When I wore a younger woman's clothes

Today is my 31st birthday. Yes siree, I made it through the first year of my 30s and am every bit as excited to embrace the second as I felt on the day when they began precisely a year ago.
 
Being both my birthday and a Friday however, I didn't want to launch into a hefty sized post. Instead the idea struck me recently while listing to Sirius XM (as I usually do when shooting photos for my Etsy shop listings) to feature a few photos of myself as a youngster on my birthday when the next one rolled around for me. As you may have deducted, it was Billy Joel's classic hit Piano Man that inspired the title for this post and by the same token, the post itself.

I have some photos from my childhood, the bulk of which I have my very dear mom to thank for scanning from old photo albums and sharing with me on a flash drive a few years ago, however not that many from my the birthdays of my youth. I debated posting others that weren't from birthdays, and may do so in another entry one day (I have shared at least a couple such snaps over the years, including in this post about how my passion for vintage fashion took root at a very early age), but that didn't feel right given the occasion so I tried to find a few that were from past birthdays, save for the first one of me as a teeny, tiny baby (aww!).

I am not wearing vintage or vintage styles here (I began doing so in earnest at the age of 15, transforming my wardrobe into an into ever more yesteryear filled one with each year that followed), but you can still get a sense of my style - girly, filled with pink, classic, and fun - from these few long time faded photos, each taken on July 10ths that came before.

Please bear with the quality of these images. They're scans from old family albums that were not archivally safe and which definitely show the ravages of time, as many colour photos from that era do. I'm so grateful to have them though and that I can take a trip down memory lane anytime I want care of these old snapshots, captured almost always by mom's hand during my youth.




I don't have any photos of the me on the day I was born, but I do have this one professional one shot during my first sixth months of life. Love that eyelet trimmed dress, it would have been perfect for a birthday party!




In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not 100% certain that this was taken on my birthday, but given the bow on my head - clearly accessorizing was already an important priority to be at a very early age (I would have been about a year old here, I think) - how could I not share it?




{Back when I was a wee sprite, British Columbia had two fun theme parks devoted just to the classic cartoon characters, The Flintstones, one of which was located about 45 minutes from our home at the time. It was a huge treat to go there and visiting on my 4th, I believe, birthday as I did here with my good friend at time, Leanne, by my side, was beyond the icing on the birthday cake for me!}




I'm going to say that this in my 5th birthday, but am not 100% sure. Based on my hair, height, and what I'm wearing, I think it was though. Here I am kneeling on the brown picnic bench we had in our backyard at the time, opening a Hudson's Bay box. I don't remember what contents it held, but am sure that it was clothing and that that me one seriously happy birthday girl (I think I was one of the few kids out there who actually loved getting clothes a present - my fashionista tendencies haven taken hold very early on in my life! Plus, holy smokes, check out the box on the ground. Is that the year I got my Lite-Brite? I loved that toy so much!).




Growing up, my family always had a tradition of giving each child a helium balloon first thing in the morning on their special day, and here I am - decked out in a pastel pink party dress, natch - holding mine as my 7th birthday kicked off. Props to my mom on the fab pink streamer decoration job around the doorway!




Diving right into my gifts on my 8th birthday, with my BFF at the time, Talia, and my little brother by my side. Tal and I were the same age, but I was very short - usually the smallest in my class - as a child, so she looks much older than me here. Based on the shape of that top box, it was almost certainly a Barbie. Score!!! :D




This is the last photo I have of me, as far as I know, that was taken one of my childhood birthdays and it from my 13th, if I'm not mistaken. My teen years were incredibly difficult and tumultuous (for reasons far beyond the normal tribulations of youth) and exceedingly few photos were shot of me during that time, which makes having this one - of me sitting on a swing at a park here in Penticton - all the more precious to me.

♥ ♥ ♥

Like most of my friends back in the day, my wardrobe was not big when I was a child and my parents had a strong say in what I could wear until I hit high school, but looking back on these photos and the others I sorted thorough from my youth to unearth this tiny selection, I can still see the seeds of the style that would come to fill my closet in the decades to come.


It's often hard to believe just how quickly time passes. I can still recall the precise way that that pink party dress felt on my skin and how much I loved my long permed locks (the results of, I kid you not, three different spiral perm applications to get my naturally bone straight hair that curly) in the final photo. I can recall too with stark clarity, too, the waves of massive excitement I felt on each birthday that I've experienced, no matter what else was going on in my life at the time.



(A Dairy Queen Ice Cream cake, my absolute favourite b-day sweet treat when I was a youngster – this one from my 4th birthday. If they were gluten-free, I'd still get them to this day. Next year I'll have to devise a GF version of my own and rekindle this once favourite birthday food tradition once again.)


I love birthdays. I mean really, really love them - be they my own or other people's, and while I might have worn a younger woman's (girl’s, technically) clothes when these snaps were taken decades ago now, that wide-eyed excitement still holds true and returns each July 10th to help set the stage not only for the day's celebrations, but for the whole year ahead and each bright, beautiful possibility it holds in store.

Welcome, 31st year of life, I can't wait to see what new memories - and photos alike - you'll bring my way in the coming 365 days!

They’re creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky

✯ Day 297 of Vintage 365 ✯

Though I've really been feeling softer hues and highly elegant Halloween elements this month, as October 31st draws ever more delightfully near, I can't help but yearn for a bit of spooky, dark fright night fun, too.

A marriage of both of those (masked) faces of Halloween lands you somewhere in the territory of glam goth, which in a roundabout way is where my creative inspiration stems from as we count down the last week until October 31st.

Though many of us think of the Addams family as being tied to either the classic television show of the 1960s or the movies that followed later in 90s, the creation of this much loved clan of morbid characters stretches back considerably farther, all the way until 1938 in fact.

Dreamed up by an American cartoonist by the name of Charles Samuel Addams, the Addams Family first appeared in a long running series of single panel cartons that appeared in the New Yorker magazine (between 1938 and 1988, when Charles Addams passed away), before making their way in the sixties to TV screens around the world.

I think it's safe to say that unless one has been living under a rock (or in this case, perhaps a tombstone), you're familiar with the Addams Family.

You know the cast - kooky Gomez, enchanting Morticia, odd-ball Uncle Fester, tenacious young Pugsley, goth-before-it-was-cool-to-be-goth Wednesday, venerable Grandmama with her somewhat cynical sense of humour, lumbering butler Lurch, the furry rapscallion called Cousin Itt, and of course, that most unique of disembodied hands, Thing – and you likely have a favourite or two.

Hands down (or would that be Things down in this case? ), Morticia was always my favourite of the Addams family members. However, it was the eccentric, endearing antics of the whole family that really made me a fan of this classic spooky family.

Well, that and the fact that they seemed to perpetually live in a Halloween world filled 24/7, which struck me as too incredibly awesome for words to me when I was a little girl (who grew up both watching reruns of the black and white TV show from the 60s and the spirited movies in the 90s).

I always adored the fact that the Addams family members were portrayed as being virtually oblivious to the fact that they struck the rest of the world (especially those neighbours whose houses shared a street with the family's fabulous Victorian mansion) as being bizarre, eerie, and off-beat.

The various Addams relatives may have come across as ghoulish at first glance, but in reality they weren't terrifying, dangerous or evil in the slightest.

As the classic Addams Family theme song (seen in the Youtube clip above) for their TV show said, They’re creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky, they're altogether ooky.

The Addams family captures the wonderful old fashioned fun of Halloween, with a peppering of the (playful) macabre thrown in for good measure. And that, my dear friends, is precisely the vibe I'm challenging this week in the lead up to my favourite holiday of the year!