Day 171: Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas and this kind of what the scene looked like this morning.

Day 170: Merry Chritmas Eve

We got to Phoenix late last night and now we're relaxing with the family on Christmas Eve.

Day 169: Donatello Hates New Mexico

Today we left Austin for our drive to Phoenix, AZ. This was going to be a generic road trip picture, but we got stuck for several hours in New Mexico due to ice storms and lets just say I was less than happy with the state by the time we got there.

Day 167: Leonardo Wraps Some Presents

It's getting close to time for us to leave for our AZ Christmas vacation. I suspect I'll be doing a lot of this tonight when I get home since almost nothing is wrapped yet. Really, I don't mind. Wrapping gifts is kind of fun, I'm just not as good at it as my wife is.

Day 152: St. Nicholas and Black Pete Battle For the Holidays!

Every year on December 6th I wake up to find candy and small gifts in my shoes. I forget about it every year, but it still happens. Supposedly St. Nicholas leaves the gifts on St. Nicholas Day (December 5th or 6th depending on your cultural background), but I think that's a lie. I believe that my wife actually does it, because the real St. Nicholas only leaves candy if you're good and I know I'm never good enough to get two Toblerone bars and about $3.50 in chocolate coins. This year I got a little extra surprise when I woke up early to go to work, went to empty the candy out of my shoes and I found our entryway, and my shoes, swarming with ants.

Every year when it starts to get cold we start having ant problems in our apartments. It doesn't seem to follow any rhyme or reason because they just pop up randomly and not always around food products. In this case I thought it was the candy, but as I pulled each piece out and inspected it before putting it in a plastic bag I only found a few ants on the chocolate. Most of the ants seemed content to run around like crazy on the cold tile or hide in my shoes. Anyway, I sprayed ant killer in the entryway, threw my shoes out and called the apartment office to get the pest guys to come spray for us. I hate ants.

So, anyway, about this picture. It's St. Nicholas being a total dick to Donatello and throwing candy at him real sarcastically like, "Yeah, you were real good this year. Here's your candy." Meanwhile Black Pete (Skeeter from Doug according to Shaun) is sneaking up behind Donatello to throw him in a sack so they can take him back to Spain and torture him.

What? You don't know Black Pete? He's St. Nicholas' helper. Look it up. He's a favorite (and pretty goddamned racist) character from the St. Nicholas legend, most popular in the Netherlands. Do a Google search for him. The only pictures you'll find are a bunch of white Europeans in black face. Some stories say he's black because of the soot from the chimneys, but that's a damn lie. His clothes don't seem to be affected and I know those dirty chimneys didn't put that red lipstick on him.

Really I guess it's a well-meaning character that was a product of it's time, but still, Black Pete is like the Christmas version of those crows from Dumbo. Anyway, he steals kids who are bad so I guess that makes him like a border-line pedophile too, probably.

Day 142: Christmas Time is Here

Yesterday's post was all about turkey pot pie, but we have another tradition for the Friday after Thanksgiving: decorating for Christmas. Usually this involves putting up the tree and hanging various Christmas-y things around the apartment. Our tree is the same fake tree we bought for our first Christmas as a married couple 5 Christmases ago. It's looking a little worse for the wear since it doubles as an irresistible cat perch. Keeping the cat out of the tree is another age-old holiday tradition of ours.

We put the tree up last night and while we hung ornaments and cooked the pot pie we watched our first Christmas movie of the season, Elf. We used to hang generic red and silver glass ball ornaments and stars, but we've got enough individual personal ornaments to fill our tree now. I don't mind trees that are very organized and designed to look a certain way with matching ornaments, but to me that's missing the point of the Christmas tree. I love going through our boxes of ornaments and remembering where they came from and when we got them. To me a Christmas tree should be a history of a family and a reflection of your personality.

Every year on Christmas Eve my wife and I exchange ornaments. Usually we get each other one of the Hallmark ornaments from that year's collection, but not always. I can't even count the number of Cinderella and Spider-Man ornaments we have on our tree because of this tradition. Ninja Turtle ornaments haven't been as popular in recent years, but I have a few of those as well. The ball ornament is one I've had since I was a little kid. I literally cannot remember a Christmas where it wasn't hanging on the tree. It's probably one of my favorites to hang and every year it gets a place of honor near the top.