A Christmas Yuleblog

In addition to collecting Christmas music, I have collected nearly 1000 vintage Christmas ads over the years. Many of these include celebrities, radio, television, cigarettes, liquor, modern appliances, and the like. Almost every Friday from here until I run out, I will feature an ad from my collection. I invite you to add a fun comment, witticism, clever remark, or observation in the comments section provided. Any comments deemed worthy of repeating will be included into this entry where all the world will see it. While ruffling through old boxes of cassettes and junk I've carried with me since the Great Toledo Fire , I came across my old Montgomery Ward "Walkman" - a cassette/radio job complete with a three slider equalizer that gave anything I listened to that extra ounce of volume. The fire effectively destroyed the machine but I can't bear to throw this artifact out. This was the machine I listened to as I travelled back and forth through my college yea...

Since the beginning of 2009, I've been attempting to review Christmas CDs (and one other DVD) that I received as gifts on December 25th. The CD you see before you was a present from my son Alex who especially liked the "neat" cover artwork when ordering it from Amazon.com (with help from his mom). Shortly before Christmas, this CD wasn't on my wish list. I didn't know a thing about the Garza brothers or their music - my musical tastes have pretty much excluded anything non-Christmas since 2004. That changed during one of my Christmas shopping runs when I turned on a local radio station who was broadcasting Christmas music 24/7 throughout December. I tuned in during the middle of an intriguing version of "Feliz Navidad" that I hadn't heard and my interest was piqued. I dialed 411 on my cell phone, got ahold of the radio station DJ who played the song, and asked for the artist. "Oh man, that's Los Lonely Boys , ain't it cool?...

New York City has St. Patrick's Cathedral, a beautiful church on Fifth Avenue where the Pope comes to visit when he's in town. Not to be outdone, Chicago has Holy Name Cathedral on the corner of State and Superior, a place where the Pope comes to visit when he's in town. Holy Name is very special to many Chicagoans. Not many cathedrals have bullet markings in the bricks thanks to a gangland killing from the Al Capone days (top that, NYC!). As the video shows, a fire broke out in the attic of the cathedral this morning, severely damaging the church with fire, smoke, and water damage. My older brother John (number three out of five) has been a Chicago firefighter for nearly 15 years and has been on many fire runs throughout Chicago. As fate would have it, his firehouse was called and John was on the scene as we all slept. He was part of the second group that went in, stretching 100 foot lengths of hose up narrow stairways and over 100 yr. old timbers to extinguis...