Ho! Ho! Ho! From the 12 foot tall Santa across the street
My holiday posts should be getting a whole lot cheerier now that I’ve started sampling the Christmas Egg Nog brought to you by the fine folks at the Jack Daniels corporation. It’s been made just the way I like it, less egg, more nog. In fact you might say it contains virtually no actual “eggnog” and is really just a glass full of amber colored “whiskeynog” that looks like liquid Christmas lights. We are about to go out and have a nice Christmas Eve dinner with all the other non-family celebrators. A lounge with a bar and food can be just as cheery as someone’s living room. Believe. Be back later. Cheers!
MW3 COD Black Ops X-Mas Cheer brought to you from the mall!
If your eyes did NOT just bug out, and you did NOT get a sudden nervous rush of adrenaline and excitement after reading that headline and seeing that picture, then you are obviously NOT a teenage boy. Or a young adult male. Or a grown ass man that might even have a wife and kids.
All those letters and numbers in the above headline stand for: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty, Black Ops. It’s a video game. Well, it’s a series of video games. I used the 3 because it sounds like more. And these games are all about MORE. More guns. Bigger guns. Throwing knives. Stabbing things. I hear the words “quick scope no scope” practically every 10 minutes from one of my children and I have no idea what that means. It usually leads to yelling and screaming about cheating and ends with real-life combat and declarations that one is quitting and never playing that damn game again with the other one. At any rate, it’s really popular too. This is a Jeep that was actually produced because of the game. Apparently this exact Jeep is IN the game. And now you can buy it! And drive around in it. And people, like me, will take its picture and show their teenage son and adult brother-in-law and they will get all sweaty and freak out and say the exact same thing despite the 20 year age difference between them: “Oh man you saw one of these???” And they will take your phone and stare at the pictures all jittery and asking questions that you really don’t know the answers to because you are a female and couldn’t give a rat’s ass about a black Jeep with a special sticker on it. Ha. I kid. But then again, I really didn’t know about this Jeep until we saw it at the Arby’s the other day. I knew as I was taking the pictures that the owner was probably watching me from inside. He was. In fact, he was sitting at a table that was facing his Jeep. I knew it was him because of his location in the restaurant, the weird way he was looking at me as he was leaving and then because I watched him physically get into the Jeep and drive away. I made up an entire life story about him while we were sitting there after he left. He looked to be in the 30 to 40-ish year old age range. In my fake life for him he worked at the Best Buy. I made him a manager so it wouldn’t be so sad and my son said if that was true, that’s probably why he gets to play video games all day. He probably needs to be a bit older, and be a manager, because I just found out they cost about 40,000 dollars. (I know right? These video game accessories are getting way out of hand.) He probably has boys, and their dads, drooling and fawning all over that thing every time he parks it somewhere. In fact, before he left, an entire van of teenagers pulled up and they all walked around it, staring and talking, as they scattered to other parts of the parking lot.
So if you find yourself out today, and I hear there are a lot of crazies madly swarming the shopping areas in these last desperate hours, keep your eyes open and your camera ready and maybe you’ll see a Black Ops Jeep too! I’m taking my sighting as a sign of a prosperous New Year for people AND the world. I mean really, if we have money to blow on a custom Jeep from a video game, and the car company feels confident enough that if they build them we will buy them, things cannot be all that bad. At the very least you will make your son very happy! Dashboard. Black Ops out.
Sunshine and clear skies!
I love a Christmas Eve that is sunny and clear! Snow is highly overrated in places where it falls on a regular basis for half the year. It still feels special and the brightness just lights everything up with that extra energy boost that can move you through a long day. The kids protest Christmas music so we are listening to the fastest, poppiest, rock and dance songs that we have. It’s actually very cheery over here. And, the TV is not on. Another small Christmas miracle.
The above picture is from a gift my mom had given me a long time ago. It’s not really very holidayish but I keep it with my Christmas stuff and bring it out every year. It was really catching all that light this morning, so I took its picture and here you go. One bright wish for the coming days.
Christmas Eve Eve
This is the kind of sky we have tonight in the Midwest. This was at sunset. I looked out the kitchen window and everything seemed pink. So when I went outside this is what I saw. Facing southwest. This is taken with the camera and the color has not been altered at all. It’s the color of all my dreams. As it is, and has been every year, for most of my life, Christmas is really more than one day. All the prep stuff is done. The kids are finally off of school. They kept them down to the wire this year. They leave with their dad tomorrow and return to me Christmas Day in the afternoon. We try to keep it as stress free as possible for them. Lots of people travel and my kids have spent many a Christmas Eve traveling on long, cold, dark and icy roads to get shuttled back and forth between his family and mine. Thanks to my sisters and brothers and their new families, compromises needed to made, and I am able to now forfeit the 24th in order to get the 25th and more. Once you give up the notion of Christmas morning it’s really quite magical and it seems like Christmas lasts, like it’s longer somehow. Christmas night, when all of the lights are on and everyone is warm and cozy and tired from the last two days, is when I finally get my real gift. Just us. Being together. Talking about everything that happened while we open our little presents to each other. Laughing so hard that sometimes I just can’t believe I brought these two clever and humorous children into this world. As the years have gone by they started focusing more on the stockings and what was inside them. It’s funny because even though Santa fills them up, I seem to spend an awful lot of time thinking about the things that go into them. They’ve become more important than any actual present. It feels so quiet and peaceful to be awake as most everyone else is getting ready to sleep and say goodnight to another Christmas. This year my family is celebrating on Monday the 26th. It works out really well with family and work schedules. No stress of other places to go or a big meal to cook. We’re doing appetizers and desserts only. Which makes it even better! Everyone is always sick and stuffed to the gills with fat Christmas dinners and we all know that appetizers and desserts are the best part of a party anyway. I get to hang out with all my sisters and brother and all the kids. It’s loud and crazy and never boring. Then on Tuesday we all get to go back to our regular lives for another year. Every year I say I would love to go to a place where they don’t celebrate Christmas at all. Preferably a place that is warm and has a beach and an ocean, because it just becomes too much and not very special at all. But secretly…no, even secretly I still wish I could go anywhere else but here. Luckily though I am easily persuaded. With a few good songs and some well placed advertising and sitcom episodes, that Christmas spirit grabs me by the heartstrings and yanks me right back in. What a sucker. As usual, I have typed way too much and I am tired. Besides it’s Christmas Eve now. I am going to try and post pictures throughout the next few days as this holiday wraps and folds around me, but you know how that can go. So, from me and mine, to you and all of yours, I wish you the very merriest of Christmases. Pay attention and find the joy wherever it may be. I believe in the good. I truly truly do because you just never know. Peace.
just shy of pretty 