Imagination - Playing Army!

I read a blog post recently where the author was commenting about how kids today had so much electonic stimulation of what isn't real that "...they are forced to imagine what reality actually is".  That's a really powerful and rather thought provoking concept.  Like most of you, I grew up playing with the neighborhood kids and we all actively employed our imagination in almost all of our play times.  And I am thankful that we had that in our lives.

I grew up in North Seattle and lived near the Puget Sound.  Some of the best times we had as kids were when we went down to the big park by the water and played army.  It’s a lot more developed now, but when we were kids it was a mainly a huge hillside of sand and Scotch broom bushes.  You can check it out here:

http://www.yelp.com/map/richmond-beach-saltwater-park-shoreline

…here's a view in google maps that shows it pretty well.

I remember that we would literally spend hours there playing war.  Even though there was only half a dozen of us, we would scamper up and down the hills – hiding in scotch broom outcroppings, behind old rusted out cars, sidling up to the few lone trees – and taking every chance we could to “kill” each other.  In our minds eye, we were all Vic Morrow on the TV show Combat! – taking out all the ‘krouts and Japs – not very PC today, but definitely the verbiage of our generation.

Mind you, we didn’t have fancy electronic guns that would make shooting noises for us.  No – that was all up to us – and the kid who could make the best “pekuuu” (single shot)… or “pphthththth” (machine gun) sound was cooler than everyone, even if he did get killed.  And some of the coolest guns we had were those that we hand made out of old broom handles, hunks of 2x2 and a mass of black electrical or duct tape.

I drove through our "battleground" last time I visited my family - it’s now full of nature trails, BBQ’s and playground platforms, and lots of amenities for the family.  I’ll never forget that in my youth, it was a hillside full of imagination of intense warfare in a Wolrd War 2 setting, and made for endless hours of awesome memories.

Remember me?

Ok - I will make no excuses.  I've been a bad, bad, boy!  Halloween was quite awhile ago, and that was my last post.  I... uh... I've been... um.  You see, it goes like this... I was, that is, I've been... uh... busy - and - like, stuff happened and...

No excuses.  I'm guilty.  Life hit me and some things got waylayed... and blogging was one of them.  And I do apologize to all my blogger friends - whom I have also largely ignored over the last couple of months - I have been spending a lot less time on the computer at home in general, as well as just taking care of a lot of other things.

This tickled my funny bone...

Of course - a lot of things have happened over the last couple of months - and I bet I can even find a few of these things to blog about.

I really do hope to get blogging here soon.  Here's one of the things that has been taking up my time...


http://www.taximusic.com/hosting/home.php?artist=darryll-sherman

looking forward to getting back in the swing of things... 

Christmas Cookies!

There's just something about Christmas Cookies! There are so many great kinds of cookies at Christmas, and my mom made some of the best! Some of her best were shortbread, lemon bars, spritz and some that were called bars by the fire.

 

My sibs and I started a tradition when we were young kids. With mom's help, we started making our own Christmas cookies. We made a big double or quadruple batch of sugar cookie dough. Then we would roll it out and use cookie cutters to cut out dozens of different shapes. Oh – we had lots of normal Christmas shapes: Santas, reindeer, candy canes, angels, Christmas trees and all the other traditional icons. We ALSO had things like sharks, cars, a cowboy boot, giraffes, flip flops, hearts, hands, airplane, a pineapple, ducks, kangaroos, cows, and whole bunch more – a pretty funny wide assortment of odd things.

We would then make up a bunch of bowls of different colored icing and little bowls of nuts, chocolate chips, all sorts of sprinkles,and  a ton of different types of toppings. And then the fun would begin. We would spend hours baking and decorating the cookies. They weren’t especially delicious, but we had a lot of fun making them. It was an entire evening of laughing, singing along with Christmas songs, making cookies and generally having a good time with family members.

We have continued this for all these years. I’ve included a bunch of pics from one of our most recent times. These days, there are spouses, kids and nieces and nephews, but we always make time for it. It’s as much a part of our Christmas celebration as all the “normal” stuff.  Although - if you look at some of the cookies, you'll see there's few of them that are not very normal and reflect the late hour at which we were finishing up the decorating.  You can click on the pics to enlarge them and see all our fun shapes!

What fun and unique traditions does your family do for the holidays?