Jul
4
patriotic gift
Filed under holidays, house at 2:18 pm | Leave a Comment
I received an early birthday present today. It’s now flying proudly in front of our house. My first American flag! Happy 231st, USA.
Dec
25
Santa solves the sleigh problem
Filed under holidays at 10:25 am | Leave a Comment
A week ago I voiced concern that Santa wouldn’t be able to make it here without any snow. We learned last night that apparently he figured out a solution to the problem. I should learn to have more faith. He rides through every street in the city … on a fire truck:
When my brother and sister-in-law came running down the stairs with their girls last night and rushed outside, we wondered if maybe it had started snowing. It hadn’t, but they knew Santa was on his way because they could hear the sirens coming. Apparently he makes his way through all of Stafford this way every year.
It was the weirdest thing I’ve seen in quite some time, but for everyone here it was a typical Christmas Eve event.
Dec
24
Hallelujah Chorus: alternate lyrics
Filed under holidays, movies at 9:12 pm | Leave a Comment
As some of you may know, we’re currently living in the basement of my brother and sister-in-law’s house. It really has been great. One ramification of it, though, is that we’re living in one big “J” shaped room, so when Micah is sleeping, we need to be quiet. This includes while watching TV. As such, we’ve grown accustomed to watching TV with the volume down low and closed captioning turned on.
This weekend we were watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, 
which we do every year at Christmas (along with How the Grinch Stole Christmas, of course). This is the first year we’ve watched it with closed captioning enabled. At the point where Clark finally gets the Christmas lights on their house to light up, a snippet of the Hallelujah Chorus begins playing in the background. Instead of, “For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” the closed captioning displayed, “Lord God Our God and King, Oh Let us praise Him.” After replaying it a few times, we could hear the similarities in how they sounded. We were amused.
“I hope this adds to your enjoyment of the holidays.” — Clark