Every other year, due to the fact that our two youngest daughters are married and have in-laws to whom they feel a certain sense of obligation, we are forced to do Christmas together on the Stanglin side at Thanksgiving. It’s always a chaotic four or five days, trying to cram all our long-held Thanksgiving and Christmas traditions into one weekend. The normally month-long rhythm of specific meals and particular movies and certain activities on specific days and nights gets condensed into a blur of too much, too soon, and too close together. Not to mention that I need to have all my Christmas shopping done by the third week of November!
We managed to pull it off pretty well, even with Valerie and David’s new dog that added a level of complexity.
Thanksgiving is always pretty normal with all the food and football, all the card games and conversation. But then Friday is both the day after Thanksgiving when we typically eat a big breakfast and follow it up with a pancake fight, decorate the tree and the house and watch It’s a Wonderful Life AND ALSO Christmas Eve when we go out to eat, open up the matching pajamas that Carrie-Anne gets for us, and watch A Christmas Carol while eating my pan-made stove-top popcorn and drinking Dr Pepper and eggnog. Dinner was at Ray’s and the intent was to watch both movies. We only made it through It’s a Wonderful Life. Albert Finney’s Scrooge will have to wait another year.
Saturday was Christmas morning. As is our tradition, we woke up the kids to Alvin, Simon, and Theodore turned up to 11 and opened gifts. The highlights for me included a beautiful little turntable and speakers, a very thoughtful gift from my girls and sons-in-law in light of the movers wrecking my antique turntable-stereo when we moved to Midland three years ago. Of course, I’ve already played my Boston “Don’t Look Back” album and Van Halen’s 1978 debut on the new setup. I also received an authentic Dallas Stars hockey sweater, complete with all the logos and an NHL “fight strap” on the inside back. When I put it on, I immediately felt the urge to crosscheck Whitney into the boards. For the remainder of Saturday morning, nobody in my family would stand between me and a wall.
The coolest thing we did Saturday was the Liberty City Rage Room in downtown Midland. This is one of those places where you pay money to break things. The idea is to take out your pent up aggression and rage on flower vases, crystal dishes, large mirrors, glass pitchers, and office equipment. We reserved four rooms for a little over an hour of breaking: a dining room, a bedroom, an office, and a room they just call “Smash It.” They dressed us up like Illumination minions–blue coveralls, hard hats, and goggles–gave us baseball bats, sledgehammers, and golf clubs, and let us loose.
Yes, I can report that it is truly liberating to toss a heavy ten-inch dinner plate into the air and smash through it with an aluminum baseball bat. Exhilarating. But doing it non-stop for 25-minutes to a variety of glassware, punch bowls, decorative bottles and vases, and glass serving trays is an indescribable thrill.
After the first two rooms, it was decided that we needed to put the women in one room and the men in the other. The girls were breaking things in a methodical way, taking turns, hitting stationary objects on a table one at a time. The boys were, as you can imagine, going at it with reckless abandon, full-body, all-at-the-same-time death lunges. Why just break a glass vase when you can get a running start with a bat and follow through with your total body force to obliterate it to smithereens? Silly question.
It turned out to be quite a workout, exhausting. Carrie-Anne’s enchilada and tamale dinner was the perfect interlude between what we did with those mirrors, computer monitors, and oversized bottles and what the Longhorns did to the Aggies at Kyle Field. The perfect ending to a truly wonderful day. Hook ‘Em.
So Thanksgiving has come and gone and, for us, Christmas too. It’s over. We worshiped together, everybody side by side on the same pew, at GCR yesterday morning, grabbed a quick lunch at Texas Burger, and sent the Richardsons and Kennedys on their way home. Weird. Awesome.
We don’t know what to call it. Thanksmas? Chrisgiving? Carrie-Anne hates Festivus because she says we don’t have any grievances to air. I guess I just call it good. Really, really good.
Peace,
Allan
I’ve never tried eggnog and Dr Pepper – interesting combo. You CofC’s really know how to party
We grew up on it, old family tradition from the Grove, I guess. Fill your glass one-third of the way with eggnog and then the rest of the way with DP. Stir it up and drink it down. Pretty rich. You don’t want to drink more than one glass. Something my family and I have done every single Xmas my whole life. Try it and let me know what you think.