Two shopping days to Christmas – normally those words would strike panic in most people’s minds. Maybe this year it’s different – 2024 has been a different year to a lot of people for a lot of reasons.
1974 it ain’t. 1974 we were well without most of the things we depend on in 2024. No cell phones – no online anything – no personal computers – no cable. MTV was a few years off. You could still afford rent and a dollar’s worth of gas could take you to the next state, depending on where you were.
It was all about malls and polyester in 1974. Nixon resigning from office was the most shocking thing in our lifetimes so far – we hadn’t heard of Punk yet, we were still getting sloshed on Tequila Sunrises and we thought Edible Underwear was funny. We still depended on Radio to give us music and news and reports whenever a fire broke out or a watermain burst. Cable TV was relegated to those hard to reach places like canyons and your TV was only VHF and UHF. They were still selling Black and White TV sets and you had bragging rights if your car had a cassette player, instead of an 8-track, and you were cutting-edge if you had an honest-to-god answering machine.
You never thought bellbottoms would go out of fashion and some restaurants still refused to serve you if you wore jeans, even if they were designer jeans and you paid $50.00 for them.
Cocaine was non-habit forming and Marijuana was starting to get turbo-charged. No one you knew was a virgin and your apartment had a collection of Mateus bottles lining the window sills, supporting all sorts of flowers and plants. You didn’t know anybody who didn’t know all the words to Stevie Wonders’ Innervisions and you had to ask people if they were vegetarians or not. You could still smoke in your apartment, in buildings, in elevators, in supermarkets and you could meet a future significant other at a book store or Tower Records.
And Christmas shopping was crazy – crazier too was the music pumping out of most department store sound systems. It sounded like a throwback to when you were a kid, somewhere in the 1950s. You didn’t mind – to you, it was white noise and it was filtered out, but somehow it made the madness more tolerable.
So in honor of that perhaps lost tradition and those times in the deep-distant past, here is a little over an hour’s worth of Christmas Music and in-store announcements from K-Mart, discovered by accident and dying to share with you.
Don’t crank this up – leave it at just around conversation level – that’s how we heard it – not loud enough to distract you, but quiet enough to climb into your unconscious and stay there.
Happy Holidays (every one of them).
