Gotta Love the Internet

When I was little, my family had a big case of Christmas cassette tapes that surfaced every December.  We listened to Christmas music while we baked cookies with my mom, while we decorated the tree, and while we drifted off to sleep every night.  I knew all the songs, new and old.  My three favorites were the Sesame Street Christmas tape, the Raffi Christmas tape, and A Cabbage Patch Christmas.  I loved the Cabbage Patch Kids.  I even had a Cabbage Patch cassette player to play my Christmas tape in.  I loved Colonel Casey's narration and I knew every song on the tape.  Whether my dad finally couldn't take it anymore and crushed it under his boot or it's lost in the depths of my brother's garage, I will never know, but my tape disappeared for good one year.  It was awful to open up the Christmas cassette case and see an empty slot where my favorite tape used to reside.  "It'll turn up," my mom had said.  It never did.

As an adult, I searched eBay, Amazon, and countless other sites every year for my beloved Christmas album to no avail.  But this year...

Ta-Da!!

Though it was not for sale, someone had expertly uploaded the entire album from their LP and packaged it into a single downloadable file.  Our Lady of Perpetual Obsolescence Vinyl Rescue Mission and Orphanage is "A safe haven for forgotten and downtrodden record albums" and possibly the best gift I will receive this holiday season.  Not only were all ten tracks included in the file, the album cover (front and back) were graciously included.  As a result, I was able to make A Cabbage Patch Christmas CD and place it in a jewel case with the original album cover.  I was so excited!  I am so excited!  Now my little boy can grow up listening to songs about Christmastime in the Cabbage Patch just like it did.  And tell me he doesn't look exactly like Otis Lee (the little bald one in the middle), pictured on the album cover of the other long-lost Cabbage Patch album I was able to download:

So the wonderful world wide web came through for me this year.

Merry Christmas to me!