Christmas carillon

Thank you, for your information about carillons and Niagara Falls, specifically.  Man, am I ever with my heart filled with joy at this time!

I feel I am reminded of youthful times I as a child often had inside a neighborhood of Watts, a location a part of southern California.  To me it is a neighborhood where people world over came in a season yearly just to witness some of the most spectacular Christmas decorations they and I too had ever seen!  Very slowly, from one boulevard to the next, they inched in vehicles filled bumper-to-bumper by families who though indeed looked dissimilar somewhat to mine with me as a typical youth of Watts at the time, of course they appeared just as enchanted and mesmerized to gaze upon the elaborate display of ornaments (colorful Christmas lights, reefs connecting neighborhood street lamps, tall statues including some Santa’s and reindeer, shinny ribbons, makeshift chimneys, candy cane, Christmas stockings and carefully laid out cotton snow that completely concealed the green lawns which were underneath it all) as then I was myself  —just a youth equally mesmerized while standing in total awe by such. 

This occurred on street after street after street!

Now I’m really reminiscing to a time when just a summer before I went to meet and visit my great-grandfather and his wife (my great-grandmother) as my grandfather took me to the place (farm) of the great-granddad, one apparently that he got in Riverside County proper, but, likely not before he sold the previous parcel of Imperial Valley farmland that made up the ranch he had already before my ever even coming there. 

(This scene like the previous I have to put into some perspective.  About which I care to share out of my own intent and purpose, like or dislike a ‘purpose-built’ tower housing a musical carillon erected at the aforementioned Niagara Falls.)

I remember as though it were only yesterday as my aunt’s door opened to happy caroling throughout the neighborhood where I had received wrapped gifts from under not only my aunt’s and cousins’ Christmas tree but from some houses away and under neighbors’ as well.  Those who had placed gifts under trees before neighborhood children came ceremoniously and thankfully got them.

If my memory serves me, my thanks were expressed quietly.  (Smile.)

Anyway, let me communicate another reference to rivers.  Perhaps it is very appropriate, now since you’ve gone ahead and brought up Niagara Falls at this site and at this time:

Man, someone has left some definite poetry er prose.  (Have now to see if I can recite any of it...  Perhaps I will later avow myself, to commit it to my memory.)

This time is one of some very real peace, brothers and sisters, boys and girls!  Rejoice!

Very nice ... and a Merry Christmas to you.

Lanny
Columbia, SC