We took the kids to the American Legion for the annual Christmas party today. We were eleven adults bringing two kids to see Santa. It was less than a success. Our scheduled time to see Santa coincided with Abbey’s nap-time, so she was in no mood to deal with a fat man in a red suit. Max, on the other hand will probably have nightmares for a month.

All was not a complete loss, however. We did see John and his wife and kids:

And Joe got to wear his hat:

Tags: holiday, xmas

What a difference a year makes!! Last year I surprised my wife and daughter by driving by the site of the house where they filmed some of the scenes from that Christmas Classic “A Christmas Story” What a surprise to find out that we were invited in and they were planning on renovating the house to it’s big screen glory and opening it up to the public!

Fast forward almost exactly a year later and today we attended the official grand opening of the “A Christmas Story House and Museum“.

The entire area of West 11th was a mass of people waiting in giant lines for the museum and house tours. Luckily the weather was unseasonably warm. The lines inched along and soon we found ourselves in the museum where you can view memorabilia, props from the movie, on-the-set photographs taken by the cast and crew, and buy t-shirts, lifebouy soap and leg lamps.

During checkout we bought our $5 tickets to tour the house. After a brief stop at the Rowley Inn across the street, we headed to the end of a very long line to get into the Christmas Story House.

During our wait a few enterprising residents of the area capitalized on the captive audience by selling bottled water, soda, pictures and even bathroom breaks!

Slowly but surely, we made our way to the house itself.

Word on the street was the people running the whole affair are still not completely finished with the renovations. The exterior of the house looks almost exactly like it did in the movie. A few anachronisms like all the security cameras aside the house was dead near perfect from the outside. But murmurs through the line outside mentioned that they did not even have a Christmas tree in the living room. The rumors were true. While they took great pains to stock the house with 50′s era furniture and decor, the house was still pretty bare. Furnishings aside, the House itself is best known for the Leg Lamp (which was, thankfully, present) and Christmas Tree (with crooked star) in the front room window.

Volunteers throughout the house answered questions and informed everyone that inside renovations were indeed still underway and explained that very little of the interior of the house was used in the movie. For this reason, while the interior was wonderfully put together and promises to be even better in the future, ultimately it will never truly match the house in the film.

Last year I said that we may make a trek to the Christmas Story House a new annual tradition and I think that still holds true. 24-hour marathons every year make this film a holiday favorite and the fact that so much of it was filmed here in Cleveland make it ever more special.

Check out some pics from todays festivities: A Christmas Story House 2006

Tags: holiday, xmas

So this is the first year we got up at the ungodly hour of 4:00 am to make the trek to the mall so we could stand in line waiting to get into a store and take advantage of excellent holiday prices.

I’ll admit that the tone of the day would have been entirely different had we not got the items that we waited in line for, but all in all it wasn’t that bad.

Arriving at the mall we immediately saw the line that we would be standing in. It was not quite 4:30 am and there was easily 300 people already in line. I made the wife and mother-in-law get out and get in line while I tried to find a parking spot. By the time I joined them in line we had only a half hour to wait and the people kept piling up in line behind us.

The half hour passed pretty uneventfully and the line moved pretty quickly once they opened the doors. We got into the store and ran to the area in which we thought the items we wanted would be only to realize that the store was totally reorganized to accommodate the huge Black Friday crowd. Luckily, we flagged down an employee and he pointed us in the right direction. We were pretty excited to see the items we wanted still in stock and promptly grabbed them and headed to the checkout.

The checkout line was handled efficiently and in no time we were standing outside again, items in hand, looking at the line of people still waiting to get in.

Like I said: if we had not found what we wanted and woke up that early for nothing, I think we would have been soured on the whole experience. But as it is… I think we might do it again next year!

Tags: holiday, xmas

So I’m blogging the holidays half way between Xmas and New Year’s…so what. Christmas was awesome (except maybe, that stupid Browns game) and it’s taken me nearly a week to recover. For the second Christmas in a row Carrie and I woke up before Ashley and waited in our room until we couldn’t take it anymore. Then we woke her up and told her that Santa had been here and it was time for us to open presents. Everybody got everything they wanted and a morning of presents and pastry and candy devolved into an afternoon of ham and sweet potatoes and taking out boxes and bags of garbage. By the end of Christmas day we were all just sort of staring at each other googily-eyed from across the room. Too much Christmas had turned us into holiday zombies. It’s taken me all week to get my sugar level back down and my sleeping pattern back in-whack.

Just in time for New Year’s.

There’s gonna be a party. With alcohol. And pictures.

Stay tuned.

P.S. Happy birthday to my sisters Cindy and Sue. Hope you girls have a good one.

Tags: holiday, xmas

For the first time since we met, I have (some of) my Christmas gift wrapped before my wife. Every year so far, the week leading up to Christmas is a scramble trying to figure out what to get Carrie and how to get it and hoping the store isn’t sold out of it. This year I think I came up with a couple pretty good presents, but more importantly, I was able to get them before Christmas Eve.
We took our traditional trip downtown yesterday to see the lights and wander through the mall. I brought the camera in case anything came up I might want to photograph. Something like the completely random arrangement of letter-holding miniature stuffed bears sitting on the shelf in the American Greetings store? Perhaps. I sure am glad I had my camera.

Today Carrie went with Joe and Rita to pick up the Christmas ham and we’re spending the rest of the day catching up with the holiday specials we’ve got backed up in the DVR. We’ve got a weeks worth of programming to plow through. But we started early.

There might be such a thing as too many holiday specials because between shows I dozed off and had a dream that Charlie Brown came by with Heat Miser and Snow Miser looking for Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. They were bummed out because of that mouse family that ruined Mr. Trundle’s clock tower. It seems that Scrooge had taken off the Baby New Year’s hat which made Yukon Cornelius laugh so hard that the Grinch put the hat on a snowman, which, of course, turned out to be Frosty. Frosty started babbling “Happy Birthday” over and over until Mrs. Claus showed up and declared that this would be the year without a Santa Claus. It was chaos until a tiny voice peeped up and said “Lights, Please”. In the spotlight, Linus delivered a stirring speech about the true meaning of Christmas which Eric Cartman argued was actually about ham. Just when all was bleakest, the fat man himself appeared (with eight tiny reindeer). He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, filling all the stockings; then turning with a jerk, and laying his finger aside of his nose, mentioned something about some good Christmas snow.

At this point I woke up and decided it was time to change the channel.

Tags: holiday, xmas

On the way home from the Westside Market today, I decided to surprise Carrie and Ashley by taking them over to the house that “A Christmas Story” was filmed at. It took them both a couple minutes to figure out where I had taken them, since the house has been renovated significantly since the movie was filmed, but imagine our surprise when we were all invited inside for a tour!!

The website AChristmasStoryHouse.com is covering the renovation and is inviting people to stop in over the next few weekends. Sadly, there’s not much to look at in the house right now (frankly, it’s completely stripped, except for the Christmas tree and leg lamp in the window) but the curator has Ovaltine to drink and plenty of “A Christmas Story” memorabilia for sale. There were DVD’s of the movie, lots of stills and glossy pictures from the film, leg lamps, t-shirts and even lifebuoy soap!

A Christmas Story House 2005 Slideshow

We picked up the special edition 2-DVD version of the movie (Yeah, I bought the movie from the living room of the house at which it was filmed) and Ashley got a t-shirt. All proceeds go to the restoration of the house to it’s big screen glory.

If they can indeed restore the house to it’s movie appearance, I can see us making the house a holiday tradition.

Today was pretty cool. Now if anybody needs me, I’ll be under the sink with a glass of milk.

P.S. So you’ve seen the movie 1000 times? But have you seen it performed by bunnies? In 30 seconds? No? Click Here.

Tags: holiday, xmas

Xbox-Scene News: Xbox 360 Crashing Like Mad?

Users report Xbox 360 “crashing like mad”

Xbox 360 Very Unstable

So you couldn’t get a new X-Box 360 to put under the tree this year?

Don’t worry about it – it appears that the returns will outweigh the sales this Christmas.

Tags: holiday, xmas

Shop -Til-You-Drop Specials, Revealed Here First

If there’s one day of the year I really don’t mind working it’s gotta be the day after Thanksgiving (Hereby referred to as: Black Friday) The crowds suck, the traffic sucks and the general attitude of throngs of shoppers out to screw each other to get a better deal has got to be the poorest introduction to the holiday season retail has ever created.

But alas, the internet has struck back. From the above New York Times article:

…the Web is shifting the balance of power in retailing from companies to consumers. Big national chains used to control discounts carefully, and shoppers were lucky to stumble into a sale at a store or receive an e-mail message promising free shipping. Today, however, online forums encourage strangers to exchange hard-to-find online coupon codes, and they offer instructions on how to combine rebates with one-day sales to cut retail prices in half.

I love it!! Not enough to actually go out and take advantage of any of these deals, mind you (although Carrie may have a different view). But anything that takes the power away from the retail giants and places it the hands of the consumers is cool with me. Giving the consumers more information creates more competition which can only drive prices down as stores scramble for your holiday dollar. End result: consumers get more of what they want and big business get a sobering wake up call that we don’t have to wander tirelessly seeking a deal while they sit back and watch us throw money at them.

Happy Holidays!!

P.S. After a few minutes of Google-ing I found there are a ton of sites out there trying to expose the Black Friday specials and sales. Check them all out here:

http://del.icio.us/tag/blackfriday

(This is a del.icio.us tag search that will continuously update as people find new Black Friday sites. Check it often to see new links…)

Tags: holiday, xmas

I found something new I want for xmas:

Less than $100 at WalMart
and it’s getting pretty good (6 out of 10) reviews at VideoHelp.com

The DVR we have from Cox Cable has been great except for the times when we like a program so much we’d like to keep it indefinitely. Sure the DVR can keep the programs stored forever – but each program we do that with takes up valuable space on the DVR hard drive.
This little baby will finally let us use the DVR’s “save to VCR” feature to offload and remove that 1987 Young Comedians Special and the “$40 a day” in Cleveland that have been on the DVR for months.

Tags: holiday, xmas

I have the reputation for being notoriously difficult to buy gifts for. Birthdays, Christmas…whatever. Carrie has finally decided the way to do it is to follow me around in department stores all year long and make mental notes of whatever I happen to pause in front of or show more than a passing interest in. What can I say… it works.

To save you the trouble of having to follow me around all year (’cause that would be creepy) I’ve decided to link to my ThinkGeek Wishlist. It’s over there on the right side of the screen (under ‘Other Links’). Go ahead, click it. All items on the list are hand-picked by me and guaranteed to be enjoyed.

…A simple idea to create and sell stuff that would appeal to the thousands of people out there who were on the front line and in the trenches as the Internet was forged. From programmers, engineers, students, lovers of open source, to the masses that helped create the behind-the-scenes Internet culture. ThinkGeek started as a way to serve a market that was passionate about technology…

I can’t decide what Chuck would like. Do they offer Gift Certificates?

Of Course.

I don’t know about all this on-line shopping stuff. Can you tell me more?

Sure. Click here.

Thanks.

You’re Welcome!

Tags: holiday, xmas