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1984: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 51: December 22, 1984)
The year wraps up with Cyndi, Sheena, Band Aid, New Edition, and Bronski Beat
I said last week that I had no memories of Christmas 1984 because we were so busy packing, but I thought of one this week. I had ridden over to Lubbock with my parents to drop a few things off at the new house, and afterwards we went grocery shopping for our Christmas dinner. My dad’s store anchored one end of a shopping center on 50th Street, and at the other end was a United Supermarket. We got almost everything on my mom’s list, except for a bag of pecan halves for the traditional pecan pie. So my dad said, “Oh, there’s a little Mexican grocery across the street, they probably have pecans.” So we went across the street and split up to find them faster.
The path I chose was down the center aisle, which ended up at the butcher department along the back wall. I turned left to go back up the next aisle, and came face to face with a 10-foot coffin freezer, the kind that’s about waist-high with an open top. A month before, it was probably full of Thanksgiving turkeys. Now it was filled with frozen pig’s heads, all of them in plastic bags with what seemed like inappropriately festive knots on top. There were two rows of eight heads, all of them canted to the side at about a 45-degree angle…