Realtors, really big black crows, the spandex explosion and the demise of the cowboy

Twenty-years-ago, visitors to the high mountains of Colorado were greeted by cowboytrailer-courts, gravel-roads, pickup trucks and dogs. Visitors to Colorado’s high-country today are greeted by factory-outlet shopping malls, Subaru outbacks, bumper-to-bumper mountain-bikers wearing spandex that makes them look like an exploding geranium, condominiums everywhere and restaurants with Californicated names like Mi Zuppa, Baglia’s. Visitors today might confuse the former “cowboy” towns of Colorado’s high country with being another suburb of Denver.

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THE GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS SINGERS (PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE)

Every year, they trot out the same lame Christmas songs we have heard for half-a-century, It’s starting to fewhitechristmas1el “contrived.” There’s Burl Eives singing Have a Holly Jolly Christmas or Frosty the Snwoman (the two biggest hits he ever had), Bing doing the Ba-Ba-Ba-Boom, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” as I begin to nod off while Dean Martin crooning Christmas Blues on another station and Elvis strumming Blue Christmas on a Gibson sun-burst guitar on yet another.
To honor the festiveness of the holidays I present to you, oh blog-readers, my version of the best and worst of Christmas singers past, present and future.

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