I love Christmas. I mean, Halloween is my favorite holiday, but Christmas unquestionably *looks* like my favorite holiday. We start decorating either the day before or the day after Thanksgiving; we do the ugly sweater parties; we make dozens of cookies and sweets (including my grandmother’s lukken cookies--using the iron and recipe brought over from Belgium); we do Christmas concerts, blast Christmas music, go and see Christmas lights, make mulled wine, and have a pajama exchange on Christmas eve. I should mention that we bicker and argue continuously while doing all of these things. We also watch a lot of Christmas movies. At least a movie a day for all of December. Although Christmas movi
I’ve always enjoyed films. Perhaps not more than television and definitely not more than books, but it comes in a close third (though to be fair, if my family had watched anything other than sports 24/7, movies may have stood a better chance against the books). I have this distinct memory of being in my early twenties, living in Kankakee, IL (a place I believe Jay Leno once referred to as the “armpit of America”), and managing a shoe store where I worked upwards of sixty hours a week. I had decided to go back to school, and my brother had agreed to help me move back home, but the only day he could come and collect all of the heavy stuff was about three months before I was actually going to b
I can distinctly remember my first television set. It was one of those behemoth wooden consoles that weighed about 80 pounds and had turn knobs for channels and volume. Being that I was born in the late 80's, well after this sort of TV set had fallen out of fashion and been replaced by smaller, sleeker versions, this early television memory comes courtesy of my grandparents. Being the only child raised by my Grandma (Jeanette) and my Grandpa (Earl), there were a few concessions a kid had to make: the biggest one being adopting an attitude of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." This essentially meant that my grandparents had no problem using the same old junky TV console for 20 years if it sti
