After the end of the semester and a particularly awful work week, I finally got a chance to bake some cookies, put up my Christmas tree, and just generally do Christmasy things. One of these things was to watch my second favorite Christmas movie, White Christmas (feel free to inquire what my most favorite is).

I could listen to Bing Crosby sing all day — even if he did get that baritone timbre by smoking a pipe. I love classic movies, and sitting on my couch watching Danny Kaye and Vera Ellen spin around the dance floor one thought jumped out at me — “Gosh, I wish people still danced!”

Now, of course people still dance, but twerking like Miley Cyrus with a bad case of tardive dyskinesia doesn’t count as dancing in my book. I wish the classic ballroom dance forms were still common to the culture the way they once were. This summer, I took a couple ballroom lessons, and I have never felt more elegant than I did when I was foxtrotting and waltzing across the floor.

Then I started looking at the clothes the characters were wearing in White Christmas and thought, “Man, clothes were so much more flattering and tasteful back then.” A certain longing for days of yore crept over me.

So I’m curious — what aspects of times gone by do the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the Ricochetti long for a return of? What fashions, habits, and parts of culture do you fervently wish would be reinstated in contemporary society? Obviously, I would start with dancing.