Happy Holidays, Everyone!

A Brand New Year!

Happy 2017, everyone!

Happy Valentine's Day !

Image credit: Vintage valentine from Sweetly Scrapped

Cat Thursday: Valentine Kitties

Cat Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by The True Book Addict, and celebrating "the wonders and sometime hilarity of cats." You can join the fun by posting a favorite LOL cat pic, famous cat art or even pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats!

It's been a really long time since I posted any photos for Cat Thursday. (Where've I been?) But as we're getting very close to Valentines Day (or should that be Valentine's Day?), thought I'd share a few vintage cards with images of cats.

I love cats (though I'm allergic, darn it) and I've always loved/collected greeting cards. So what's better than a greeting card with a cat on it, right?

A couple of these are from my personal card stash, and the rest are images I've collected over the years from various sources (internet sites like Graphics Fairy and Free Vintage Digital Stamps are great places to explore).

They're all wishing you a Happy Thursday and a Purrrr-fectly lovely Valentine's Day.

Christmas Time is Here!

Every year I sign up for Holidailies in December, fully intending to update the blog regularly with a bunch of fascinating holiday posts. Of course, it never works out that way. And this year, here we are already five days into the month and I've posted exactly... nothing. It's not that I'm lazy.... Well, actually it is that I'm lazy. Mostly, anyway. But busy, too.

But I didn't want to let another day go by without putting up some sort of holiday post. So, here's a shot of the hubby putting the Christmas wreath on the front door...

...and another of said wreath after he got it all adjusted.

So there we are -- holiday post numero uno.  Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! Season's Greetings! And more to come!

Blue Monday: Memorial Blues

Blue Monday is hosted weekly by Smiling Sally.
To see more offerings, or to participate yourself, please head on over to her blog.

We're not flying our flag today because of the rain. Michael is an old Boy Scout (well, old-ish) and has a thing about not displaying the flag in the rain. I think he also just doesn't want to get wet. And I can certainly identify with that.

Anyway, if we were flying the flag today, here's how it would look:

Happy Blue Monday! And I hope everyone has a happy and safe Memorial Day.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

I'm a little tired of all those valentine hearts and all the red and pink we get for Valentine's Day.  So here's a bouquet of my favorite flowers - yellow roses.  Hope you have a happy day, together with your special sweetie!

Christmas Cards

I love Christmas cards.  And I have a huge collection of them.  Actually, I love ALL greeting cards.  Always have.  My mother used to save all her greeting cards in a big shoe box and one of my favorite childhood pastimes was going through the box, making up stories to accompany the pictures on the cards.  I especially loved the shaped or die-cut cards - I'd trace around the edges and use the outline to make frames for my drawings.  Hmmmm.  Whatever happened to all that creativity I wonder.  But I digress.

Today, I just thought I'd show you a few cards from my collection.  It's a pretty random selection - some are really old, from the 1920s and earlier.  But most were issued sometime between 1930 and the early '60s.  I used to be able to pick these up for around a nickel each, in thrift shops.  These days, with more and more people collecting, they're usually considerably more expensive - and harder to find.  But I still love hunting for them.

SkyWatch Friday: Glorious 4th

(Click on photo to enlarge.)

Gotta fly your flag on the 4th of July.  And in Texas you gotta have that Lone Star flag as well.

I always think of Independence Day as the official beginning of summer. Of course, here in central Texas we've been having summer-like temperatures for months already, but now that the fireworks displays are done and all the hotdogs eaten, I can sit back and relax.  Summertime is really here at last.

To see more sky photos, or to post your own sky shots,
please visit:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Have a wonderful day, everyone!

Christmas Eve Is Here!

The Great Christmas Show: The Rest of the 1940s

I'm falling behind in putting together my list of favorite holiday movies. Figured I would. Actually, I've been falling behind in viewing them, too. Gotta get a move on. So today, here are a few more favorites from the 1940s -- probably the Golden Age of the Christmas movie.

It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

Directed and Produced by Frank Capra
Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Jo Swerling, and Frank Capra
Based on "The Greatest Gift," by Philip Van Doren Stern
Starring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Henry Travers, Thomas Mitchell

This is, I suppose, the archetypal Christmas movie. But I was never a big James Stewart fan, so it's really never been one of my favorites, even though I do feel a certain obligation to watch it -- just out of tradition if nothing else. Actually, I've always seen the film as something of a horror epic: I really want George Bailey to get away from Bedford Falls, and live the life he wants to live. Every time I watch the show, I'm rooting for George when he says, "I'm shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I'm gonna see the world." And every time, he goes right ahead and gives his college money to his brother, marries the boring hometown girl, and takes over the old building and loan, just the same!

The Bishop's Wife (1947)

Directed by Henry Koster
Screenplay by Leonardo Bercovici and Robert E. Sherwood
From the novel by Robert Nathan
Starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young, David Niven, Monty Woolley, James Gleason, Gladys Cooper, Elsa Lanchester, Sara Haden

I think this is my favorite of all the favorites from the 1940s. And it's one I had never seen until my husband made me watch it after we were married. Now it's one of the two or three films I absolutely must see every holiday season, even though it's rather heavy-handed in the "author's message" department. Not something I'd usually be attracted to, but I think the humor saves it. I love the exchanges between Grant and Niven; and the scene where the very proper Bishop Brougham (Niven) gets stuck in an armchair and can't get out is almost worthy of the Marx Brothers. Great movie. (And there's Monty Woolley again!)

Holiday Affair (1949)

Directed and Produced by Don Hartman
Written by John D. Weaver and Isobel Lennart
Starring Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh, Wendell Corey, and Gordon Gebert

This is another one of my husband's favorites that I've come to love, too. Well, anything with Robert Mitchum in it is worth watching, right? Although I think the main reason the hubby likes it is that a model train figures prominently in the plot.

See other Holidailies posts:

The Great Christmas Show: 1944 and 1945

Continuing on with my list of movies I like to watch during the holidays. I'm going through the list by year, and last time I covered 1942 (Holiday Inn and The Man Who Came to Dinner). So today, I've got a few from the mid-40s.

Since You Went Away (1944)

Directed by John Cromwell
Written and Produced by David O. Selznick
Starring Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Shirley Temple, Joseph Cotten, Monty Woolley, Robert Walker, Hattie McDaniel

Another one that's not, strictly speaking, a Christmas movie -- it was released in July 1944. I'm including this one because it was a huge favorite of mine when I was a kid and used to see it on TV every year. I think I liked it mainly because of Shirley Temple, but also because of the house the family lived in -- for me, growing up in post-war ranch-style suburban sprawl, it seemed like the perfect storybook home. Now that I'm older, I'm more critical -- the movie is almost revoltingly sentimental and preachy, and about an hour too long. But, like all of Selznick's films, it's a gorgeous thing to watch; and Monty Woolley, Hattie McDaniel and Joseph Cotten provide welcome bits of comic relief. It's no longer a film I seek out, but I usually end up watching it (or part of it) every Christmas season.

The Bells of St. Mary's (1945)

Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Leo McCarey and Dudley Nichols
Starring Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman

I don't really think of The Bells of St. Mary's as a Christmas movie, although it's come to be associated with the holiday. One of my favorite films in general, I could (and do) watch it any time of year. The scene where Ingrid Bergman, in her nun's habit, teaches one of her young pupils to box is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

Directed by Peter Godfrey
Written by Lionel Houser, Adele Comandini, and Aileen Hamilton
Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sydney Greenstreet, Reginald Gardiner, S.Z. Sakall

Wonderful little film -- if I had to rate the movies on my list, it would be very near the top. It's one of the funniest of all the Christmas films, and I can really identify with the idea of a woman who has no domestic skills whatsoever!

See more Holidailies Posts:
The Great Christmas Show, Day One

The Great Christmas Show: 1942

The Diaries of Yesteryear

The Great Christmas Show: 1942

Today I'm continuing with my list of favorite Christmas movies and TV shows -- I started it here with a post about the 1965 Charlie Brown Christmas special. I'm trying to keep the list in chronological order as much as possible, so today I've got two black & white films from 1942. (A year that's very special in my book, since it's the year my parents got married!)

Holiday Inn

Directed and Produced by Mark Sandrich
Written by Irving Berlin, Elmer Rice, and Claude Binyon
Music by Irving Berlin
Starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds, Virginia Dale, Walter Abel, and Louise Beavers

In Holiday Inn, former musical-act partners Jim Hardy (Crosby) and Ted Hanover (Astaire) battle for the affection of lovely singer Linda Mason (Reynolds). Hardy falls in love with the beautiful performer and persuades her to come to work at the country inn he's opening, but his ex-buddy Hanover wants her to be his new dance partner. The setting for most of the film is Jim's supper club, Holiday Inn, which is only open on holidays (get it?) -- and that schtick provides the excuse for lots of big production numbers.

OK, this isn't really a Christmas movie exclusively -- it's about all the holidays throughout the year. But it introduced us to one of the iconic holiday songs, Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," and I always watch it at some point during the season.


It's schmaltzy and some of the musical numbers and dialogue probably wouldn't make it into a movie filmed in these politically correct times, but it's still fun to watch Crosby and Astaire going through their paces back when they were at the top of their game.

The Man Who Came to Dinner

Directed by William Keighley
Written by Julius J. Epstein and Philip Epstein
From the play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman
Starring Monty Woolley, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Jimmy Durante, Billie Burke, and Reginald Gardiner

When the world's most famous (and most obnoxious) theater critic, Sheridan Whiteside (Woolley) slips on the front steps of a provincial Ohio businessman's home and breaks his hip, he and his eccentric entourage take over the house indefinitely.


Again, technically this isn't really a Christmas movie, although it does take place over the Christmas holiday. And it wasn't one of my favorites until a few years ago when my husband got hooked on it and added it to his "must see" list for the holidays. Now I'm a fan, too. And oddly enough, Monty Woolley is one of the co-stars in at least three of my favorite Christmas movies (besides this one, he appears in The Bishop's Wife and Since You Went Away).

See another Holidailies Post:
The Great Christmas Show, Day One