Christmas Photos

More Christmas pictures of the Quinn kids.  The first one, which I call Ugly Christmas Sweaters, takes the cake for confirming my mother’s love of dressing Bill and Butch alike.  And they didn’t seem to mind.  Sitting on the couch in the living room, hamming it up for the camera, we were in the Christmas spirit.

 Second photo, a family favorite, Christmas morning.  Let me tell you about the tree first.  I don’t remember where our early trees came from.  Uncle Duke started his Christmas tree farm some years later, I think, so my father probably brought trees home for us to decorate.  What I remember is that my mother let us put some ornaments on the tree, but she supervised us very closely when we did.  You can’t make out the ornaments very easily, but I remember them. My mother told me that she bought them during World War II. They were very plain glass balls from Corning Glassworks because Christmas ornaments up to that time were all made in Germany and Japan and that supply line was obviously cut off because of the war.  I found an interesting account of what happened then in case you’re interested.

So we kids helped a little to decorate the tree, but my mother was very fussy about the icicles, as we called them, but I think other people refer to “tinsel.”  She pretty much insisted on doing the whole tree herself.  She’d put the icicles on one at a time and was sure to make them hang perfectly.  You can tell that from looking at the tree in this picture.  Every piece of tinsel was placed perfectly on the branches. (BTW, if any of you or your offspring have a tendency toward perfectionism, you now know that you came by it honestly.)

As for the Quinn kids in the photo, again the guys are dressed alike. This is a black-and-white photo, but I can guarantee you that Bill’s plaid-checked shirt is brown and Butch’s is blue.  These guys were very much into pretending they were cowboys.  We devoured lots of TV shows featuring characters like the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and the Cisco Kid.  You can tell that Butch was really into this because he’s the only one wearing his cowboy hat.  This reminds me a little of what I wrote about the relationship between Bill and Butch when I described Bill’s astronomy club.  Butch went along with it, I think, because that was Bill’s “thing.” Here Bill is going along with the cowboy idea because it’s Butch’s “thing.” 

The elephant in the room, of course (in case you haven’t noticed), is related to my being all dolled up in my Annie Oakley outfit.  I envied my brothers’ holsters and cap guns, and Bill insisted I needed a gun too for the picture, so he let me pose with his bazooka gun.  Talk about an anachronism. I also was wearing some pretty spiffy cowboy boots that I absolutely loved.  I remember that Bill and Butch had the same high, pointy-toed, faux leather boots, but theirs had spurs attached.  Kind of dangerous around the house, as I recall.

Another observation.  If you look closely at the left of this photo, you’ll see my mother’s mahogany drum table and floral urn lamp with its fancy linen lampshade.  It’s moved out of the way to make room for the tree, but it held the place of honor in the front window when it wasn’t Christmas.  This very same table and lamp were given to Bill and Joan when my mother redecorated the living room and dining room; if I’m not mistaken, Joan still has these items in her house in Hamburg.

And then there was Tommy.  In the third picture, we see that awful dizzying wallpaper again, icicles placed perfectly on the tree, and an old RCA TV relegated to the corner of the room. Little Tommy has his own cowboy outfit.  But It looks like he’s holding a play revolver, not a cowboy cap gun. Another anachronism.  

I wish I knew for sure when all three of these photos were taken, but If I had to guess I’d say that Thom looks like he’s about 4 years old, so it would be Christmas 1955.  The others are obviously older, early 1950s. At any rate, Christmas was a memorable time in our family, as it is in most, or at least we wish that could be true. Santa Claus was always good to us. The looks on our faces in these old photos prove that. Happy kids.

~ Maryellen Thirolf, September 2023