Category: This & That

Turkin Soup

I have reached that point in the pre-Christmas season where I feel like I’m going nuts. Too much to do! Not enough time!

The good news is that Eldest Son made it home yesterday without incident. His flight was delayed, but not for several hours like it was last year. I made homemade turkin soup last night with my mom’s Thanksgiving carcass, which I’ve had in the deep freeze. E.S. loves turkin soup. That’s soup made from turkey bones, whatever turkey meat falls off the bones while you’re making the broth, then, if you don’t have enough meat, you add cooked chicken breast. Turkey + Chicken = Turkin Soup. And I make a mean turkin soup, if I do say so myself.

We’ll have it again after Christmas, too. With a new dead turkey body. Um, carcass.

Anyway, I’ll still be hanging around the blog (although not every day), because I have some stuff coming up that I don’t want you to miss. I might not post tomorrow (but then again I might…), but drop by Friday, because my group blog, Nobody Writes It Better, is holding a contest from Dec. 18th – Dec. 24th and I’ll announce all the details here when I know them. Which will be sometime on Friday.

I’m also blogging at Nobody Writes It Better on Christmas Eve! Don’t ask me how I get these dates when I’m one of the two blog schedulers. Let’s just say I don’t believe in fiddling with my dates at the expense of another member’s. Because I am jolly! That’s why.

I have no idea what I’ll blog about. Rudolph seems a fair bet, but you’ll have to wait until Dec. 24th to find out why.

Is anyone else getting caught up in crazy Christmas preparations?

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Categorized as This & That

The Great Christmas Tree Debate

An innocent posting (of mine) to Facebook last weekend sparked a bit of debate, so I thought I’d bring it here. Not the debate necessarily. Just the questions. You see, I’ve been harboring a bit of Christmas-decorating guilt. Because I haven’t done any yet. And I probably wouldn’t think of doing any if not for My Liege and Youngest Son doing it for me. Doing the outside decorating, that is. The blow-up Santa on the motorcycle is on the carport roof, the blowup_santalights are on the house. But I’m not, no way, not even considering, putting up our Christmas tree until at least December 15th. I’ve never been able to fathom putting up the tree earlier than 2 weeks prior to the big day. Part of this is because we use live trees, and I like them to last until after January 1st. We put our tree in the family room in the basement, because that’s where the monster TV and fireplace is, and My Liege does love his fire every night. We have a huge living room, but when we first moved into this house it served as a living room/piano room/partial dining room AND office (complete with two desks). There was no room for a tree. So the stockings went on the upstairs fireplace and the tree went downstairs. My kids grew up like that, so that’s how they want the tradition to remain. I can’t argue.

Thanks to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, it has recently been revealed to me that it might be something of an American tradition to to do all your Christmas decorating—including putting up the tree—on Thanksgiving weekend a month before Christmas. In some ways, the idea makes me jealous. American Thanksgiving kicks off the holiday season, so dispensing with the turkey one day, observing Black Friday the next, then decorating for Christmas makes sense. For me as a Canadian, however, it doesn’t make sense until I’m staring the Christmas countdown in the face, and that’s always ten days before.

Now, some say you can put up your tree a month early even if it’s a live tree, that proper watering will keep it going until Christmas. Thanks, but I don’t want to try that with a roaring fire in the same room every evening. The other option that is becoming more and more popular is the artificial Christmas tree. Twenty years ago, I found fake trees laughable. I mean, they looked pretty darn fake. Now, they look great. I can easily see the argument for an artificial tree (which I’ll refer to as fake from now on for the sake of my typing fingers). They can go up earlier and you don’t have to worry about them catching on fire or your toddlers playing in the water or eating the needles xmas_tree_farmthat fall on the floor. If you buy a good fake tree, I’m sure you could expect to keep it for twenty years before dumping it in the landfill. Whereas, with a live tree, you replace it every year.

We get our live trees from a Christmas tree farm down the road (that’s a picture from last year). The farm is within walking distance, but the trees are up a steep hill and we always seem to have to go to the top to find THE one. That’s enough walking without needing to haul the tree all the way back to the house without benefit of the pickup. Before we discovered the Christmas tree farm, we’d cut a live tree from our woodlot or a piece of property we once owned, or one of my dad’s properties. We called it juvenile thinning. Now, it’s much easier to just visit the tree farm, which didn’t grow anything but dry yellow grass and cow pies before it came into existence. Every year around about this coming weekend, we go and flag which tree we want. Then, when we go back around the 15th, we’re rest assured there’s still a tree left to buy. The tree goes up until New Year’s Day, and then we take it into town for chipping. For getting a live tree, I figure the way we do it could qualify as “green.”

I didn’t realize until I posted about live versus fake trees on Facebook that there’s a bit of a controversy over the environmental greenness of Christmas trees. I can see arguments on both sides, so I thought I’d do a little survey here.

  1. Do you have a fake or live tree?
  2. What’s the reason for your choice? Are you motivated by environmentalism or something else?
  3. Are you staunchly against live or fake trees? Why?
  4. How early do you put up your tree?
  5. When do you take it down?
  6. If Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October, why can’t we kick off our Christmas holiday season then?
  7. If not for Halloween, would we?
  8. Can you imagine drinking eggnog for two freaking months?

Tell You Tuesday

Hah, tricked you with the title change, didn’t I? Usually it’s Tell ME Tuesday.

You can go ahead and tell me, anyway. How’s the writing going? Life? Any good news/bad news to report?

After the blogging kerfuffle of last week, I needed a little break. Pretty much waiting to hear what’s next from Horizons Vs. RWA. Plus, I had the H1N1 shot yesterday. It wasn’t a bad experience, but it did make me feel slightly lethargic. I took advantage of my brain-deadness to do something that makes me feel even more braindead—compiling a fiscal year end for delivery to our accountant. No sense wasting the H1N1 glow on something ambitious like writing.

Last night I watched the Thanksgiving episode of Dexter for a second time. dexterMy Liege had an early Sunday night, so I watched it myself then. All I can say is, “Wowzer!” The way this season started out, I thought, “Ho hum, another serial killer introduced in the form of Trilogy, Dexter will be trying to figure out a way to get rid of him without revealing the monster within throughout the whole season, and then he’ll succeed.” But the Thanksgiving episode contained a number of Wowzers!, the little switcheroo at the ending being the best one. I thought I knew what was going to happen at the end of the episode…that Trinity would begin a new killing cycle with J’s new girlfriend. Did not see the twist coming at all.

Still waiting for the onion that is Rita to be peeled. I have theories that drive Youngest Son nuts. “Not everyone on the show has to turn out to have some sort of psycho past, Mom.” Sure, but Rita’s gotta have a darn compelling reason to act like a Stepford Wife. I swear, the voice alone drives me insane.

third3aOn a side note, is anyone getting flashbacks to Dick from Third Rock from the Sun while watching John Lithgow as Trinity? I keep expecting that guy who could talk to the Big Giant Head to show up…

Life Can Be A PITN

Literally.

I put my neck out on Friday. No, I wasn’t bungee-jumping or doing gymnastics or painting the ceilings. I was, um, waking up.

I turned my head too quickly the wrong way, and pop, ouch, squeal. There I was, not even out of bed yet and down for the count.

Luckily, I had my bi-monthly (that does mean twice a month, doesn’t it?) massage therapy appointment scheduled for the afternoon. I quickly put in a call for a chiro appointment. The chiro couldn’t even move my neck, although he gave me a nice adjustment of a trouble spot that had been plaguing me since Wednesday and which probably led to the neck trouble. The massage was great, but did more for my back than my neck, because my life is also a PITA.

Literally.

I’ve been walking like a duck since childhood (or like a ballet dancer, take your pick). Then in high school I hurt my right knee in a production of Oklahoma! (I know, weird, right? Let’s just say it involved a wagon wheel back stage and a cast member who was taking “Break a Leg” too literally). Since The Knee Incident, I’ve been slightly hobbled, and apparently it’s affected my gait. Factor in a major car accident when Youngest Son was 11 months old, and an abusive need to (try and) run Allie McBeagle two or three times a week…well, my gimpy right knee/right hip means my massage therapist needs to take care of my PITA every couple weeks, too.

Over the weekend, the neck has relaxed some. But it’s still not great. If I would just lie in front of the TV for three days, all would be fine. Or so my mother tells me. Apparently, back in the day, when you put out your back or your neck, you rested for three days, and voila! you got fixed.

Now we’re too busy to rest for three whole long days. At least I am. If I could convince myself not to do any activities that exacerbate my problem, I might not keep finding myself in pain. But that would mean not using the computer, not writing, not painting the house when it needs it, not walking and running the dog, etc., etc. It would mean sitting there like a lump. Not for me.

Desconstructing Halloween

I read on another author’s blog last week that she has an intense dislike for Halloween. Say what? All that candy? Haunted houses? Fireworks? What’s not to like?

I guess it depends. My Liege and I used to host big Halloween parties—adults only, no kidlets. We started doing this before we had kids and we continued for a few years afterward. Then the kids started getting too old to foist off on a grandmother while we partied the night away. Plus, the wood floor in my living room was damaged from too much dancing in high heels (not just me). After I had it refinished, I couldn’t bear to put it through the torture again. And did I mention the work of hosting these parties?

But they were fun. They also created an extremely busy month. Especially after we had the kids and I needed to create not only costumes for My Liege and me, but for the boys. I had it in my head that I needed to create homemade costumes, which I did for several years. Every once in a while, I bought a costume. One year, My Liege wore a cow costume. Youngest Son dug it out for this year’s Halloween. He went to work as a Holy Cow by wearing his cross and a priest collar over the cow costume. I thought that was ingenious! (Which begs the question, why didn’t I think of it?). You could also do this as a couple costume by having one person dress up as the cow and the other as a nun or a priest.

Now that the kids are grown, Halloween isn’t anywhere near as hectic for me as it used to be. I don’t carve pumpkins. I have glow-in-the-dark pumpkins that (to me) work just as well. One runs on batteries and the other plugs in. And I don’t have to worry about anyone smashing them and creating a mess in my driveway.

We live on a large corner lot on a not-very-busy street, so sometimes I need to bribe trick-or-treaters. How do I do this? Candy! At one point Halloween night, I was giving away 6 pieces of candy per kid. I made sure to tell them how many were going into their bags, too. I mean, I bought 300 pieces. I couldn’t be expected to eat them all myself! And I expect those 6-pieces-per to bring me plenty of repeat trick-or-treaters next year.

It was a warm Halloween this year. Trick-or-treating winds down pretty early in my next of the woods, because our local volunteer fire department puts on a fireworks show on the beach that rivals the Canada Day fireworks around town. My Liege and I used to take the kids down there every year. Now we go ourselves. The first year without the kids felt a little sad. One year we stayed home and watched the fireworks from the deck. It’s not the same! Another year we watched them from a viewpoint on the road. Not the same again! Nothing beats standing on the beach with other members of your community while hot chocolate gets handed out (if you stand in line) and a bonfire is blazing, and gorgeous fireworks are filling the night sky.

Any Halloween traditions you want to share? How do you celebrate where you live? Do you like/abhor Halloween?