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Is it possible to be nostalgic for a time you never experienced? I only ask because while I was typing up a post to the Christmas Movies thread in the Movies and TV forum I was reminded of this feeling and thought it might be worth discussing here.
My answer to the question is "yes, it is possible."
I remember going to grandma's on holidays. She lived in an old house filled with old things in an old city. There were pictures of my dad and his siblings as kids in the 1940's and 50's on the wall. My experience there would not be unlike what you'd see on 50's TV or a forties movie, or A Christmas Story.
I was born in 1970. I remember a world before push button telephones, call waiting, the Internet, even Atari. I remember Pong being a big deal. My first bike was the same as my dad's first bike. I played with Lincoln Logs. I'd watch The Honeymooners and Leave it to Beaver with my dad. The cartoons I watched were from the 1940's, even earlier.
It seems like the time my childhood took place in was the end of an era. Now we live in a different world. I'm not qualified to evaluate and compare the two. I'm happy in the present and that's all I really know. But at the same time I miss the "old world" that many GTP members may have no idea of. America has changed more in the past twenty years than it had in the previous fifty.
While I embrace digital technology and the "postmodern" (as they call it) world, I feel nostalgic for a time I was born just early enough to get a taste of before it was taken away and replaced with what we have now; I have one foot in a black and white, scratchy-music cartoon and the other in Macromedia MX Studio. These holidays and the memories they evoke bring this to the fore for me and I was just wondering what others thought.
My answer to the question is "yes, it is possible."
I remember going to grandma's on holidays. She lived in an old house filled with old things in an old city. There were pictures of my dad and his siblings as kids in the 1940's and 50's on the wall. My experience there would not be unlike what you'd see on 50's TV or a forties movie, or A Christmas Story.
I was born in 1970. I remember a world before push button telephones, call waiting, the Internet, even Atari. I remember Pong being a big deal. My first bike was the same as my dad's first bike. I played with Lincoln Logs. I'd watch The Honeymooners and Leave it to Beaver with my dad. The cartoons I watched were from the 1940's, even earlier.
It seems like the time my childhood took place in was the end of an era. Now we live in a different world. I'm not qualified to evaluate and compare the two. I'm happy in the present and that's all I really know. But at the same time I miss the "old world" that many GTP members may have no idea of. America has changed more in the past twenty years than it had in the previous fifty.
While I embrace digital technology and the "postmodern" (as they call it) world, I feel nostalgic for a time I was born just early enough to get a taste of before it was taken away and replaced with what we have now; I have one foot in a black and white, scratchy-music cartoon and the other in Macromedia MX Studio. These holidays and the memories they evoke bring this to the fore for me and I was just wondering what others thought.
