#still hung up on the lost Tork version of Christmas on the Isthmus

[thislovintime]

Christmas, day 1: 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Photo 4 shows Peter and his siblings in Regina at Christmas in 1966; photo 5 is Peter with his brother, Christmas 1967; photos 8 & 9 by Paul Natkin/Getty Images.

“We have a favor to ask. We would like to enlist your help in promoting The BEAT’s Christmas issue. During Christmas week, we’d like you to go naked. When you see others in offices, on the streets and in restaurants without their clothes, you will instinctively know that they are wishing you a Merry Christmas from The BEAT. We intend to be touring during the holidays. Without clothes it will be a cold but cool Christmas. THE MONKEES” - KRLA BEAT, December 17, 1966

“A couple of days before December 25, Peter vanished. The family lived in a three-story apartment house that had front and back entrances. When we realized that Peter was gone, Ginny and I scoured the apartment thoroughly — finding no little Peter Thorkelson. Finally, we turned to each other in panic and Ginny shouted, ‘You take the back stairs — I’ll take the front!” And all of a sudden we looked like a couple of middle-aged females on one of those romps you so often see the boys doing on their television show. Ginny [raced] off in one direction and I in the other. I had absolutely no luck at all. I searched on the stairs, under the stairs, and in the closets — and finally ended up on the back stoop shouting, ‘Peter come home! Where are you?’ Having no luck, I decided to run around to the front and see what was happening with Ginny. There she stood, hugging a sheepish-looking Peter and looking like she didn’t know whether to kiss him or kill him. It seems that young Peter was halfway down the block, standing by a telephone pole, expectantly waiting for something to happen, as he shivered in the snow which had begun to fall. When we got Peter upstairs and simmered down, Ginny asked him, ‘Where were you going? What were you doing?’ Peter looked her straight in the eye and said, quite simply, ‘I was going to find Santa Claus. I was waiting for him to come by.’ Well, we burst out laughing and hugged and kissed our baby. ‘Don’t worry,’ Ginny said, ‘I will make sure that Santa Claus doesn’t forget you this year — or ever.’” - Catherine McGuire Straus, 16, July 1967

“Imagine spending a magical night singing with The Monkees around Regina’s Whitmore Park neighbourhood in the late 1960s. That’s exactly what happened to a then-13-year-old Jim Sax. [...] At the time, Sax lived a couple of doors down from the Thorkelson family. H. John Thorkelson, Tork’s father, was an economics professor at what was then the University of Saskatchewan Regina campus. Sax befriended Tork’s younger brother Chris. ‘Chris called and told me to come over and swore me to secrecy before I went downstairs,’ Sax recalled. ‘So, I get downstairs and there are The Monkees, all of them, just hanging in the rec room.’ The band was visiting Tork’s family home. ‘I’m basically trying not to trip over my own jaw. I’m just 13 at the time so I’m just trying to be cool,’ Sax said. The memory-filled night didn’t end there for Sax, who found himself caroling around Flamingo Crescent where the family lived. ‘I said, “Yeah, absolutely I’m going with you guys. In fact, I’m picking the house because I know where all the pretty girls live,”’ Sax laughed. Sax described ‘instant insanity, possibly some incontinence,’ when doors opened and it was discovered the famous group was on residents’ doorsteps. He believes there are some Polaroid pictures floating around Regina somewhere, but he didn’t get a picture with the band. ‘I was being too cool; are you kidding?’ Sax said. Sax had to keep his memory a secret until the band left Regina, ‘but I was  almost stoned to death by the girls in my class’ when the night was revealed. The story of The Monkees visiting Regina certainly grew louder, especially as Tork returned on numerous occasions to visit his family. Green Zone contributor Darrell Davis lived one block away and came home from a shinny game to hear from his parents that The Monkees had sung on their doorstep. Don Young played in a band at the time and knew of such visits to the Whitmore Park neighbourhood. ‘The story was that some of the young girls would go over to the house and go by the window and try and hear him snoring or catch a glimpse of him,’ Young recalled.” - CJME dot com, February 21, 2019

“[My father] thinks the Monkees are quite interesting, but he doesn’t like the peripheral fame — the hundreds of phone calls he gets from fans. My mother foolishly told many callers that I would be home for Christmas and the house was surrounded!” - Peter Tork, Disc and Music Echo, January 20, 1968

“Several years ago, [commenter] spoke with Chip [Douglas] about the genesis of these 1976 recordings. He shared with me an anecdote about going out to record Peter Tork, after hours, at the high school where he was teaching. Chip brought a portable reel to reel recorder to capture Peter on the guitar and singing a cover of the song ‘Christmas on the Isthmus’. Peter started to perform the song when Chip suddenly remembered the tape he was recording on was the one with Davy's version of ‘White Christmas’ and his amazing, first take whiskey-infused vocal. Just in the nick of time Chip hit the kill switch and White Christmas '76 survived — but ‘Christmas on the Isthmus’ unfortunately never did get recorded.” - comment on the Monkees Live Almanac blog post about “Christmas Is My Time Of Year” (with Peter on Hammond organ), backed with “White Christmas” [listen to both songs here]