MERRY CHRISTMAS

Merry Christmas from the Crowe household in St. Louis to all our friends and colleagues around the world. May all your images in the new year be brilliant.

                 

TOY FACTORY

My paralegal told me not to bother going to work today because there there is nothing particular needing my attention. Since she runs my professional life I decided to follow her sage advice    

A better shot of the light projections on the barrel vault over Union Station's main hall, showing Santa's legendary toy factory. I wonder if the elves are organized. I tried  to add a short ohone vav video byt *&%&* Blogger keeps crashing during the upload, The work around was to copy it from Flickr.

  

HOW ABOUT A DING DONG?

What we call the headhouse of the old union station is now a spectacular hotel lobby with luxury rooms to the left and right, and more out under the train shed. A little hard to tell since I was using a very wide angle lens but the view is straight up into a beautiful barrel vault ceiling. In the last couple of years in the management has added light shows.

I tend to have loose associations, which is not a bad thing unless you are psychotic. Watching this part of the display, I couldn't get a certail old Monty Python bit out of my head. Sorry for any offense.

            

SO WHAT'S THIS STORY, ANYWAY?

I have neither read the book or seen the movie so I really don't know. You can make a guess from context. Characters (from the book, I assume) brought around  large print editions for the children to follow.Ellie was spellbound. I think the illustration, at least on the right side of these pages, is a little strange. Santa is standing bolt upright, chin a little raised. He is staring forward, looking like he was watching the approach of H. G. Wells martians. But I'm sure everything turned out well in the end.  

Very late post today. I've got some kind of bug that leaves me feeling sleepy all the time.   

THE POLAR EXPRESS

So this Polar Express thing we took is actually a franchise. The themes are based on the book and movie. Everybody piles on to some creaky old coaches whose seating compared unfavorably with the last row on Spirit Airlines. The train pulls out of the station and slowly finds its way to the post-industrial wastelands north of the Arch.

Elves, chefs, conductors and Santa whipped the children into a constant frenzy. They loved it. Some of us geezers thought it was like an unpleasant visit to the dentist, but it wasn't about us.

That's daughter Emily and the irrepressible Ellie above.