A Different Kind of Drug Problem

I often lament about the difference between kids today and who/what we were as kids growing up.

A friend sent this to me. It says more in a short paragraph than I could say in a month of blogging. If you click on it, it will open up much larger to read with our aging eyes.

And, please don't think I hate all kids today (I have a couple of my own, you know) - or that I throw all kids into this cauldron of "spoiled lazy brats" soup. I do think that in a lot of ways, this generation of parents as a whole, has certainly done our kids a disservice by not drugging them in some of the ways mentioned here.

I'll be the first to admit that raising kids is hard work, takes concentrated effort and challenges our own abilities and level of commitment - even to the things we strongly believe in. But I also know that it's worth the headaches and heartaches. I pray that God helps us all to bethe types of parents that raise kids that will be upstanding and contributing parts of society, kind and caring to others, and giving rather than selfish.

Dishing up the FUN!

I wanna give a big shout out to my man, Darrin, over at Dad’s Dish Retro Blog! This guy is just plain funny! His little sub-title on his blog says it all: “Stuck in the past and living my life… no matter how much it embarrasses the kids”. He and I are a kindred spirit when it comes to all of this fun ‘70s stuff.

One of my favorite posts of his a bit ago was when he ran down with a list of some of his favorite catch phrases that were solidified in pop culture. Reading through the list he wrote, along with all those added by others, really sends you down memory lane. TV shows, movies, commercials, etc. – they all gave us some of the greatest one-liners.

He was also kind enough to just write a review of my book – he even recommended it! You gotta check out his blog, it’s a great time! Click the link on the right of my page under My Blog List.

And the ‘70s thought I have to throw out for you all to ponder today: what’s your favorite TV sitcom from the ‘70s? No dramas, variety shows or afternoon shows allowed (we’ll save those for another day). My vote – try to keep it just one or two – would have to be Mork and Mindy. The brilliance of the young Robin Williams, his goofiness really revealed for the first time, and cute Pam Dawber all made for a great show!

And – catch phrase + sitcom = Nanoo-Nanoo!

Christmas Memories - The Decorations

We had plenty of decorations that went up all around the house, and we had fun putting them all up.

Since I grew up in a house full of kids – there were four of us – by nature, we were competitive. We had a beautiful Manger set and it had all of the classic pieces. Every year we would all want to be the one to find Baby Jesus.

All of the figurines were wrapped in tissue, and we had our own silly rules in “the search for Jesus”. You couldn’t just rifle through the box and try to grab the smallest one in hopes of finding it, you had to unwrap whichever one you pulled out and place in the crèche. There was no prize or special recognition for finding the Baby Jesus – just bragging rights that seldom lasted longer than the evening. But – YOU remembered! And every time you looked at the scene you knew that it was YOU who was responsible for Baby Jesus this year.

We had these extensive little village scenes. These weren’t fancy set-ups, but they still had a magical air about them. The snow was just sparkly, fluffy cotton, and the buildings we kind of small and didn’t light up or anything. The trees were a bit oversized and had steel wire trunks with pipe cleaner type material that were the branches. They did make a good cone shape with some big clumps of fake snow on them and little platforms so they stood up. The funniest thing was that mom picked up some plastic elk that were WAY oversized. This was always humorous to me, but we still put them up. My brother and I would secretly have little terror episodes of the attack of the mutant elks.

There were also lots of little individual decorations that we put up all over - all part of our own traditions. One other cool thing we did was that Mom always made her own door decoration. My brother and I always had to find downed branches for mom to use. They weren’t really fancy or anything, but they were always homemade and originals.

What memories do you have of your decorations?

A Christmas Story

What is Christmas, really?

I want to spend some time and write about my memories, and I will, but I have to share this first. A friend of mine posted this and I recommend that you read it – it’ll warm your heart.


This short story is the author’s memories of spending Christmas at his Aunt Ida’s house. It’s full of the things that Christmas should be about. It tells of what it was like when the living rooms at Christmas were filled with the sounds of families talking or kids laughing, not the football game on a 52" plasma; with families making memories and having appropriate conversations, not pieces of fractured families avoiding each other or talking about the latest celebrity gossip; of kids playing in a pile of coats, not holed up in a back bedroom playing the latest bloody combat video game and seeing images of life way beyond their years.

Kind of made me stop in my tracks and remember what it means to have a family Christmas - not a "happy holidays" party; to be able to appreciate a personal, thought-out, given-with-love gift instead of another "picked-it-up-while-I-was-in-line-at-the-grocery-store" $50 gift card; to revel and take in with all my being the beautiful sounds, sights and magical wonder of Christmas instead of complaining about having to fight the crowds and traffic to "get my shopping done".

Christmas at Aunt Ida's

Enjoy!

The Snow of '68

We have our first prediction of snow in the next couple of days. I do enjoy the snow, and that’s largely because I grew up in Seattle where we didn’t have much of it. There were a couple of good snow storms when I grew up, but they were the exception, not the rule.

I do remember that we had a big storm in ’68. This happened to coincide with when my folks decided to do an addition to our home. We had the dining room addition foundation poured, walls and roof framed, and the contractor had just opened up the wall between our kitchen and the new dining room when the storm hit. And it was a big one – dumped 3 feet of snow in a short amount of time. You guessed it – we ended up with snow in our kitchen. My mom wasn’t too happy, but we did get a good story out of the experience, though.

It did make for good sledding, though, which was a rarity in our area. Living above the Puget Sound we had some good hills. So – with the big snow – we all got some great nights of sledding fun. We rode a route that started right by our house and, if you did it right, could take you all the way to the beach. The normal stopping place was about half the way down. The funnest thing I remember was that one of our neighbors had a big black lab named Tucker. They’d keep him at the midpoint until a bunch of us piled there, and we’d all rope our sleds together and he’d haul them all up the hill for us. It was one of the coolest things to us as kids.

We get a lot of snow here in Pullman where I live now, but my funnest memories are of the few times we had big snow where I grew up.

Color TV

It's easy to work on the computer and watch TV – especially professional sports.
Being a Washingtonian and former Seattleite, I follow the Seahawks and the Mariners. The Seahawks are performing less than dismal this year, and the Mariners came nowhere near making the playoffs.

So – I’ve ended up following the MLB playoffs and am right now watching the Phillies and Yankees go at it in game 5. It’s said that you either love or hate the Yankees, and as for me, well, go Phillies!

They just showed a montage of the 1950 World Series where these same two teams had met. Watching the footage it was apparent just how far television coverage has advanced over the years. We are so spoiled! Without a doubt, you see the game better when you watch it on TV, although you don’t get that “being there” experience, and going to a game these days is an experience in itself.

The reason I share all this is because I heard or read a comment recently that was extremely poignant. It was made by a guy who was a kid in the ‘60s. He said “I’ll never forget the first baseball game that I went to because it was the first time I’d ever seen one in color!” That concept blew me away. And – if you’ve ever heard the broadcasts from back then, I believe they also went to great lengths to describe everything about the players, the stadium and the whole feeling of the day because it was so poorly captured on camera. This helped me understand even more why a little kid’s first trip to the ballpark would have truly been such a magical experience and would make such a lasting impression on him.

I grew up with black and white TV, and I certainly remember when color first came out and how awesome it was! We take it all for granted now, but there was a time when the only mental image we had of anything we’d never seen in person was a black and white image. Try to get your kids to wrap their minds around that!

Comic Books

Comic books were a big part of my childhood. They may still be big, but I’m not in to them anymore, so I don’t know. From what exposure I have had to modern day comic books, I know that many of them are much more graphic (violence, sex, language) than anything I ever read when I was a kid.

My sisters, brother and I had a lot of comic books. There was Superman, (who can forget Bizzaro World, Mr. Mxyztplk, and of course Lex Luthor) Supergirl, The Legion of Super Heros, Batman, Archie and I’m sure many others. We had stacks and stacks of them in our closets and I remember that we seemed to have read them all a few times, even though there were a lot of them.

They were very good, well written, well drawn and very entertaining. Many a rainy afternoon, sun-soaked lazy day and/or – dare I say it – bathroom visit were regular fare for reading the latest purchased comic.

Two questions come to mind: 1) Where are all of those comic books now? And, 2) are any of them worth big bucks? As I mentioned before, we certainly read them all plenty of times. Only if they are really rare and condition doesn’t matter will we be retiring and building our dream homes from any proceeds that we might receive if we were to sell these to some crazy collector.

Did you grow up with a pile of comics that helped you wile away the hours of your youth?