Blue Tablecloth Week: Day Five, Otherwise Know as Postcard Friendship Friday

Blue tablecloths and postcards...what do they have in common? Nothing except the day of the week.

Owls may deliver the mail for witches and wizards, but Muggles must get it the old fashioned way...by the Postal Service.

Most people save their letters and postcards in boxes, some tie them together with a satin ribbon.

Others blow them up really big and decorate with them.

Blue tablecloths and postcards...it must be Friday. Happy PFF!

Dein ist Mein Herz

I thought this card would be appropriate for a Valentine's Day Postcard Friendship Friday entry, since the front declares "You are my Heart."

Maybe our hostess, The French Factrice, with the mostest will translate the message for us. All I know is was written to Joseph who lived in Munich in October of 1917.

Happy Valentine's my postcardy friends!

Postcards and Doodles

Postcards:

What's pink and red and high flying?

A Chinese postcard of the Beijing airport apparently.

Happy Postcard Friendship Friday!

Doodles:

What's purple and green and pretty sketchy?

More office doodles, of course!


What do postcards and doodles have to do with each other?

Duh, nothing dude!

The Black Dress

I found this postcard at a local shop recently.

The Black Dress, 1960 by Alex Katz

As Coco Chanel said, "A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous." and "Fashion fades, only style remains the same."

I've never thought of myself as being particularly stylish. (I do try)

How about you?

Sending a Christmas Blessing Your Way

God grant you the light in Christmas, which is faith; the warmth of Christmas, which is love; the radiance of Christmas, which is purity; the righteousness of Christmas, which is justice; the belief in Christmas, which is truth; the all of Christmas, which is Christ.
-Wilda English

If we could condense all the truths of Christmas into only three words, these would be the words: "God with us." We tend to focus our attention at Christmas on the infancy of Christ. The greater truth of the holiday is His deity. More astonishing than a baby in the manger is the truth that this promised baby is the omnipotent Creator of the heavens and the earth!
-John F. MacArthur, Jr.

Yuletide Greetings PPF Style

The notation on this faded postcard front is Christmas Eve 1930 ______ Conn.
(for the life of me, I cannot decipher the name of the town) Look closely and you'll see a two story home and the faint outline of a street and sidewalk.


The back of the card is addressed to Mrs. Evelyn Fee who lived in sunny Phoenix, Arizona.



As a bonus, I'm tossing in another of my vintage Christmas cards.

This one has a note inside to my mother's mother and her youngest brother. (I have no idea how I wound up with a card of theirs in my collection) This one is probably from the late 60s or very early 70s as my uncle moved away from home and married in the mid 70s.

"Dear Vera & Don hope you are well I'm doing better lately which I'm so thankful my children will all be here sunday week I'm really looking forward to it sure is good day for me I always have a tree & put the presents under it I know you are busy getting ready for yours best wishes to you and yours Write me sometime Love Mellie Irvin"

(no punctuation was used)

Do you try to write a personal note inside each Christmas card you send? Or do you type up a newsy letter detailing the past year? Or are you doing good to remember to sign each card and put stamps on them before dropping them in the mailbox?

Drop by The French Factrice to see more Postcard Friendship Friday posts.

Postcard Friendship Friday

I've said it before....I have a paper fetish. I save all kinds of bits and pieces. Tonight, I dug into 35 years of birthday, anniversary and Christmas cards to bring you today's PFF post.

Christmas postcard from my aunt and uncle in 1981.

This card was sent to my family from a neighbor when I still lived at home with my parents...so my best guess is that it is from the early to mid 60s. What you can't see is the clear glitter which makes the whole card sparkle.

This one was taken from my mother's stash as well. I've always loved the colorful simplicity of this scene.

Holly Hobbie from the late 80s.

This one is probably circa late 80s or early 90s. I love this gentle, busy Santa.

My parents bought a box of vintage cards at an estate sale and my mother sent each one of us one of these old cards in 1999. It was already yellowing then, now it is more so.

I'm sad that the high price of stamps and cards have influenced many to stop the time honored practice of mailing cards to their friends and family. So tonight, I'm sending all of my PFF and bloggy friends my wishes for a very Merry Christmas with 6 virtual cards!

Happy PFF from Amish Country

About ten years ago when my oldest son and daughter in law lived in Ohio, we made a couple of day visits to Amish country. We toured a Amish home, had some homemade bread, ate at some good family style restaurants and toured a cheese factory. We also meandered along a lot of country roads. The Amish countryside is quite beautiful. One of my favorite sights was lines of their clothing drying in the wind. Another favorite sight were the conical hay stacks. Here in Alabama, farmers roll them into big bales of hay...there they were shaped like the haystacks in Van Gogh paintings.

My daughter recently gave me a few of the postcards she had purchased as souvenirs.



For more Postcard Friendship Friday posts check put Marie's blog Cpaphil Vintage Postcards.

Postcard Friendship Friday

I found this postcard in my mailbox today. It is from Jude in China . The painting depicted is named Steam Dumplings by Zhang Meiling. I did a little internet research and found this short bio about the artist. She was born in 1957 and began painting in 1980. Her work has been exhibited in Shanghai as well as in the United States and Belgium.

Here is what the site Chinese Peasant Paintings has to say about her style of art.

Jinshan Peasant Paintings are created by Chinese peasants working in Jinshan County near Shanghai, China. During the late 1970s, the Chinese painter Wu Tongzhang began teaching painting techniques to the farmers in Jinshan. Most of these first painters were older women skilled in various folk arts that had been passed down through generations. These traditional folk arts, such as embroidery, paper cutting, paper folding, and weaving, heavily influenced the style of painting that developed.

Style
Jinshan Peasant Paintings are both natural and unnatural. They are natural, for they show a love of ordinary life--love of children, love of festivals, love of animals, and love of work and chores. But they are also unnatural, in that these ordinary life-events are shown according to the painters’ imaginations. The painters use a wide range of bright colors--colors that are often unnatural--and spread them throughout the paintings. Spatial reality and perspective are unimportant in these paintings. Figures and objects are usually drawn in a way that looks child-like. Taken together, these elements give the paintings a charming, primitive style. The paintings that result are not traditional Chinese and not Western, but are universal celebrations of life.

beautiful stamp on the back of the card

As an added bonus to today's PFF, I'm tossing this photo of a wacky set of mailboxes I found while driving the backroads around my home last weekend.

I don't have a clue why there is a cutout of a cat on top of the box...but there it is ....4 mailboxes and a cat. It looks like it might blow over in a strong wind doesn't it?

Happy PFF. As always, to see more participants go to Cpaphil Vintage Postcards.

Postcard Friendship Friday

My computer is full of "borrowed" images. The Internet is a gift box chocked full of any and every sort of beautiful picture, artwork, painting, photograph....postcard you could ever think to go in search of.

I saved these images of Japanese postcard backs because I thought the lettering was beautiful.





Sorry, I have no idea if the orientation is right side up or upside down. Please enjoy the beauty of the characters and color.

Happy PFF.

PFF brought to you by the Smith Brothers

Dear Audrey,

Hazel and I had lunch in this quaint, old restaurant. It was opened by the Smith Bros. of Cough Drop fam. We travel back to Greenwich Friday night.
Nellie L. Schlosse

The postmark reads Greenwich, N.Y. Oct 14 3:30 pm 1947 and is addressed to
Miss Audrey James
Box 124
River Falls, Wisconsin

I darkened the back of the card quite a lot in order to decipher the writing as well as enlarging the image. I don't think I could have read Nellie's handwriting without the help of my modern aids.

THE HISTORY Smith Brothers Cough Drop packaging portrays one of the world’s most famous trademarks. The two bearded gentlemen who distinguish it, affectionately known to generations as Trade and Mark, are legendary. Not well known, however, is the fact that the Smith Brothers really existed. Their names were William (Trade) and Andrew (Mark) and they helped found Smith Brothers in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1847.

William and Andrew were sons of James Smith who moved to Poughkeepsie from St. Armand, Quebec in 1847 to establish a restaurant. Though James was a fine carpenter by trade, he was an even better candy maker and a businessman. The story of the birth of the first Cough Drop is a good example. As that story goes, a journeyman stopped at the Smith restaurant and gave James the formula for a delicious and effective cough candy. James saw a need for such a product in the cold, windswept Hudson Valley and immediately mixed up a batch on his kitchen stove.

The Drops were a quick success and demand for the "cough candy" grew fast up and down the river. Only a few years later, in 1852, the firm’s first advertisement appeared in the Poughkeepsie paper, inviting all "afflicted with hoarseness, cough or colds" to test it. Young William and Andrew were active in the new business from the start. They helped mix the family secret formula in their father’s kitchen and busily sold the product in the streets of Poughkeepsie. The two boys inherited the fast growing business on the father’s death in 1866, and the company officially became known as Smith Brothers. As sales grew throughout the Hudson Valley, this success was met with a whole flurry of imitators-"Schmitt Brothers", "Smythe Sisters" and even other "Smith Brothers" appeared with imitative product. The real Smith Brothers, by this time having long, flowing beards, decided to place their own pictures on their product packaging, which consisted of glass bowls for a counter display and small envelopes into which the shopkeeper counted the Smith Brothers Cough Drops for each sale.

By chance, the word "Trade" appeared under the picture of William and the word "Mark" under that of Andrew. Thus, it happened by a mere coincidence that the famous Smith Brothers’ trademark was born and the Smith Brothers became known to generations of Americans as Trade and Mark. The glass bowl and envelopes then in use, had definite limitations. For one thing, the Smith Brothers could not be sure that only genuine Smith Brothers Cough Drops would be sold in envelopes which bore their pictures, so in 1872 the brothers developed a package bearing their likenesses, which was filled under their own personal supervision. This package was one of the first "factory filled" packages ever developed. Andrew (Mark) died in 1895 but William (Trade) continued as President of Smith Brothers almost up to his death in 1913. He was succeeded by his son, Arthur G. Smith, under whose direction the company continued to prosper. Menthol Cough Drops were added in 1922, a cough syrup in 1926 and the famous Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Flavor in 1948.

So there you have it....famous in Poughkeepsie for generations....the Smith Bros.

Happy Postcard Friendship Friday. Check out all the other PFF posts this week by clicking here.

ps. Yes, Nancy and Pam, I did research this one!

Postcard Friendship Friday

According to Wikipedia, Cabinet Cards were "the style of photograph which was universally adopted for photographic portraiture in 1870. It consisted of a thin photograph that was generally mounted on cards measuring 4 ¼” by 6 ½ inches."

I don't know if these two postcards would be considered true Cabinet cards, but I am going to assume so unless one of you card experts can shed light on their probable origin. I acquired them in a lot of cards that I purchased off Ebay. These are two of my favorites.

There is no postmark or message on the back which would give a clue as to their age. So I'm giving it my best guess and dating them using my superior powers of deductive reasoning and my vast knowledge of costumes and clothing of the 19th and 20th centuries. The one I'm titling "Generations" seems to be from the late 1800. The "Sisters" might have been taken between 1900 and 1910. I read both cards as Midwestern in origin. Maybe Kansas. Maybe Oklahoma. Possibly Wisconsin. These women and girls are strong, determined, forged out of hardship and experts in making do with what is at hand.

The ladies in "Generations" look a bit surprised that anyone would want a photograph of them. The photographer better hurry and get their picture. They can't sit under this tree all day...they've still got tomatoes to can and peas to snap before the sun goes down!

The girls in "Sisters" seem to be used to lounging on their porch steps watching whatever or whoever passes by. They make judgments and giggle behind their hands as they whisper secrets about those who intrude on their privacy.

Lillie and Florence Jacobson

Perseverance
We must not hope to be mowers,
And to gather the ripe gold ears,
Unless we have first been sowers
And watered the furrows with tears.

It is not just as we take it,
This mystical world of ours,
Life's field will yield as we make it
A harvest of thorns or of flowers.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All in all, I think what their faces say to me is that "we will persevere, we will abide and we will abound."

Wishing You A Happy Thanksgiving!

Like Mary B. wrote to Miss Lana Trim in 1909, "I wish you could be with me and help eat our Thanksgiving dinner."

I am deeply grateful that I have met such nice people in the blog world this year.

I trust that each one of you is spending this day with those that you love.

Happy Thanksgiving from my home to yours.