Minions 'n Mermaids: must be Christmas!

Since all four grandkids already had everything they wanted in electronics, games, etc., I was left to try to figure out what else I could give them.

But then. . . it came to me. I knew they didn't have these. . . 

MINIONS! I mean hand-knitted, personalized Minions. Four of them. I thought of this idea about ten days before Christmas, so was in Minion hell for a while, just cranking them out. These guys appeared in the toe of each kid's stocking and were probably better-received by the adults than the kids. I don't know Minions from the bottom of my shoe, and thus was working from a very chintzy photo of a knitted Minion. (Not nearly as nice as mine.) I ended up going back to the original images from the movie. "Which Minion is this?" one of the grandkids asked. Which Minion? You mean they have names?

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE. . . 

Mermaid tails!! These were knitted like small sleeping bags and were a hit, thank God, because I wasn't at all sure that: a) they'd know what they were, or b) they'd want anything to do with them. Preteens blow hot and cold. But they took to these and soon were hopping around in them as if in a very strange mermaid sack race. Caitlin has grown so rapidly that I really could've added another 4 inches to hers. From a very petite little girl, she's suddenly (overnight, it seems) as tall as many adults and will soon be looking down on her mother. Ahem. The happy-faces may look strange, but my daughter-in-law prefers not to have her kids' faces on a blog, and I understand completely. Suffice it to say their own faces are a lot prettier. 

Caitlin surrounded by her loot, or some of it, or at least the packaging it came in.  I gave her a makeup kit this year. Yikes.

My lovely daughter Shannon with her nutcracker, Boris. Took a long time to get him to stand on her shoulder like that.

Minions!!

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Sleep in heavenly peace

Yes, there IS a spiritual component to Christmas for me, after all. My cat Bentley. He has brought more joy and love into my life than I have felt for a very long time, and just looking at him zonked out or grooming himself with obvious delight promotes deep relaxation, which for me (with my assurance I'm going to die in the next year) is a very great blessing.

This was originally a MUCH longer post, so don't complain about how many there are. I cut it down to less than half. These are just the good ones.

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How the cat saved Christmas

Reflections on decorating the house for the nine millionth time. I am far from Martha Stewart, but every year we just seem to have more "stuff" to put up, so it takes way longer than we think. A wreath appeared over the fireplace and I wondered how it got there, then I realized my husband must have put it there - without being asked! It seemed like a Christmas miracle, until I realized we'd been at it 2 1/2 hours and were nowhere near done.

I wouldn't mind, but -. It's the memories. They should be good ones, they ARE good, some of them anyway, except when I realize a handmade ornament from a grandkid has become antique. The days of salt dough and poster paint are coming to an end. Meantime, every item, every ornament has these memories, these damn memories stuck to it, and not all of them are all that pleasant. 

We sometimes replicate our childhood, and for a while I did and found a lot of ways to ruin Christmas, or almost. It's usually good now, but hauling all this stuff out - . EVERY year I say, this year I'll enjoy it, or at least: this year I won't mind it, or at least: this year I won't hate it. And I hate it. 

Once it's finally done, now that I am old, my back aches and I can't drink eggnog any more like I used to, or anything else for that matter. And I haven't baked anything because - phhhssssshht - baking?? But we have a new edition in the house, and it's his first Christmas here. A stealthy cinnamon tabby who wound his way up the trunk of the blinking tree and stared out at us with dilated owly eyes. Whenever you tried to hang an ornament, a white paw would shoot out and biff you in the nose. I guess there are consolations. (Addition? Edition seems better to me.)

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Every day is Christmas: Harold Lloyd's Christmas tree

All right, I guess I've put this off about as long as I can. It's time to deal with the little issue of Harold Lloyd and his Christmas tree.

Harold was a Christmas fanatic. He was a fanatic about a lot of things, including painting, handball, microscopy, the Shriners, and beautiful women with no tops on. But let's stick to the Christmas tree for now.

When he was a boy, growing up dirt-poor in Nebraska, they probably had something - you'd have to be pretty impoverished not to be able to cut something down in the woods, drag it home and decorate it with some paper garlands and strings of popcorn.

But once he was in the chips, Christmas took on a whole new meaning.

I sometimes get a mental image of Harold rolling around in dollar bills and throwing them up in the air, not because he was greedy (though he was apparently a lousy tipper), but because it was fun to have money at last.

Never again would the family have to skip out in the night to avoid paying rent that they didn't have.

As you can see here, some of these ornaments were absolutely huge. Most were handmade European things that remind me of Faberge eggs. Over the years he amassed an incredible 10,000 ornaments (hard to believe, but this is Harold Lloyd, folks, and he never did things by halves), most of which were kept in a vault somewhere in his huge estate, Greenacres.

It took weeks for him to decorate this thing, which was constructed from three gigantic fir trees lashed together. Then one year when he was about to dis-assemble it, he decided, ah, hell, isn't it really Christmas all year long? So the tree stayed up.

This pose with a red-jacketed Harold is obviously an earlier incarnation because you can still see parts of the tree. It doesn't have that bulged-out/pregnant/I-think-I'm-going-to-explode look it took on in later years.

In fact, this tree looks really nice to me. Has a nice shape, a nice sparkle, and TONS of ornaments already. But Harold never knew when to stop.

The little girl in the red pajamas is Harold's granddaughter, Suzanne, now keeper of the Lloyd legend. Due to family circumstances, Harold was like a father to her, and it must've been fun to have a grandfather like that, even if he was hard to keep up with. This surely must have been taken in the middle of the decorating frenzy, given the appearance of the tree in the first photo.

It always strikes me that the great geniuses of the world are little boys who never grow up. They retain that mental flexibility and ability to dream and actualize those dreams without adult restraints. They also retain temperament and a degree of childishness, which Harold did. He had a hairtrigger temper by all accounts - hey, folks, I learned that from Kevin Brownlow's superb documentary Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius, a major source of information for my research, and it was Harold's brother-in-law who said it. I'm not just making up stories. He really did have flaws. I say this because I sometimes wonder if I somehow inadvertently pissed off someone in the Lloyd family by portraying him as less than perfect in my book. At any rate, the silence from them has been deafening. But as I've said before, Kevin Brownlow has been wonderful to me, so maybe I'd better be happy with that.

It's still possible to buy some of those 10,000 ornaments today. In fact, they're listed on eBay right now, eight ornaments for $2500.00 USD.  That's uh, three hundred and. . . that's lotsa money per ornament. Eight would be about enough for my tree.

POST-POST POST: As you well know, Wikipedia is my Bible, especially when I don't feel like plodding through a dozen web sites for information which may or may not be right. It's a sad and poignant story, what happened to Harold's estate after he died in 1971. The upkeep on the gargantuan place was basically unworkable. The huge lot had to be subdivided and sold off in parcels in the '70s, but the house still sits on top of the hill in Benedict Canyon, somewhat updated from its falling-down days. It's nice to know it's still there and being looked after.

Several movies were shot at Greenacres in the '70s, including a Lylah Clare-ish, Sunset Boulevard-esque, cheesy TV movie called Death at Love House with Robert Wagner in it (Harold's close friend), but the video clips I could find were so Godawful I could not include them here. I couldn't even make a decent 3-second gif.

History after Lloyd's death

Plans for preservation and a museum





Christmas tree in 1974

Lloyd left his Benedict Canyon estate to the "benefit of the public at large" with instructions that it be used "as an educational facility and museum for research into the history of the motion picture in the United States." For a few years the home was open to public tours, but financial and legal obstacles prevented the estate from creating the motion picture museum that Lloyd had intended. Among other things, neighboring homeowners in the wealthy community were opposed to the creation of a museum hosting parties and attracting busloads of tourists.

In October 1972, the Los Angeles Times visited the property and noted that it had "the feel of Sunset Boulevard," bringing to mind the line spoken by the young writer when he first visits Norma Desmond's home: "It was the kind of place that crazy movie people built in the crazy 20s."The house appeared to visitors in the 1970s to be frozen in time at 1929. One writer noted that nothing had been moved or replaced, changed, or modernized, from the books in the library to the appliances in the kitchen and the fixtures in the bathrooms. 

Noted columnist Jack Smith visited the estate in 1973 and wrote that "time stood still", as Lloyd's clothes still hung in his closet, and the master bedroom and living room "looked like a set for a movie of the 1930s." A Renaissance tapestry presented to Lloyd as a housewarming gift by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks was still hanging in the hallway.

The house also had Lloyd's permanent Christmas tree loaded with ornaments at the end of a long sitting room. Jack Smith described the tree as follows:

"At the end of the room, dominating it like some great Athena in a Greek temple, stood the most fantastic Christmas tree I had ever seen. It reached the ceiling, a great, bulbous mass of colored glass baubles, some of them as big as pumpkins, clustered together like gaudy jewels in some monstrous piece of costume jewelry."

POST-POST: I just thought of something else. As usual! Somewhere, I know not where, I read in my research that there was a TV special called Citizen Lloyd which aired shortly after Harold's death. There was scant information about this, but I can't help but see the title as an allusion to Citizen Kane and Xanadu, the great echoing mausoleum inhabited by Charles Foster Kane. Parallels have also been drawn to Sunset Boulevard with its algae-choked swimming pool and demented German manservant with the duelling scar. 

Though Harold never employed Eric von Stroheim to look after the place, there is an eerieness to all this. Perhaps it's Stroheim's ghost that haunts Greenacres. I know Annette Lloyd got to tour the place at some point, and I never will. I'll die before that happens. In spite of all my efforts to flog it, the book I toiled over for seven years has fallen off the face of the earth. Except for wonderful Kevin Brownlow, no one connected with the film industry has shown the slightest interest in it, or in helping me actualize my dream.

A few years from now, I have a feeling "someone" will make a movie about Harold Lloyd, and it will have all my ideas in it. There are enough copies circulating, all of which seemed to fall into the Grand Canyon without an echo. And because I am so utterly powerless, there will not be a damn thing I can do about it.

But I wonder what happened to that TV special, if someone still has a tape of it moldering in their basement and will some day decide to put it on YouTube.

Stranger things have happened. But not much.

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Let this be my Christmas card

For all you've done for me.

Are you in Crimbo Limbo?

Today I mistakenly or accidentally stumbled across the term Crimbo, then when investigating it a little more, the expression Crimbo Pressie. First I thought it was a gaming expression, and it might be, but who gives a fuck about gaming, we spend our lives doing MEANINGFUL things.

So now I know TWO new words. Oh happy, joyous Crimbo!

(For an added thrill, click on any or all of the hip words below. Check out related terms like Crimbabwe and Crimbo Limbo, as well as British slang variations such as Crimbles. This opens up new worlds.)

• bitchy resting face
• poopsock
• control shift n
• thot
• swag
• cenosillicaphobia
• selfie
• morning hitler
• troweling
• lunk

• crimacious
• crimaliens
• Crimanity
• crimansqua
• Crimany
• Crimany-A
• crimate
• Crimax
• crimbalba
• Crimbaloid
• Crimble
• crimbles
• Crimbo
• Crimbo Limbo
• crimbo pressie
• crimbo (short for Crimbabwe) also kno...
• crimbot
• Crimbus
• Crimcheck
• Crimdalf

• 1. crimbo pressie

British slang for "christmas present"

I'm only getting one bloody crimbo pressie this year!

Why Watch Safety Last? This is shorter