Look What’s Under the Tree!

Posted on December 25, 2011 by sbranch

Merry Christmas Girlfriends!  I have a surprise for you!  Look under the tree!  And Come and Get your Happiness.

S  U  R  P  R  I  S  E  ! ! !  It’s  

I wanted to give you something that everyone would like . . . something sort of like a subscription to the flower-of-the-month club, a gift that would keep on giving.

You all know by now how much I love old movies; I’ve been recommending them in my books and calendars forever.  I know you love them too, so I thought I’d give you a list of my very favorite movies — hoping they’ll bring you happiness and give you a very wonderful winter 2012!

I’m not an expert, there’s no rhyme nor reason to this; please forgive me if I’ve left your favorite out.  I didn’t include lots of really good movies, like Sound of Music for example, or An American in Paris, Mildred Pierce, Funny Face, or even My Fair Lady . . . and I’m sure there are plenty I’ve simply forgotten.  But this is still a really good start.  These are films I never tire of.

Many of the movies I love best were made before I was born, and I saw almost all of them on the TV.  Wonderful, romantic, beautiful, magical, touching, funny and charming movies (like The Bishop’s Wife for example) that, because they’re in black and white, lots of people have just never seen. But that’s why I’m doing this . . . a cozy afternoon on a freezing day, with a cup of hot chocolate and one of these movies is my idea of the perfect Christmas present.  They are soul soothers, inspiration-givers, joy spreaders.

I came by my love for these movies naturally, my mom started me very young.  She’s the same age as Shirley Temple; she fell in love with Shirley when she was a little girl.  By the time I was old enough to be propped in a chair, she made sure the Good Ship Lollypop was tap dancing its way into my heart.  She and I know the words to all of Shirley’s songs; we sang them while we did dishes.  I still love Shirley.  If there was ever anything cuter or more adorable than Shirley Temple in Baby Take a Bow, I don’t know what it is.  All my life, I could be having a bad day, turn on Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, hear Shirley sing “Come and Get Your Happiness,” see the darling curtains at Aunt Sarah’s house and the roses on Tony’s Porch, and cheer right up.

From Shirley Temple, it was natural for me to move up to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies; they were made about the same time.  I think they’re sort of the grownup version of Shirley Temple, sweet, innocent and charming; the fabulous genius-inspired dances they did (like this one in Swing Time); the creative visuals their early movies presented in the height of 1930’s fantasy fashion, elegant clothes, beautiful furniture and architecture, not to mention the music!  It was magic!  A world of inspiration; a feast for the senses!

By the time I was old enough to live out on my own, I was half-formed about what life was going to be like, and all of it, for better or for worse, was based on books like Pollyanna and Little Women and wonderful old films, most of which I saw on the Million Dollar Movie on television.   I had already come to the conclusion that if you wanted a roses-on-a-picket-fence sort of life, it would be easy, just get a picket fence, and then plant some roses next to it!

I moved from my parents into an apartment with my best friend.  Her mom loved old movies too.  I’ll never forget us, lying on the floor, watching TV at two in the morning; A Farewell to Arms had just ended with Jennifer Jones dying, we were both sobbing hysterically, I had to get up and go into the other room.  Oh we loved it!  Janet called me Sue-Sue Applegate after the Ginger Rogers character in The Major and the Minor. (We called her Natasha after Boris’ wife.) We would get in her huge old car and go to the drive-in movies, wearing our jammies with big coats over them so we could go to the snack bar; we saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in French with English subtitles, and sobbed all the way home.  We really loved to cry at movies!  Splendor in the Grass almost killed us. (You can tell by these photos, we’d been looking at too many fashion magazines. 🙂 Legends in our own minds.)

Old movies shaped my dreams:  they showed me what I wanted my houses to look like, how I wanted to dress, what kind of a person I wanted to be; those shipboard romances in An Affair to Remember, The Lady Eve, Sabrina, and Shall We Dance; rose covered cottages in Father of the Bride and Love Letters; houses with darling curtains and wallpaper like in Dear Ruth; the train rides in The Palm Beach Story, Some Like it Hot, North by Northwest, and Brief Encounter.  I dreamed of fields of bluebells as high as my knee, like the ones I saw in Howard’s End and one day, I went to England to see them. ♥

You could go around the world, even from a one-bedroom apartment, with The Quiet Man, Roman Holiday, Mrs. Miniver, Ninotchka (prettiest dress in the movies is in Ninotchka), Out of Africa, Two for the Road, and A Room with a View.

I planted flowering trees because of the tree-lined road Anne Shirley (of Green Gable fame) drove through, the petals flying, in the buckboard with Matthew just after she arrived on the train.  Remember?

Miracle on 34th Street made me decide to never grow all the way up.  I could see that the fairy-tale life was the life for me.  I knew there was much goodness in the world, I saw it in movies such as It’s a Wonderful Life, The Bishop’s Wife, Margie, and The Secret Garden.

When 9/11 happened I was glued to the TV like everyone else, but after a while, the intensity was too much, the grief, sorrow, anger, pain; it was unbearable; the real world was just too real.  I couldn’t sleep, thinking about man’s inhumanity to man; the TV news was unrelenting; I felt like it wasn’t healthy to hear it anymore. I finally turned it off, and began feeding my soul with childhood favorites . . . at first it was all Shirley Temple movies. When I saw Cary Grant, cutie pie Walter Pigeon, gorgeous Gregory Peck, Jeanne Crain, Barbara Stanwyck, or Myrna Loy — the laughter, beauty, whimsy, and charm, my troubles just floated away.  It took a few weeks for me to find my equilibrium and remember that the overwhelming majority of people in this world are good; those movies really helped.  One big bad apple had upset the balance.  I think if Osama bin Laden’s mom had given him Shirley Temple to watch when he was young, we wouldn’t have had this problem. Judge Hardy wouldn’t have put up with any of his shenanigans either.

If you’re starting from scratch, trying to learn more about old movies, it’s hard to know where to start. So here is my list of favorites, many times tried and always true. ♥ I added links to some of the trailers for these movies — I didn’t do them all, I’m sure you aren’t going to want to go through all of them, just want you to know that the ones without the links are just as good as the ones that have them!  You can get these movies sent to your house from Netflix or buy them at Amazon. You can find them at your public library!  You can look them up on Google to find out more about them; some of them are even free and run in full length on Youtube.  So here we go!  Merry Christmas and Happy 2012 to you all! ♥ Enjoy!  Here’s the list:

This is a list of newer movies that I love as much as the old . . .

 

Now take an extra minute, go to the top of the next post.  I don’t know if you did this, but something fun is to click where the link says “It’s that time of year” — come right back to the blog, letting the music play.  Now, scroll down a few more lines to the words that say THE MAGIC OF SNOW …. click on that and watch, you can listen to the music and watch the picture at the same time . . . . a little bit of heaven . . . . XOXO

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Posted on December 23, 2011 by sbranch

No snow here! Even though It’s that time of year, somehow it hasn’t happened yet.  But we can still dream can’t we?  Of a snowy afternoon, in front of the fire?   After all, remember, “Reality is something you rise above!”  (This is one of my favorite sayings, right up there with “we’re the normal ones.”)  Even if you don’t like snow, even if you moved to Hawaii to get away from it, you have to admit, it sure looks pretty!

Plenty of snow here in this little painting I did of my house; my favorite kind of snowfall, the big, fat, slow-moving (or in this case, stopped) flakes.  That’s what I like about painting, you can make it snow all you want!  Who cares about reality!

THE MAGIC OF SNOW

Here’s our back yard in the snow this time last year!  Not only looks pretty, but it smells wonderful, cold and fresh.

Snow coming down outside our kitchen door.  Coming in to a warm house is wonderful too.

Playing in the snow a few years back — makes cheeks pink.

The path in front of our house, clean, pristine, untouched snow.

The holly trees out back, bowed down with wet snow.

Apples for the squirrels . . . beyond is our picket fence garden and the house next door, with sunrise reflecting on it.

Big windy nor’easter’s blow snow in every direction and turns the garden into a twinkling white fairy world.  Walt Disney couldn’t do it one bit better than this.

Last year, our shutters were off the house — Joe was painting them in the barn . . . you couldn’t tell where the snow ended and our house began — it looked like a square snowball.

Joe took this photo of me running through the snow for the picture we used on the back of my first Christmas Book.

The lights are a reflection from our Christmas tree across the room.  I took this photo of snowy holly trees through the living room window.

I’m afraid this is the closest we’re going to get to snow this Christmas . . . the powdered-sugar “snow” covered chocolate tree cake I’ll be making for Christmas dinner!

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