A little nostalgia for the old folks

Normally we at Mistletunes leave the old-school holiday celebration totems to other websites, but we know that many readers are old folks like Rudolph and that some of them have a sweet tooth for mid-20th century pop culture tchotchkes. With that, I'd like to note the current Car and Driver online feature, "Back in the 1960s, You Bought Your Christmas Music at the Tire Store." It's a fun feature about how Goodyear, Firestone and B.F. Goodrich used to compile Christmas albums and sell them cheaply as come-ons to bring in customers. The most interesting thing about this story is that they link to a website, Christmas LPs to CD, that takes those old albums and converts them to CD or downloadable MP3. To avoid copyright hassles, they sell actual old copies of those albums to customers and ship them with the CD, or you can download most (not all) of them. For vinyl fans, there's a hitch; they make no guarantees about the condition of the vinyl albums, they may very well be unplayable. But you have your digital copies to play. The site also has Christmas albums from Longines Symphonette, Tru Value, Disney, WT Grant, Readers Digest and more. They also have non-Christmas music available.