Ornaments

December 24, 2011

Growing up, each family member collected Christmas ornaments. We each collected a different series.  And every year we would each get the new ornament in the series.  These became some of our most cherished symbols of the season.

Mom collected Frosty Friends.

This one dates all the way back to 1981.

Jason collected the Crayola series.

All the series that I followed never really caught on.

My series were so bad, they were cancelled. 

So none of my childhood made it on to the tree this year.

Sigh.

Linkage:

These American Lives

Special Section in the NYT

(Including a story about Shannon Stone, who fell over the railing catching a ball at a Texas Rangers game.)

Ira Glass, Julie Snyder and Lisa Pollak, producers of WBEZ Chicago’s public-radio program “This American Life,” were guest editors of this section of the magazine.

When The Times Magazine’s editors invited us to be part of the annual ‘‘Lives They Lived’’ issue, they told us two things: 1) They wanted us to be bold and shake things up, and 2) Times readers love the issue just the way it is.

Nice. We decided to try something that’s not so different from what we do each week on the radio. For each person, rather than the soup-to-nuts sweep of a typical obituary, we chose only one story from his or her life. An excerpt. As much as possible, we tried to get these stories in their own words, or in the words of people close to them. Our hope was that the immediacy and intimacy of this approach would bring us close to these people, and help us hear their voices, get a feeling for who they were.