Traditions

It was looking like some of my Christmas Traditions were going to be broken this year…

I had wanted to bake a bunch of stuff this year, but that didn’t happen. We did almost make gingerbread trains and I did successfully make some Peanut Butter fudge using my grandmother’s recipe. The recipe makes 2.25 lbs of fudge. The street value of this fudge is like $63! Seriously… if you go to The Fudgery at the Outlet Mall, they charge around $7 for a “slab” or 1/4 lb of fudge. Now out of all the fudge I made and brought to South Carolina, I must have eaten about $56 of it myself in about 3 days. Oh, it was so good… mmmm Fudge.

So, although I didn’t get to bake everything that I wanted, I made something.

Next was Christmas Specials…

Christmas TV specials used to mean something before the advent of DVDs. I used to wait all year to hear that CBS special music intro that a special event was getting ready to air. Now that all the kids that loved those shows now have full time jobs and can pay money to relive their childhood, the shows are all on DVD ready to be seen anytime of the year.

In the early 1990s while I was in college, I would watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas every chance that TBS aired it. Sometimes they’d even have a mini-marathon of shows. But then as I grew older, I moved toward movies.

A Christmas Story was the first movie that I paid my way as an adult. And well, no matter how often I watch it, I can watch it again. I hadn’t seen the movie yet in 2008 before arriving in South Carolina, but I knew that TBS (or was it TNT) would (I hope) have a 24 hour A Christmas Story Marathon (like they have in the past). And they didn’t disappoint. I watched part of the movie late Christmas Eve and the rest of the movie Christmas Morning.

Christmas Vacation I have on VHS but I should get it on DVD. Seeing that we only have the cable hooked on down stairs, we don’t watch much regular broadcast television. And I don’t spend much time at the TV, but I could fire up the computer and watch the movie on the laptop. Funny, funny movie. I was worried that I wasn’t going to see the movie this year. I hadn’t seen it before leaving for South Carolina and I honestly thought I would miss it. Luckily on the 23rd, I flipped through the channels and catch “most” of the movie. Not my favorite part, but enough of the good stuff and since I had seen it many times, I didn’t actually have to sit down and “watch” it. I could be up and active with the kids when I needed.

Elf is more recent movie that has made a place for itself. The main character in the movie, Buddy, brought the slang word (as far as I can tell) Ginormous to our slang vocabulary. It’s a great movie and the kids actually sat through the entire movie, so that was nice that we could enjoy the movie in it’s entirety. My Lovely and Talented Wife love it so much that we don’t even have to see certain parts of the movie, just knowing that a funny scene is coming up is enough for us to start laughing hysterically. And we make references to the movie all the time.

So, I think I end there for last year’s Christmas season recap. Now, hopefully it won’t be February when I get around to the New Year’s Eve recap…