloped me. Since I have been working from home since 2011, I admit I’ve not given a lot of consideration to my workday attire. I don’t do Zoom calls and I’ve not seen my boss since 2012. I return home from walking or errands and it’s either shorts and a tee-shirt in warm weather, or a sweatsuit in cooler weather, mooseskin moccasins and a messy bun. Where did the counsel about having my own style go? Sadly, all the accessories I amassed are languishing in various boxes or drawers, unused … but not unloved.

I picked up each pin in that jewelry box, reminiscing on when I got it, what I usually wore with it. Many of the pins were from my mom, like the pair of frogs scatter pins, also sterling silver, that were in the jewelry box compartment next to the deer.

There were scarves and scarf rings and clips and I looked at them all, but didn’t include them here, so yes I DID “let pins and scarves be my signature look” so the idea to have a style all my own was engrained in my soul. Yes, those words did sink in!

These are a few of my favorite things (as the song goes) ….

This pin I got when I was about eight or nine years old, a dog made of mink with a rhinestone collar to wear with my good dress at that time which had a mink collar and cuffs.

I wore it for a cringeworthy class picture in 6th grade.

Then I added to my furry pin menagerie with this fun feline with googly eyes, similarly made of mink.

Many moons later, Mom ordered me this cool cat from “Coldwater Creek” catalog – no, it was not on a hot tin roof, but instead made from the roof of a 1973 GMC truck and fashioned using a blow torch.

There were animals for every occasion. And traditional-looking pins, a few which I’ve included, most I’ve left out.

But through the years, the oldest pins remained my favorites.

Since unearthing all these treasures, especially the collection of festive holiday pins and silk scarves, each still carefully folded in their original boxes and my pins amassed through the years, I have decided I’m going to start wearing them and once again embrace the fun and festive flair I seemingly abandoned when choosing to work from home a dozen years ago.

I started by pinning “Santa’s Favorite Elf” to one of my wool hats.

The squirrels weren’t fooled by my festive pin – of course they knew their 5’ 9” (175.26 cm) “Peanut Lady” wasn’t an elf as she towers way over them. They were unfazed and just went on munching their peanuts. 

I am joining Terri Webster Schrandt’s Sunday Stills Monthly Color Challenge: Festive.