It is said that the real spirit of the holiday season is best seen through the eyes of a child, and I think that is probably true.
I can remember, for example, the awe and wonder I felt when I was about four or five-years-old -- that was some 50 years ago now -- and my parents took me to have my picture taken with a department store Santa...and I visited also with a “Talking Christmas Tree.”
For some reason, meeting Santa, as special as that must have been for me, pales in my memory to my visit with the Talking Tree. Today I can vividly picture, in my mind’s eye, the huge, living tree...and how it was filled with multicolored lights and decorations 100 times larger than my incredible feeling of wonder... and the tree was surrounded by what I must have understood were plaster reindeer figures and foam snowmen, and yet I believed the tree was really talking to me. My memory is so clear, in fact, that right now, as I type these words, I might as well be standing at the little wooden booth at a shopping center in Northern Ohio in the late 1950’s, in my kid snow boots up on kid tiptoes, talking into a speaker to converse with the tree.
Geez, memories are amazing.
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Anyway, clients and friends have been asking me lately to do pictures of their kids, and several of the resulting images are posted here. (I'm particularly tickled by the photograph above of the little girl who initially was less-than-excited about having her picture taken. She later warmed up to the idea.) Some of the pictures will be used on holiday cards, others will be printed and framed and given as gifts to grandmas and grandpas.
One day, these pictures will be the stuff of memories.
