Silver and Gold

No one can sing like Burl Ives and it isn't really Christmas until you hear his smooth tenor.  I remember listening to "Frog Went a'Courting" when I was a kid.  I never did figure out what a'courting meant mmmhhmmmm.  If you know that song, I know you sang "mmhmmm" like Mr. Ives used to do. It's ok, no one else probably heard you. 

One of my favorite songs in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is "Silver and Gold".  I don't know why really.  Perhaps I heard my Mom say she "just loved that song" so many times when I was a kid that I decided as an adult that I just loved that song too.  

I remember watching Rudolph a couple of times with my Grandma Bower.  This was a big deal.  We did not watch TV back in the 70's the way people do now.  Also, this was not a DVD we had so you had to look in the TV Guide of the Sunday paper to see when it was on and pray that it wasn't going to be on a Sunday or Wednesday night.  We went to church on those nights and we were out of luck if it aired on one of those days.

After I had my own kids, we watched Rudolph on DVD which also meant that we watched it 17 times in July when they were small and really had no concept of when Christmas was celebrated.  After the second viewing in July, I referred to Rudolph as "mom's nap time".  Whenever the movie pauses and goes to black screen I always say, "Time for the commercial".  Since I don't think the kids have ever seen it on TV with commercial breaks, they would give me weird looks and then absorb themselves in the show.

"Silver and Gold" and Rudolph in particular remind me of family, of a time when life was much less complicated, memories of my kid's childhoods and a Grandma who is sorely missed and fondly remembered.