My 29 year old son and his girlfriend are putting up the Christmas tree and he found a box of ornaments with a Woolworth sticker on it. “These are older than I am!” he exclaimed. No, not quite. But close. Then me and my equally old-assed husband started reminiscing about old area stores. And old assed Little River Band songs.
Alexanders, McCrory’s, Mays and Grants were big department stores that are long gone. There was also a kitchenware chain called Lecter’s or something close. I can’t seem to find any references for it.
Still wondering how cheap glass balls lasted all these years of clumsy, cat and child filled, drunken, happy, sometimes crowded Christmas trees.
Lechter’s. There was one in the Randall Park Mall near Cleveland (store chain and mall both long since gone).
We had a May Company, Zayre’s and Woolworth’s all in one big shopping center prior to the existence of Randall Mall. One of my best friends got her first job at the lunch counter in Zayre’s.
Nope, that’s not it. I’m not sure of the spelling but I’m almost positive it pronounced Lecters. They sold stuff Alton Brown would go to W for on Good Eats.
No, it was Lechter’s. I remember them well. I still have a nice set of steak knives from there.They sold kitchenware and housewares, sort of like Crate and Barrel; no sporting goods or other types of merchandise, as mentioned in the Lechmere link. I don’t know if they existed outside the NYC metro area.
ETA: Two replies since I started typing. I didn’t think I was that slow.
I’ve had a little blast from the past in a big-ass bag of yarn. Someone contributed a lot of old yarn to my mom’s AARP chapter, and she passed it to me since I make afghans and lap robes for them to distribute. Some of the skeins of yarn still have their original sleeves with price tags from Woolworth’s, Ben Franklin, Kresge’s, and probably other places I’ve forgotten. I remember as a teen buying yarn for under a dollar a skein, and that’s how old some of these are, so close to 50 years old.
All acrylic, of course. The few skeins of actual wool didn’t fare as well.
There is a new commercial. It shows a beautiful room. Christmas trees, decorations, presents. Then it shows lots of various cats locked behind pet doors with a red light above. The red light goes off, the green light goes on…and well cats…
Certainly, if you fill the reservoir with Scotch and water. Not too much, though, or they’ll puke pine needles and sap all over the tree skirt. Evergreens just can’t hold their liquor.
I’ve seen plenty of Christmas trees full of cats. Most of them, in fact, since I’ve lived in (or at least visited for Christmas) a household with cats for most of my life. If you have any fragile ornaments, you have to be really careful about where you hang them.
Years ago, I returned to the family abode, took one look at the tree, which had been up for days, and asked my parents what the hell they were drinking.
The fake tree went, top to bottom from a point out, then got instantly wider, and tapered down some.
Yes, the put the bottom half of the tree together upside down.
We have some very old ornaments, too. I don’t know what store they’re from, but I do know that they originally belonged to my great-grandmother, so they’re about 100 years old.
My parents have been married for almost fifty two years.
The first year they married, they had a Blue Christmas (the Elvis album came out in 1964 and 1965, my parents married in early 1966). Blue garland with blue lights and blue bulbs. None of it expensive.
And my mother lived with that damned blue decorated tree for years. It wasn’t expensive, but a young family couldn’t afford much in the way of new ornaments and garland and lights.
My sisters and I all have some of those fifty year old blue glass Christmas bulbs, and every year we hang them on the tree. It honors my parents fifty year marriage and their first Christmas. It makes me remember all those years of decorating with those bulbs. And it reminds me of an important lesson in life - fads change, tastes change. I suspect I am tattooless due to those damn blue bulbs.
I remember finding boxes with the old K-Mart stickers on them, and the family prize was a can of Schilling paprika, the round red metal kind, with a sticker on the bottom from a grocery chain that closed in the 1960s. I don’t know how old it was, but I remember it being on the shelf when I was a wee one, several years before that. (My mother was raised as a Scandinavian farm cook; what she was doing with a can of paprika is a complete mystery.)