Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas! Yes I'm a little late...

The holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas have been great.  I've been pretty busy this month so there have been a lack of posts.  But again I've enjoyed the holidays.  For Thanksgiving we did pizza since our oven is broken.  That was a great idea until I started checking on pizza places that may be open on Thanksgiving.  None were.  Finally I remembered Casey's General Store made pizzas and they were open.  Great pizza and we all enjoyed even if it wasn't the traditional holiday dinner.  The Saturday after Thanksgiving I ran the local 5K which is run every year just prior to the Christmas parade.  I enjoyed the run and the parade as well which we watched from our front porch.  Living on the main road in town the parade runs right in front of the house which is great.  Our neighbor came over with his mother to watch the parade with us and the youngins gathered all the candy thrown from the floats and vehicles.  We love our small town we live in and the parade is a great reflection of our cozy little city. 

We had Christmas three times this year as my youngins came from out of town on Christmas Eve to get their presents, we had the traditional Christmas morning opening of presents, and then our oldest surprised us by showing up later in the morning with her fiancé to open their gifts.  You can never celebrate Christmas too much can you?  Well you probably can but we had a great time.  Santa Claus was good to me as I picked up the Hot Wheels Batman 75th anniversary collection, a laptop lap desk which I'm using right now, and an Overlook Hotel shirt (from the movie The Shining). 

I hope everyone else's holidays were good and that your upcoming New Year is just as fun.  I'll do some further posts showing my Christmas swag. 

I like Halloween - I really like Halloween

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year.  I'm sure as a kid I'd have told you it was Christmas and I was probably right but Halloween was a close second.  As I've grown Halloween jumped to #1.  I love everything about it.  The scary scenes like the above, the costumes, the movies, the visuals, the music, the feel of being scared, the candy, everything.  This year I had wanted to post for the 31 days of October.  I got the idea from Erick's Wonderful Wonderblog.  You can see this year's post concerning the Countdown to Halloween here which is annual drive put on by another site.  I'm actually out of town for a bit so for now I'm going to say I'll do it next year.   

As a kid I always dressed up.  Maybe it was a football player, in a homemade wolfman outfit or any of the kind you buy at the store.  Didn't matter.  Just looking forward to picking out my costume was great.  I also loved going to the Halloween fairs they had at school.  I would even trick or treat and I even remember trick or treating on my own as I got older.  Not something you'd do today.  I also remember getting homemade candied apples.  Homemade food is also taboo today.  I even stuffed a shirt and pants and put them in our front yard once.  I also had recorded scary sounds on a cassette tape.  I had no way to remotely play the sounds and it didn't run long so I'd run outside every time I saw someone coming to hit play on the old school cassette player.  I was probably was in my mid teens at the time and I'll never forget how much fun that was.

One thing that I always looked forward to around Halloween were the Halloween TV shows and movies.  In the 70's and early eighties this would be The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, Mad Monster Party, the universal monster's big three (Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman), among many others.  One of my first posts here was on my favorite horror movies.  This part of Halloween was always better than Christmas.  I cut my teeth on all the great black and white movies that scared me to death and slowly graduated to Halloween, The Fog, right up to current greats such as the original Scream and Rob Zombie's Halloween.  There are too many to name here but needless to say I could go on and on.  Being scared by a movie or show is something I always look forward too. 

Halloween is also something I've always enjoyed with my youngins.  Passing on the love of Halloween is great.  My kids would tell you they've seen Mad Monster Party way too many times. Still it is great to see them enjoy something that I've had so much fun with throughout the years.  The older kids still at home love to dress up and hand out candy and the wife loves making up all the cool Halloween treats for everyone to enjoy.  We all enjoy seeing the great costumes of kids and how they react to the pumpkins we carved and have put outside the house.  My wife is someone whose interests lend itself to the ghost hunting side of the genre and she was into long before it came into vogue.  We'll go on what we like to call jaunts and I'll share some of those this month in future posts.

Halloween always seems to bring out the fun in folks. We always love talking about everything the season brings.   I'm in the military and one of the things I enjoy every year is our Halloween run and costume contest.  We run a 5K in costume followed by the contest.  I am in communications, which is a career field filled with nerds, and historically we've done very well with costumes.  Just two years ago they took first and second with a group from Futurama as well as Rick Astley.  One more thing to make me look forward to ictober and all it brings.  I look forward to the upcoming season and I hope you have a fun and scary Halloween.

 

Holiday Fun

2013 Thanksgiving Weekend Parade

 The holidays are always fun.  We, like many families, have our own fun traditions we prescribe to.  Some have been around forever or have come into play as things have changed in our lives.  Not all our children live at home so that also affects how we do things. 

Thanksgiving we had all but one of our children at the house.  She is off at college and couldn't make it in.  The wife loves to cook and usually does so for an army (I am a big leftover fan so that is a good thing).  In fact this was the first year I can remember that we didn't have a 20+ pound turkey.  We always put cranberry sauce on the table but nobody eats it thus becoming humor fodder for the family.  The kids did the shopping at Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving as they do every year.  Living in a small town our Wal-Mart is not the same zoo other Wal-Marts are.  The small town in which we now live also has a holiday parade and 5K the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  The parade, and 5K, runs in front of our house and we invite anyone and everyone to sit on our large front porch to watch with us.  We've had as many as 12 or as few as 2 with us.  The wife also makes a nice warm soup and other goodies to feed everyone.  This year my running fanatic boss and her son came to town and we ran the 5K which is the first time I've been able to do so.  It was a great Thanksgiving. 

2013 Christmas

With three of our five youngins living out of town it is almost impossible to get everyone here at the same time.  To that end we did Christmas three separate times.  Just adds to making the holiday special.  The wife cooks homemade pizza on Christmas Eve every year.  This year our 60 year old stove decided to quit that day.  Great timing...  We didn't sweat it and ordered pizza for delivery.  For Christmas Eve everyone opens gifts from Mrs. Clause which surprisingly are always funny sleep pants, shirts and socks or slippers.  Yes, we are that family.  We take the picture of everyone in their "jammies" and it is shared with family and friends and becomes part of the next year's Christmas card.  I had friends texting me on Christmas in anticipation of this year's pic.  Fun stuff.  Christmas Eve night a few other gifts are opened which normally contain movies and a family game.  At some point the kids are banished to their rooms and me and the wife, I mean Santa, get to putting out the gifts.  Milk and cookies for Santa are also put out and of course are half drank/eaten when we get up Christmas morning.  When it comes to opening the gifts someone plays Santa and hands out all the gifts.  We then go around the room letting everyone open one until they are all opened.  After that the kids seem to go their own way and things quiet down until Christmas dinner is ready.  This year Santa was good to me.  I received a 7th Gen iPod Nano to replace my broken Zune, the Stryper CD Soldiers Under Command, the book The Breaks of the Game which chronicles the 1979 Portland Trail Blazers, the Company of Heroes PC game, NCAA Football 2014 PS3 video game  and the awesomeness that is the "I Survived Sharknado" shirt.   Pretty nice haul.  Again a great time which we all enjoyed so very much.

New Years hasn't had any hard set traditions.  The last few years the wife and I have used this as a chance to get away from the house for a bit.  This has meant just going to a hotel and enjoying  some time together.  Two years ago we stayed in town at one of the smaller hotels.  We do enjoy adult beverages but the hotel was within walking distance of anything we could want which allowed us to do as we please.  One thing we look for are marathons on TV.  SyFy plays Twilight Zone on New Years eve and New Years day each year.  We've watched that two of the last three years.  Last year we got stuck on Locked Up Abroad.  We can be pretty random sometimes.  This year we searched out a small hotel in one of the small Illinois towns.  We did find a great looking Route 66 type hotel but it had no vacancies.  We ended up in an old hotel but it was in a bigger town than what we had hoped.  Still we had a very good time. 


Blow up fruit cake our youngest gave us with a Christmas card.  We always have a real fruit cake which everyone takes a bite of and then talks about how bad it tasted.  I know, we are bad about making fun of food. 

So while our holiday traditions are not ground breaking they are ours.  We have such a good time and it is all about memories as a family.  That is something my wife has instilled in me.  It is about looking back and remembering all the great times.  I hope everyone out there had as good a time as we did. 

Easter Weekend

I'm a little late on this but Easter weekend was a fun weekend for us and I just wanted to share.  Friday was a day for errands but still fun as I got to hang out with my daughters who live with their mom about a half hour away.  They were up for the weekend.  We celebrated the 17th birthday of our 3rd oldest daughter that Saturday.  We ate out at Olive Garden which didn't disappoint.  Afterwards we did the presents and cake and ice cream which no one is ever hungry for after the large birthday meals.  A tradition gained when I married my wife is we hide the birthday presents and the child whose birthday it is then searches for them as their brothers and sisters do the hot/cold thing.  Kinda corny but they still get a kick out of it as they've gotten older.  Our daughter is headed to Florida with the school band this week so we stuck to money for her gifts which is something I'm not a fan of.  I love finding gifts the youngins have asked for but I think they'll love.  The kids all ended up at movies late Saturday night but otherwise we just hung out. 

For Easter the kids were up by mid-morning.  They then did the egg search thing.  Yes even at their ages - the oldest was 20 youngest 11.  They each got an Easter basket with tons of candy and a nice gift.  I did have some leeway on the gift so that was fun.  Just a wonderful time.  Maybe nothing too special but we really did have a great weekend and I couldn't keep it to myself.