We’ve got holiday music and mugs, we’ve got cookies, mulled cider and tee-shirts, and we’ve got Dr. Dan Mack and his Ballad of Mack Street book for you and/or that special person on your holiday list!  On the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, Windsor Historical Society main building will be open free of charge from noon to 4 p.m.  See the Society’s exhibition Faces of Windsor.  Also on view is the Four Centuries of Windsor History exhibition in the Society’s South Gallery.  Pick up the Images of America: Windsor photo history book or one of the Windsor Storytellers volumes, a Windsor 1633 tee-shirt, mug or pie plate, matted art photographs of Windsor by Len Hellerman, or the Doors of Windsor poster.  Choose from a selection of small wooden replicas of Windsor’s historic buildings or select toys and games popular with children for centuries.  Indulge your senses with soft holiday music and delicious hot cider and home-baked sweets.  Shopping for holiday gifts used to be a pleasure.  Experience that for yourself at Windsor Historical Society on December 12th!

From 2 – 4 p.m., Dan Mack will be available to autograph your copy of Ballad of Mack Street  (available for $25) which showcases his childhood growing up on Mack Street in the 1920’s and 1930’s.  Seven generations of Dr. Mack’s family ran the Mack brickyard in town.   All the Mack boys including Dan worked in the brickyard from the time they were 11 or 12 years old.  Mack’s illustrated reminiscences take participants through the details of brick making, how clay was mined, then transported by oxen to brick yards where it was mixed with water and sand, placed in molds, dried thoroughly, and stacked in kilns for the firing process.    But there was time for fun:  sneaking off to go for a swim in the cistern, fishing, horse-back riding.  Mack’s painting includes examples of weddings, home births and funerals, and Yankee peddlers who traveled from town to town, selling everything from bolts of fabric to contraband whisky during the Prohibition.  The Mack family was largely self sufficient, growing most of what they needed on their 60 acres in Windsor, and livestock figures prominently in the painting.  “I began making sketches of all the things I could remember about the houses and the people from the time of my birth until I went off to college,” Mack said.  “That’s what I have – fragments of experience – some sentimental, some mildly humorous, but all relevant to the people that lived on Mack Street at that time.”