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at Christmas displays. We bought tickets for Christmas plays, ballets, and concerts. We started stung tips into envelopes for the milkman and others who delivered baked goods, potato chips, newspapers, and dry cleaning to our door. We sent Christmas cards, many of them created locally at American Greetings. We were awed by the Christmas lighting displays at GEs Nela Park. At home, families put their favorite Christmas music on the hi-fi: selections such as Bing Crosbys White Christmas (1949), Spike Jones Presents a Xmas Spectacular (1956), Christmas With the Chipmunks (1962), Frank Yankovics Christmas Party polka album (1964), and The Jackson 5 Christmas Album (1970) as they decorated the tree. The whole family watched A Christmas Story one more time, and recited the dialogue along with the characters. Carolers went door to door. Each family and each ethnic community had its own traditions as the season built to a crescendo with Christmas pageants, nativity scenes, and much-anticipated Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services at church. For our Christmas feasts, we brought out the once-a-year tablecloths and Christmas table settings. Perhaps we even set the table with Christmas Eve patterned dinnerware designed by Cleveland artist and industrial designer Viktor Schreckengost. The book Cleveland Food Memories is filled with examples of how food links us to our family and our culture. Its not surprising, then, that what we ate for Christmas dinner depended on who we were, and what our families considered traditional. Some had meatless meals, fish, pasta, or oyster stew on Christmas Eve. For Christmas Day, turkey, ham, roast beef, rabbit, pheasant, or pork were among the standards. Collectively these memories represent wonderful Cleveland Christmases that are gone forever. We can look back, though. We can read about them, and remember the people who made them so special.

ostalgia is all about the things we loved and the things we miss today. In the not-toodistant past, store clerks werent shy about wishing us a Merry Christmas and we did

window shopping rather than Web surfing for gift ideas. Happy memories for Clevelanders include taking the rapid transit downtown to see the grandeur of a decorated and bustling Euclid Avenue in December. We recall the sparkle and splendor of department stores decked out for Christmas. As kids, we made forays into the neighborhood toy stores and hobby shops to check out the gifts we wanted Santa to bring us. We embraced the magic of the vast toy departments of Clevelands now-closed department stores, and displays in discount stores, drugstores, and dime stores. Each of us has memories of a gift we pined for as a child. Some favorites are Chatty Cathy dolls, Cabbage Patch Kids, Rock Em Sock Em Robots and Schwinn Sting-Ray Orange Krate bicycles. At home, delicious aromas emanated from Moms kitchen, as cookie-baking and pastrymaking got underway. No sooner had we finished eating our leftover Thanksgiving turkey sandwiches on the day after Thanksgiving, than it was time to head downtown for the annual tree lighting ceremony with Santa. The Friday after Thanksgiving was also the day Mr. Jingelings television appearances started for the Christmas season. As the pre-Christmas excitement built, we bought Advent calendars and counted the days until Christmas. We braved the cold at Christmas parades held the Saturday after Thanksgiving. We watched as the city-wide decorations gradually unfolded downtown. Garlands went up at Higbees, and oversized exterior ornaments appeared at the May Company. Halles and Higbees unveiled that years window displays, and the Sterling-Lindner tree stood, majestic and decorated, waiting for admirers. Soon the signs were everywhere: Salvation Army bell ringers stood outside store entrances. Businesses held their annual Christmas parties. When it came time to start our serious Christmas shopping, we withdrew money from our Christmas Club savings account at the bank, redeemed our books of trading stamps, got out our store Charge-A-Plates, and studied department store and mailorder catalogs. We left nose prints on the windows as we gazed