Best Christmas Present Ever!

All of this talk about"A Christmas Story" has me remembering about my childhood memories and some of my favorite gifts. My Memaw was always great about getting me something I longed for. She got me the Western Barbie and Ken that kissed. It even had a little red ink pad, so it left kiss marks. She also got me the Twister Hair Barbie that had a tool that twisted Barbie's hair together. And she got the SUPER COOL parachute pants that I just HAD to have! I tell you, I looked freakin' awesome in those pants! LOL! But, I have to say my favorite gift came in 1979. First I opened up 2 awesome posters for my wall. One was of Bo and Luke Duke in front of the General Lee. And the other was of Ponch and John from CHIPS. At the time, these were my favorite shows and I had huge crushes on these guys! Especially Bo Duke! But, my very favorite gift of all was a little record player that folded up like a suitcase, so I could carry it around. I can't even tell you how much I loved that thing! We would listen to records and sing and dance. It wasn't long before records were replaced by cassettes, then cassettes were replaced by CD's and now CD's are slowing getting replaced by Ipods, but my memories of that little record player will last forever!

A Christmas Story

A Christmas Story is my all time favorite Christmas movie. I remember the first time I ever saw it was in 1986. Memaw and I had gone to Franklin, IN to see Uncle Mark's new baby, Markell. While we were there, he rented this movie. He said we HAD to see it! From that moment on "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!" became one of those movie quotes that you just never forget! I was so happy when TBS started showing the movie for 24 hours starting Christmas Eve at 6pm. We always had it on at some point on Christmas Eve at Dad's. And it was always playing while we opened gifts on Christmas morning. But the kids were never paying very close attention to it. Well, 5 years ago, the flu kept us from going to Dad's on Christmas Eve, so we all sat down and watched the movie from beginning to end. The kids LOVED it. For the next 3 days, Jordan did his "Ho,Ho,Ho" impression of the Santa as the elf shoved Ralphie down the slide at the mall. He cracked us up and sounded just like that Santa! From then on, it has become a tradition that we all sit down and watch it together at least once during the Christmas season. Last year, we were having a hard time finding it on TV. Christmas Eve and day is just to busy to watch it all. So, I talked Steve into letting me buy the DVD. He didn't want to buy it because he was afraid that having it to watch whenever we wanted would take away some of it's "specialness". Kind of like when we bought the Wizard of Oz on DVD. Bryson watched it over and over. She would never get to appreciate it like we did as kids when it only came on once a year. That was the one night we all got to stay up late and watch the movie. We just looked forward to it. So, I promised Steve if we got the DVD, we would only watch at Christmas time. It's fun to gather as a family, with popcorn, M&M's and twizzlers and watch this movie together. It fun to hear the kids quote their favorite parts-"Daddy's gonna kill Ralphie", "Only I didn't say "Fudge." I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!", "Fra-gee-lay. That must be Italian!", "I TRIPLE dog dare ya!", "It's a major award" and of course, the Fa, ra, ra, ra's at the Chinese restaurant on Christmas day. Have I mentioned how much I love this movie???