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Sunday, December 13, 2015

An old photo...or three actually.

Once again this year, I'm posting a photo per day on Facebook under the heading of 25 Days of Christmas ie Dec 1-25. Photos cover a wide range of items/events including some old photos of Christmases past...like this one from 1975.
As the caption says...two mothers opening gifts on Christmas Day; my mother on the left and my mother in law on the right. The setting is the teeny tiny lounge room of the little two bedroom house that my first husband and I bought in December 1971. (We paid $9600 for that house!...haven't prices changed? Lol) 
The colours have faded in the photo but the sofa the mums are sitting on was part of a lounge suite we had bought on hire purchase in 1974 to replace our first lounge which was an old secondhand 'converter lounge/sofa bed we had bought for a few dollars before we moved in in January 1972. Our new lounge was peacock blue and black vinyl; the 2 chairs were swivel based and we just thought the suite was the 'ants pants'! Lol. The crocheted rug draped over the back of the sofa had been a gift to me in 1970 or 71 from my future mother in law who had crocheted it from oddments/scraps of wool. 
We couldn't afford to replace the threadbare carpet square in the lounge room so we had bought a circular shag pile rug in peacock blue to sort of disguise the carpet's  bare patches, but it doesn't really show up in the photo because the colours in the pic have faded over the years. 
In the photo in the left foreground you can see our 'evaporative cooler'...very trendy then and like a 'poor man's aircon. It worked by filling a tank with water and then the fans in the unit blew through this tank of water and this was supposed to blow out cool air...wasn't that great but again, we thought we were pretty 'flash' having one! Lol
Now I have no memory of what my mum had unwrapped that morning but we had given my mother in law a blender...you might think that wasn't much of a gift, but Elsie loved it. She and my mother had been army cooks in the war, but unlike my mum, Elsie loved to cook. She was staying with us for the 6 weeks of my school holidays and I can remember she cooked just about everything that was in the little recipe booklet that came in the blender's packaging! 
So there you are, some memories of Christmas 1975 BC...Before Children ! :-)

Now earlier in this post I wrote about an old sofa bed lounge that my first husband and I had when we were first married. I realised I had a photo of that old lounge...well 2 photos actually...these were taken a lifetime ago...well so it seems! Lol
(The crocheted rug on this old sofa was made by me; my mother in law had taught me to crochet when I was her son's fiancĂ©) 

7 comments:

Dorothy said...

Love the idea of the old photos Maria. I remember those evaporative air coolers - we had one but I think it was hotter when it was going as it made the house so humid. It was also a pain in the neck having to fill it up all the time. Is that you in the wedding pics?

Chookyblue...... said...

I still have one of those exact bonairs working at my place.......they blow so much air......great of a night....

Christine M said...

Thanks for sharing your old photos, Maria. I remember having one of those coolers. We thought it was pretty good too.

Susan said...

Love reading about your memories. We had an air cooler like that for a few years too - better than nothing but I certainly prefer the real air conditioning....

Cynthia said...

Thanks for sharing your photos and I really enjoyed the details you wrote about. It's fun to look back and remember the "old days".

angela said...

Love looking at old photos. Yes times have changed and so have the prices. But the memories that last are always wonderful

doodles n daydreams said...

Well we didn't have any sort of air con, not even a fan, but then our climes area bit cooler than yours and when it warmed up we weren't interested in cooling the temps down again, haha. We did have a convertible couch like yours for many years though and thought it was just great when we had visitors to stay :)
Thanks for sharing this lovely nostalgic post.

Diana