New Year's Eve

The first time I was allowed to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve to see the ball dropped in Times Square I was 10 years old. In those days part of the tradition was to listen to Gaetano Alberto "Guy" Lombardo (June 19, 1902 – November 5, 1977) and his Royal Canadians play their music from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.  The music may have sounded corny to a first time listener but it didn't take long for one to realize they were a well organized and tight group of musicians.  They were noted for playing the traditional song Auld Lang Syne and their recording of the song still plays as the first song of the new year in Times Square.

While my younger brother and I waited for midnight and were being shown traditions like the Royal Canadians and the sight of all the people at Times Square, we soon realized we needed some confetti to throw at each other at midnight. The first thing we started ripping up was our blank notebook paper used for school reports but after a short while we were steered towards the newspapers in the pantry. In those days before the town began recycling,  this was  the logical thing to do.

When the clock struck 12 the ball began its descent at Times Square and we heard for the first time Guy Lombardo's version of the Robert Burns poem Auld Lang Syne. We could also see on the old black and white TV that people had begun to throw their confetti so we started throwing ours in support. After all the confetti was thrown we picked it up and threw it all again. This second celebration finally wore us out and we were sent off to bed, with the nostalgic tunes of the Royal Canadians playing in the background to lull us to sleep.

Flexible Flyers

With the first winter snow storm fast approaching us here in the northeast, a blizzard no less,  it's easy to remember those times when we saw a snowstorm as the perfect opportunity to have fun with our flexible flyer sleds. They would be hustled down from the attic and then stored in the garage until spring. You never knew when they would come in handy so they had to be close at hand.

This current storm which is coming would have been a slight disappointment because it will fall during Christmas vacation and there would be little chance of us celebrating a snow day with the subsequent loss of a day at school. I say a slight disappointment because sledding was and is too much fun to care whether or not you are doing it instead of attending school.

We had a fine little hill in the school yard at Willard, right behind our home. Dozens of people would use it at one time. As I recall if you made a running start and then threw yourself upon the sled you would travel quickly all the way to the fence at the bottom. We would then turn around and pull our sleds back to the top to do it all again. Such a simple activity, and one which we would repeat for an hour or two. After that time we would either engage in some other snow activity like a snowball fight or just go inside to get warm.

This hill at Willard is the only place I can ever remember sledding. I think this was because our parents would discourage us from sledding in the streets, for obvious safety reasons. Though the streets were never as pristine as the snow at Willard so it wasn't a terrible restriction in our eyes. The Village of Ridgewood would do the snow removal even in our edge of the town fairly early in the morning and would take most of the sledding fun with them.

Later in my younger days I would take up skiing and leave my flexible flyer in the attic for the last time. When we moved from Ridgewood the sleds were donated and hopefully found some kids who  appreciated them the way in which we used to. If given the choice now between skiing and sledding I would take sledding in a heartbeat. Too bad we can't sled down the ski trails as that would be a blast! We could put the sleds on our laps while we road to the top on a ski lift, instead of pulling them up the hill the way we did as kids. Now there is something I would pay for, and would cheerfully weather even a blizzard to engage in.

Christmas Eve

One of the most anticipated days of the year in our house growing up. One year we even wrote our plans down for getting up Christmas Day very early in order to watch Charles Dickens' The Christmas Carol on TV on our old black and white television set. The 1930s version with Reginald Owen as Scrooge was in my mind more faithful to the original story than the 1950s version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge, which had the advantage of better photographic techniques. These both played in the middle of the night so our written plan had the exact time we had to set our alarm clocks to wake up and watch. This was usually a formality as the excitement of Christmas Day usually made us wake up on time every year.

The other aspects of Christmas Eve which comes to mind include how our tree looked with all the presents under it, plus the Christmas decorations we had in our house like the Christmas creche and the red Santa Claus with a light inside. In those days people also wrote Christmas cards to each other and each day's mail in December was sure to include some of these now obsolete reminders of a simpler era. I guess this loss of the annual supply of Christmas cards, the prettiest of which were displayed tastefully in the living room, is the inevitable result of the Internet and it instant communication. Christmas cards are now a quaint memory of when communications from distant places was something we got excited about, whether it was a long distance telephone call or a written note. These were events we delighted in much more than we will ever glory e-mail, instant messages, or phone calls over Skype. The ironic fact is now that we can be in contact without much effort it makes us less likely to do at traditional times like Christmas and via old time methods such as a card sent in the US Mail.


The Village of Ridgewood always did itself proud with decorations. The Christmas Tree near the train station was always a place we would stop and marvel at, along with the infamous Arthur's House of Beauty. I can't remember ever being inside this landmark, as I usually patronized the Barber Shops in Hohokus, but this was another must-see at Christmas time while growing up. I scooped this picture off the Ridgewood Ridgewood-Expats page on Facebook.

I can also clearly remember how our elementary school, Willard, used to have all the grades gather in the auditorium to sing Christmas carols to the parents. They would march us in one grade at a time as I recall and we would do our best to sing the old faithfuls, Silent Night and Jingle Bells. One year there was even a class who sang Oh Tannenbaum in German. They had a stern german woman as their teacher and the kids knew they had to get it right or else! Not that anyone ever got hit in Ridgewood by a teacher but the teachers could make our lives miserable just the same by a look or a cranky disposition. Of course, the worst was having to stay after school. I had a spanish teacher in high school as the last class of the day and she would always threaten us with 5 minutes after school. Just think about it: 5 minutes was all it took to get our attention back to our studies. You would have thought we were being sentenced to a year in jail. I guess our attention spans were shorter back then and we didn't ever want to miss the rush to get out of school and be with our friends.

I hope you all are with family and friends this Christmas and can conjure up some happy memories of your own.

Peace.

Cold December Days

While we were growing up cold December days always heralded our countdowns to Christmas vacation and New Year's Eve festivities. Back then Dick Clark was in his heyday and the first time we were allowed to watch the ball drop on Times Square at 12 midnight on television we tore up newspapers as our confetti and tossed it wildly around the living room until our mother told us to clean it up and go to bed. I still savor the simplicity of my first New Year's Eve celebration, more than most of the rest that have come thereafter.

New Year's Eve 1999 was another memorable one held at the Novy's in Wyckoff was a great time that carried on well into the morning.

Though I have also had the unenviable task of working in restaurants on New Year's Eve. This task along with a desire to enter another profession were not much fun. This was caused mostly by the fact that we began to call it Amateur Night' as it always seemed that people who never went out all year would pick this evening to go out, be grossly overcharged, and show that they lacked the aplomb to truly enjoy themselves on a night out. It was always the little things which ticked them off and caused them to make a scene with the staff. It is for this reason I usually never go out to dinner on New Years and would never in a million years consider standing in Times Square to watch the ball drop. It those cold December days which keep me inside. Not to mention the warm memories of my first New Years as a child, and the best New Year's I ever had as an adult spent at the Novys with many old pals from my Ridgewood days.

RHS 1970 Reunion Web Site

http://ridgewood70.shutterfly.com/

This is a wonderful site, filled with pictures, and sections devoted to every school in town. Well worth the time for a look if only to see some familiar haunts.

Ridgewood Education Foundation Link Added

I received a nice note from Jennie Smith Wilson, the Vice President of the Ridgewood Education Foundation. The Foundation is now included in our list of Ridgewood Links. According to Jennie:

"The Foundation provides support to the Ridgewood public schools through classroom grants and community-wide programs.

We were founded 20 years ago by then superintendent Fred Stokley and a group of residents and in the following years we have given over $400,000 to the schools through programs that directly reach the students and support excellence in education.  We are an independent foundation and not part of the district administration or Board if Education.

Many alumni support the Foundation and the additional exposure would be great."




Hope this helps raise awareness of the work they do.