Amalia Fashionista Accessorizes

Since  she passed her second birthday and moved from Miami to Manhattan, granddaughter Amalia has revised and refined  her fashion vibe. 

 Leaving the bikinis and sundresses behind, she’s transformed her wardrobe for winter in the Big Apple.  And like Coco Chanel, whose ever-present pearls are an inspiration, Amalia believes, “The ability to accessorize is what separates us from the animals.”

Like many New Yorkers, Amalia often wears black.

Especially when working with penguins --one of her favorite animals.  She often visits them at the Central Park Zoo.)

This brown outfit needed something to make it pop—she decided to add her lime green owl backpack.

For eating a mini-cupcake in a diner, she wore her shiny red Minnie Mouse boots and a white hooded jacket.

She has to pick the right workout clothes for Tuesdays (hip-hop dance class) and Thursdays (yoga) at the nearby store “Sprout.”

This outfit was a favorite of her yoga partner.

For a casual Sunday brunch, she picks her cozy Hello Kitty robe, Dora socks and her favorite baseball hat—worn backwards.

Fake glasses add a note of gravitas when you’re playing doctor.

A new Poochie Purse inspired her “Snow fun” top and multiple necklaces.

For working on her I-Pad, Amalia chose black galoshes and her cupcake-topped tutu, but she felt there was something missing.

Her old faithful Dora baseball cap!

This outfit, with the matching knitted leggings, needed no embellishment

For baking and eating Valentine cookies, she picked her LOVE shirt with a heart on it.

Choosing the right purse for an outfit is critical.

Watching Dora videos on Yiayia’s computer called for some butterfly wings and a tutu, along with her penguin top.

On Valentine’s Day,  Amalia baked heart cupcakes and entertained Uncle Bob and Auntie Robin in a black outfit with hearts and a hat worn backwards for a cloche effect.

Last week’s storm, which caused havoc in New York, prevented some child models from getting to a photographer’s studio in the building where her Mommy works, so Amalia was pressed into service for a catalogue shoot. 

Here she is getting ready in hair and make-up.

She liked the outfit they put on her, but if she were accessorizing the photo shoot herself, she would have added a poochie purse and a baseball cap—backwards, of course!

Valentines in the U.S.—It All Started Here

 (I recently bought these English and German-made valentines at an auction--sadly, they are not from Howland or Taft.)

Worcester, MA, the once-bustling industrial metropolis 45 minutes west of Boston where I live, is enormously proud of its rather peculiar list of “famous firsts”, including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the birth control pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball, the first liquid-fueled rocket and the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon (starring in a soon-to-be-published tell-all book “The Saga of Smiley”, printed by the Worcester Historical Museum and written by me.)

And every year about this time, you hear about how Worcester produced the first commercial valentines in this country thanks to a foresighted young woman named Esther Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine.”

Esther Howland (1828-1904) attended Mount Holyoke at the same time as Emily Dickinson. She was the daughter of a successful Worcester stationer and, in 1847, she received a frilly English valentine that inspired her to ask her father to order materials from England so that she could assemble her own.  She then convinced her brother, a salesman for the company, to show a few of her valentines on his sales rounds.

The initial demand was overwhelming and Esther gathered some of her friends to help her assemble the valentines, seating them around a long table on the third floor of her home.  The company was eventually earning $100,000—a phenomenal success.

Esther is considered significant because, according to historians, she was among the first commercially successful women overseeing a female-run business, and she basically created the assembly-line system, paying the local women “liberally”.

She introduced layers of lace, three-dimensional accordion effects, and insisted that the verses be hidden inside--something you had to hunt for. She had her staff mark the back of each valentine with a red “H”.

In the Victorian era, Valentines were wildly popular, and the elaborate cards were scrutinized for clues—even the position of the stamp on the envelope meant something. Often the valentine was intended as a marriage proposal.

On Feb. 14, 1849, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousin, “The last week has been a merry one in Amherst, & notes have flown around like snowflakes.  Ancient gentlemen & spinsters, forgetting time & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for smiles…”

In 1879—after 30 years in business—Esther Howland merged with Edward Taft, the son of Jotham Taft, a North Grafton valentine maker.  Together they formed the New England Valentine Co. (and their cards were marked “N.E.V.Co.”)

This is where Esther Howland’s title of “Mother of the Valentine” begins to get a little shaky.

It seems, upon much study, that Edward Taft’s father, Jotham Taft of North Grafton, a small village near Worcester, started the commercial valentine business in the U.S. even before Miss Howland did,  but he didn’t like to talk about it, because the Taft family were strict Quakers and Jotham Taft’s mother sternly disapproved of such frivolity as Valentines. (Full disclosure—I live in North Grafton, about a stone’s throw from where Taft worked.)

In 1836, Jotham Taft married Sarah E. Coe of Rhode Island and two years later, they welcomed twin sons.  But in 1840, one of the twins died suddenly, leaving Mrs. Taft prostrate with grief.  Jotham decided to take his wife and surviving son to Europe with him on a buying trip for the stationer who employed him, and while in Germany, he bought many valentines supplies—laces, lithographs, birds and cupids.

When he returned, Taft began making valentines with his wife’s help, and in 1844—3 years before Esther Howland graduated from college—he opened a valentine “factory” in North Grafton (then called New England Village.)  But because of his mother’s disapproval, Taft never put his own name on the valentines—only “Wood” (his middle name) or “N.E.V.” for “New England Village”.  Some believed that Taft trained Elizabeth Howland as one of his workers before she opened her own factory

Taft and Howland merged into the New England Valentine Co. in 1879, and a year later Esther’s father became ill and she left her business to care for him.  After he died, she moved in with one of her brothers and she passed away in 1904.

Unfortunately, despite all the couples who presumably found their true love thanks to Esther’s creations, the “Mother of the Valentine” never married.

In 1881, George C. Whitney bought the combined business of Taft and Howland and it became The Whitney Co,  which dominated valentine production for many years.  Instead of cards laboriously made by hand, Whitney turned to machine- printed valentines and eventually added postcards in the 1890’s.  The Whitney designs, featuring children who resembled the “Campbell Soup “ kids, were wildly popular, although more often exchanged by children than adult lovers, and in 1942 the Whitney factory closed, as a result of wartime paper shortages.

It’s Official—The Book is Dead

 You know how sometimes you notice something and realize that the universe is sending you a message:  “This is the future—the world as you know is finished.”?

That happened to me last Saturday on a visit to Manhattan.  I was walking down Third Avenue on my way to the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory when I stopped in at an Anthropologie store on 71^st Street.  I went in because Anthropologie sells books as well as clothes, often on quirky subjects, and I wanted to see what they had.

In front of me was a round table piled with a pyramid of carefully stacked books but, on inspection, I realized they were not meant to be read. They had been sliced into the shape of letters of the alphabet.  You could pick one up, read the titles on the spine and fan through the pages, but because huge gobbets had been cut out, it was impossible to make sense of the text.  These books had been stripped of their original purpose—to tell a story—and turned into decorative objects with no meaning beyond a single letter of the alphabet.

Looking closer, I realized that all these “alphabet letters” were originally Reader’s Digest condensed books, printed between 1950 and 1997, and bound attractively in fake leather and cloth, with four book titles on each spine.  Clearly these were books that had not been sold and someone had the clever idea (and the right slicing machine) to carve them into capital letters.  You would buy one of these  books in the shape of your initial and set it on your desk or in your library to advertise your name and stroke your ego. They cost $20 each.

In 1983 my husband, Nicholas Gage, published the book “Eleni”, recounting the story of his mother’s life and death in their mountaintop Greek village during the civil war, when the communist guerillas occupied much of northern Greece.  Nick’s mother, Eleni Gatzoyiannis, was tortured and executed because she had engineered the escape of Nick and three of his four sisters after learning that the guerrillas were going to collect all the village children and send them to “re-education camps” behind the Iron Curtain.

“Eleni” was eventually published in 32 languages and made into a film.  Excerpts and articles about the book appeared in “The New York Times”, and “People”.  And it was published as a Reader’s Digest Condensed book.

Those were the days when magazines had fact checkers.  In March of 1983, the  Digest sent a young man to Worcester, Massachusetts,  where Nick’s  family lived.  After their nighttime escape on foot from their village, the children had been found in a refugee camp on the Ionian Sea and brought to live with their father, Christos Ngagoyeanes, a chef in various Worcester restaurants.  Nine-year-old Nick had never known his father, who was prevented from visiting Greece after 1939 by the outbreak of war.

As Nick and his sisters gathered in the basement kitchen/living room of the third sister, Glykeria, the young man from “Reader’s Digest” proceeded to read the condensation of the book to the assembled family, stopping to confirm every detail.  The sisters wept and nodded. Their father Christos, 92, lay on a couch, and, in his mind, he relived the experiences of the war: “My sweet wife!  Why they do that to her?”

With trepidation I approached the display of letter-books at Anthropologie and examined every one of them, fearing that one of the spines bore the title “Eleni”.  But, to my relief, it wasn’t among them.

God is an ironist, as Nick likes to say.  From Anthropologie I walked to the Winter Antique Show at the Armory on Park and 67^th, and one of the first booths I came to was devoted to selling the rarest and most expensive books on paper—illuminated books from the Renaissance.  You could admire opened books, protected in individual cases, which monks had devoted their entire lives to illustrating, embellishing the religious texts with gold leaf, jewels and exquisite art in the colors of stained glass. 

These books were created to educate and inform the one percent of the population who were literate in medieval times—and to share their religious stories with those who were not.  They have been cherished and protected for centuries. It’s a good thing no one cut out the text of these books to turn them into decorative objects that no longer have a story to tell.

The Kitchen God—A Chinese Elf on the Shelf

Recently, at an auction, I bought a box of delightful Chinese prints—including various Chinese gods and posters for oolong tea—all colorfully printed on thin rice paper and block-printed in bright colors.

I was charmed by the jolly fellow pictured above and started poking around on Google to learn more about him.

Turns out he is the Kitchen God, who is tacked up behind the stove in every Chinese kitchen along with a small altar to hold incense burners, candles and offerings.

The Kitchen God observes the behavior of the family all year long and, seven days before the beginning of the Lunar New Year celebration, his image is taken off the wall and burned.  This releases his spirit  so that he can go to make his annual ascent to the Jade Emperor to report on the way the family has behaved during the past year.  After hearing his report, the Jade Emperor decides how much prosperity and abundance he will give to each family in the New Year.

But before burning the Kitchen God, the family will attempt to bribe him into making a good report by bestowing on him sweets, like fruits, honey and lotus cakes as well as candies and rice wine and especially sticky rice—perhaps as rice balls served in a sugar soup.  The plan is that, if the Kitchen God’s mouth is full of sweet sticky rice, he won’t be able (or inclined) to report on any bad behavior by the family.

Seven days after the old Kitchen God is burned, a new image is installed above the stove to keep an eye on things during the coming year.

This year the Chinese New Year of 4712—the year of the wooden horse—begins on January 31, so you’d better start making sticky rice balls right now, because the day to make sweet offerings and send the kitchen god on his way is —Friday Jan. 24!

When I read this, I immediately thought of the Elf On the Shelf—a not-as-antique tradition familiar to nearly every parent and grandparent in the U. S.  Based on a book written by the mother/daughter team of Carol Aebersold and daughter Chanda Bell in 2005, the Elf is a little bendable doll who comes in a box along with the book (cost: about $30) and, beginning in December until Christmas, he sits around somewhere in the house and observes the behavior of the children (naughty or nice) then, after the children are asleep, he flies back to report to Santa every night.  The Elf reappears every morning in a different spot.  Finding him makes it a game.  But no child must ever touch the Elf or he will lose his magic powers.

When I first heard about the Elf on the Shelf, it all sounded rather sinister and scary—like Big Brother watching you from the TV set in “1984”.  This past season, the Elf seemed to be the most controversial thing about the holidays, discussed even more than the  elimination of the word “Christmas” from “Happy Holidays “ and “Holiday tree.”  It seems some A-type parents were one-upping each other by creating elaborate scenes of mischief or magic created by their personal Elf overnight—inventing yet another laborious task for moms during the holidays.   Others complained that the Elf was a means of terrorizing children into good behavior out of fear of what Santa would hear.

At Thanksgiving, when her family came to our house in Massachusetts,  someone (not me!) gave 2 ½ -year-old granddaughter Amalia an Elf on the Shelf which she promptly named David for no observable reason.   She loved the whole idea—especially after seeing a TV special based on the Elf.   She didn’t seem frightened of him, although I did see her freeze with surprise when, back in her New York apartment, she realized that David had followed her from Massachusetts and was perched near the top of her family’s, uh, holiday tree. 

No one created elaborate scenes for David in the ensuing days—it was all we could do to remember to move him, but when Amalia found him on the window ledge in the kitchen, I did imply that he had bitten the head off of one of the tiny gingerbread men I bought at Trader Joe’s.

When I came to Manhattan to see Amalia after Christmas, she confided to me rather sadly, “My little friend David has gone away.”

I promised her he’d be back next Christmas.