In the kingdom of Southern Californialand we don’t have a king, but we do have a queen – the Rose Queen. Her reign is brief – just a year. The Queen and her court work their way up through the charm schools and debutant balls of the San Gabriel Valley. The highest call of duty for the bevy of beauties is waving very properly to their subjects and cradling a super-sized bouquet of red roses like a baby while being strapped on a flower covered barge-like vehicle riding toward the morning sunshine of the New Year. Palm trees and crystal clear blue sky provide the picture perfect backdrop.

Without a doubt the Rose Parade is the grandest and most detailed spectacle on the planet. The prized show horses, champion marching bands and rolling flower petal art procession has been a tradition since 1890.

If you’ve never been, WHAT are you waiting for? It’s waaaaaaaaaaaaay more dazzling and fragrant in person. You don’t have to get there the night before to get a great spot. Do what I do. Arrive at the parade about 8:30AM. The trick is to get a spot at the end of the route – Colorado and Sierra Madre.

DIRECTIONS…From LA take the San Bernardino Fwy (10) exit at AtlanticBlvd. Go north to Huntington Drive, turn right, then left on Sierra MadreBlvd. PARK YOUR CAR just east of Sierra Madre Blvd, on a residentialside street, four or five blocks South of Colorado Blvd. Then observe thelegendary spectacle somewhere near the corner of Sierra Madre and ColoradoBlvd, which is near the end of the parade route.

Afterwards you’ll be starving of course. For me and the gang it’s usually a hearty-heavy-fatty lunch at the North Woods Inn, nearby at the corner of Rosemead and Huntington Drive (7247 Rosemead Blvd, San Gabriel, 626-286-8284). Please don’t forget to marvel at the fake snow on the roof.

If you’re up early watch for me on the KTLA Pre-Rose Parade Show beginning at 6am. My quickie segment is scheduled for 6:10.

GOD BLESS ROSE PARADE-IANA

I’m breaking my own rule this week. This is not a slide, it’s a snapshot. But it’s the only picture I have of my family at Christmas.

We’re at my Aunt Mattie and Uncle Art’s house. That fake white flocked tree with gold ornaments reappeared every season for more than two decades. I never realized how well it went with the curtains and hanging lamp in the corner.

That’s me in front with asymmetrical bangs. I have no idea what ever happened to the teddy bear; I was never into stuffed animals. But I’ll never forget when the brown corduroy coat I’m wearing got sucked out of the window of our speeding Oldsmobile Cutlass on the way home from Palm Springs. Guess I should not have held it up to the open window. My brother Mike, holding a transistor radio, is four years my senior. He often mistook me for a punching bag-OUCH! My mother, Donna, is holding a terrarium wrapped in tissue. The Compton High School class of 1958 voted her Outstanding Homemaker. She was that and more. A stay-at-home mom who spoiled us by cooking nearly everything from scratch, sewing clothes and costumes, and making sure we went to Disneyland regularly. My dad is wearing his trademark Pendleton jacket and smile. He was a workaholic with four used car lots. Sadly, after a long painful battle with diabetes he died seven years later at the age of 38.

My mother still lives in the ranch house I grew up in. Nothing ever tastes better to me than her home cookin’. My brother and his wife have a spread in Wrightwood with horses, pigs, ducks, geese, dogs and cats. These days they host Christmas dinner –but with a twist. The main course is homemade pizza. What would you like on your Christmas pizza?

A VERY Merry Christmas to you and yours!!

The candles are lit, the Christmas-ball Christmas tree centerpiece is in place and a very special dinner is served. At each end of the table, Lazy Susans offer carrot sticks, green olives and a half red cabbage studded with sputnik-style multi-colored toothpicks bearing olives, sweet pickles and pearl onions. On either side of the fatty ham being sliced (topped with Maraschino cherries and pineapple slices), a pyramid of carbs and roast turkey. Cranberry sauce served in paper cups, celery and cream cheese platter, potato salad and macaroni salad, lime Jell-O mold, and creamy pink Jell-O fish mold are also on the menu.

Since Jell-O was first introduced back in the late 1890s, countless molded concoctions, both sweet and savory, have been enjoyed at many a dinner and dessert table. There’s even a Jell-O Museum, in Leroy, New York, where Jell-O was manufactured between 1900 and 1964.

Jell-O has certainly always been a favorite of mine. Growing up, if there was a Jell-O mold on the table, it was a special occasion. But what exactly is Jell-O made of? As a kid I remember being told that it was made out of horse’s hooves. Not quite so. Gelatin is an animal product that comes from the collagen in cow or pig bones, hooves, skin and connective tissues. Just think! That means that the ham and Jell-O on this table are related, they’re cousins.

Here’s to you and the Jell-O molds on your holiday buffet

Flamingo pink walls and pea green curtains provide a festive backdrop for stockings hung by the chimney with care, plastic poinsettias on the mantle, clown on the wall, Christmas cards on the television console and gifts around the aluminum Christmas tree.

Aluminum Christmas trees are one of the great synthetic products of the space age. They were first mass produced in 1959 by the Aluminum Specialty Company of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. At the time the small factory town was promoted as the “Aluminum Cookware Capital of the World” known for making coffee percolators, electric fry pans and Jell-O molds. Aluminum Christmas Trees and Jell-O molds are related? They’re cousins. According to Richard Thomsen, then the company’s chief engineer, the sales manager came up with the idea to manufacture them after he saw handmade silver metallic trees in a holiday display at a department store in Chicago the year before. The “Evergleam” trees were an instant sensation. Dozens of other manufacturers followed suit. Hundreds of thousands of them were produced. Silver not good enough for you? No problem – they were made, though in far greater numbers, in pink, turquoise and gold

Except for the one year we had a flocked tree when I was in Kindergarten, we always had a real green tree, never an aluminum tree. But my Aunt Helen did. Growing up, I looked forward to seeing it every year. The sight of the glittering tree sparkling from the light of the color wheel gave me a great natural holiday high, Christmas after Christmas that I’ll never forget.

Here’s to you and your aluminum Christmas tree!

Two lovely young ladies clad in sleeveless blouses and capri-clam digger-pedal pusher-toreador pants rest on giant cement mushrooms in front of the “Welcome House,” of Southern California’s most bizarre theme park. The first of three Santa’s Villages — the others were in Santa Cruz and Dundee, Illinois — it opened just months before Disneyland in 1955. The fifteen-acre, larger-than-life toyland was designed to keep the legend of Santa Claus and the spirit of Christmas alive throughout the year. Oddly, it was open every day but Christmas

Spectacular cartoon-like storybook buildings made from logs cut from local ponderosa pine trees were sugar coated in bright colors and artistically detailed inside and out. Employees costumed as elves sold tickets and souvenirs, operated the rides and served food and refreshments. Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, the Easter Bunny and “Jack-the-Pumpkinhead” roamed the grounds and greeted guests. The best rides were the bumble bee monorail, candy cane sleigh pulled by “Dancer, Prancer, Donder and Blitzen,” a spinning Christmas tree — you rode in the ornaments — and miniature train ride “through the enchanted forest.” There was also a petting zoo, the Chapel of the Little Shepherd, Wee Marionette Puppet Theater, Santa’s House where kids could check to see if their name was in the “good book”, a “help yourself” lollipop tree and the North Pole, where the ice never melted, no matter how hot it ever got.

I had the privilege of visiting the park only twice, once as a child and once just before it went out of business in 1998. What impressed me the most as a kid, besides the shocking pink shake roof and bumble bee monorail, were the giant cement mushrooms. As an adult, it was how many employees had missing teeth.

Here’s to Santa’s Village and you!!

A giant skyward helium-filled Popeye balloon tethered with many strings and a small army of earthbound wranglers. Just part of an annual tradition of parading balloon sculptures down Broadway that began in 1927.

Popeye goes back almost that far. Originally he was introduced as Olive Oyl’s love interest in 1929 in the then ten-year-old comic Strip, “The Thimble Theater.” He quickly became the favorite character, stole the show and became a world famous super star. Among my earliest musical recollection is Popeye’s theme song– sing-a-long—“I’m Popeye the Sailor Man�” He has not only a memorable theme song, but in it he sings about his theme-vegetable, spinach, which he consumes frequently by the can.

Second only to the Tournament of Roses Parade, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is the most famous parade. The tradition began in 1924 and was called the Macy’s Christmas Day parade – even though it was on Thanksgiving. The procession of floats and cages with live animals, borrowed from the Central Park Zoo, drew masses to kick off Macy’s holiday shopping season. Because the animals scared too many children, in 1927 Macy’s replaced the goats, elephants, donkeys, lions, tigers and bears with giant character balloons. Between 1928 and 1933, the inflated spectacles were let go to float away when they reached the end of the parade route. Macy’s then offered rewards for the balloons after they had deflated and fallen back to earth. In 1947, Miracle on 34th Street, introduced the parade to movie audiences worldwide and the very next year it was broadcast on television for the first time

Today the annual tradition continues. Not only can Macy’s claim to be the “world’s largest department store”, they can also claim to be the world’s second largest consumer of helium. The US Government is the first.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoy the parade

The sweeping spear, sky high rear window and eye-catching tailfin trim on this two-toned space-age spectacular 1959 Chrysler Saratoga, combined with the gentle curve of a barrel vault roofline, twin gooseneck lights craning toward very sober signage and sort-of checkerboard windows, provide a most unexpected backdrop for this impromptu family portrait.

Like bowling alleys and miniature golf courses, skating rinks are not nearly as plentiful in this old world of ours as they once were. The Holiday Roller Rink in Montclair, where I learned to roller skate in third grade is long, long gone.

Southern California’s most stylized rink was a big red barn called Skate Ranch. It was a western themed extravaganza that sat on the north slide of the Santa Ana Freeway in Orange County. I never went there but it always caught my eye as a kid when we sped by at 65mph.

But don’t despair, now that you are in the mood to go skating, the Rollerama in Bakersfield, Rollerdome in Thousand Oaks, Skateland in Whittier, Skate-o-rama in Downey and the Moonlight Rollerway in Glendale are still standing.

For my thirtieth birthday party I rented out the Moonlight. I’ll never forget it. We ate ice cream with wooden spoons, did the Hokey Pokey and sent my friend Fred off to the hospital. He fell and broke his arm.

Here’s to roller rinks and you!

Miniature green dinosaurs top gas pumps. Bright pennants rustle in the bluster. It has just rained. A giant stucco dinosaur is a gas station. The year is 1965

Last Saturday night, half way out the front door leaving a party the host said to me "Hey, I have something for you, I want you to have these." And he hands me two vintage souvenirs from Dinoland, Sinclair Oil’s dinosaur exhibit at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair. First a green plastic injection molded dinosaur marked "Sinclair-Dinoland." Second a dinosaur shaped green bar of soap boxed and marked with the Sinclair Logo. Divine providence or coincidence? Not eight hours before I was going through a newfound collection of old slides and picked this image out as the highlight of the bunch. Seemed like it was Sinclair Oil Day at my house and I couldn’t wait to share it with you.

Here’s to the Sinclair Oil Dinosaurs and you!

Beaming with joy, three customers bask in the glory of orange, yellow, blue and white vinyl, wood paneling, hanging lamps, slanted striped ceiling and plate glass. Even they are color coordinated. By any creative design standards the interior decor scheme is as playful and colorful as a space-age fantasy toy box

The most detailed work in the modern day dining hall is the amazing above-the-counter art depicting the coffee shop’s namesake, the legendary story of Little Black Sambo published in 1899. Strange by any children’s book standards, the tale is that of a turban wearing Indian boy named Sambo who loses his clothes to some browbeating tigers. They wind up chasing each other around until the tigers melt into hotcakes and butter, which Sambo then eats

In 1957 two guys in Santa Barbara, “Sam” and “Bo” blended their abbreviated names and matched the title character in the book that inspired the boy-tiger-pancake theme for what was destined to become less than a decade later a coffee shop empire. “Famous” pancakes with lots of butter and syrup is the specialty of the kitchen. A decade later, in 1967, the original Sambos had spawned restaurants spanning nearly coast to coast with more than 1200 restaurants

Today just one Sambos restaurant survives — the original overlooking the picturesque bay in Santa Barbara

Cheers to Sambo’s and you

The striped-stamped, two-tone turquoise and white aluminum siding of a travel trailer is a dramatic backdrop for three works of pumpkin art displayed on a classic redwood patio table protected by an early American patterned plastic table cloth. On the left a feather and arrow suggest a Native American inspiration. Center stage a flower-trimmed yellow yarn wig and hoop earrings give plenty of character to the pink-painted pumpkin. A cross between Mr. Potato head and a cigar smoking Groucho Marx completes this creative trio very nicely. The people responsible for the art direction here have taken the art of pumpkin carving in the direction of Gingerbread house decorating.

Pumpkins are in a patch all their own. We never think of them as fruits or vegetables – they are just pumpkins. But when forced to face facts it’s clear that pumpkins are the superstars of the squash family. But we never call them squash because then you would have to say squash pie. And nobody would eat it. No other vegetable is sweetened and made into pie. None of Mother Nature’s other vegetables or fruits grow in such a wide variety of sizes. We’ve seen plenty of small pumpkins the size of grapefruits but never a grapefruit the size of a large pumpkin. After we’ve carved and displayed them lit for Halloween, then pulverize them with sugar and spice and bake them in a soggy crust for Thanksgiving (and maybe Christmas,) we have no use for them.

Here’s to you and PUMPKINS

Happy Halloween!!