Sunday, July 24, 2011

Christmas in July Part III: The Big Day!

"Keep your Christmas-heart open all the year round." -Jessica Archmint

Today definitely capped off our Christmas in July festivities. David and I woke up early so that we could open our presents from each other, and from Santa, before church. Santa obviously found his frozen treat that we left for him in the freezer on our back porch...




David wore his Santa hat, while I went ahead and got dressed in my red and green ensemble I was going to wear to church...







The cards that we made for each other were on the tree...



Here is a picture of all of our loot together. David knows how much I looooove different holiday and seasonal decor. So he got me plenty of fall decor, a little summery lighthouse, a Mardi Gras banner for our house at Mardi Gras, and a little candy. I got David some work gloves, a pedometer, a football-drinking cup, gum, and some vitamin supplements that I knew he'd been wanting...



We even set our camera on the timer on our fireplace mantle in the living room to a get a picture of the two of us...



After church, David, my parents, and I went to Tex & Shirley's, the restaurant that inspired our Christmas in July idea this year (http://www.texandshirleys.com/). They had the whole place decorated, a Santa there, and David and my Father wore their Santa hats. They were the only customers there that did so!!! It was so funny...EVERYONE was looking at them and laughing and chatting, lol!









I even had my picture made with Santa! Thanks Tex & Shirley's for such a fun lunch!



This evening, we had an official Christmas in July dinner cooked by my mother at their house. All the traditional delicious Christmas favorites, as well as an awesome Christmas/summer themed centerpiece and some other awesome decor!







In the usual place of stockings, there were sand buckets!!!



To finish up dinner, we called David's family in Mississippi and sung Christmas music to them! We so wish they could have been here to celebrate with us (although they'd probably rather not be associated with such total wierdness, haha), but it was fun to share it with them across the miles!

All in all, our first Christmas in July celebration was an awesome one! I definitely see this becoming a tradition. Merry Christmas!!!

Christmas In July Part II: "Christmas Eve"

"Men in white coats with restraining devices are on their way, David..." -David's Mom, Margaret, on our Christmas in July plans

Soooo, what does one do on "Christmas Eve" of Christmas in July? Well, a lot of random stuff! David and I had gone earlier in the week to shop for each other for our presents. We were each allowed to spend $10 on the other and all gifts had to come from the Dollar Tree. So, we had to find time Saturday to wrap these and put them under the tree. While David wrapped mine in the living room, I made some rice pudding in the kitchen. No real reason for this, other than I had a bunch of steamed rice from leftover from a company lunch function from Thursday. Everyone knows how much I hate to see food go to waste (I just don't feel like it's being a good steward of the provision God has given us), so I figured rice pudding was the perfect thing to turn it into...







After all of this, we washed both of our vehicles! Yes, it was about 97 degrees out, but we stayed relatively cool by spraying each other with the hose...





Then we followed each other around our neighborhood to dry our cars off...




In the evening, David and I had our customary Saturday night date night. Then, we stopped by my parents house and walked next door to my grandparents house to sing Christmas carols to them on their back porch/kitchen. I hope none of the neighbors were out to hear this! haha



When David and I got back home, we remembered that we needed to leave a treat out for Santa. Since it's Christmas in July, we figured he may want a frozen Italian Ice. We left Santa a note telling him there was a cool treat for him in our outdoor freezer...



We may be crazy, but we had a fun Saturday! Read on for our next post which details "The Big Day!"

Christmas in July Part I - The Idea and The Preparations

"Perhaps the best Yuletide decoration is being wreathed in smiles." -Author Unknown

A lot of you have been very curious about the Christmas in July celebration David and I have been talking about over Facebook this past week. I told David this post will have our largest readership ever (maybe up to 3-4 people lol) because everyone is curious as to just how nutty we are!!!

A lot of us have heard about Christmas in July celebrations, mainly just an excuse for people to party during the long, more holiday-devoid summer months. But we had never decided to take part in a celebration until this year. Several weeks ago we found out that one of our favorite local places to eat, Tex & Shirley's (http://www.texandshirleys.com/) was having a Christmas in July celebration today, December 24th. Well, you know how I LOVE celebrations, so I just had to go along. And the plans grew, and grew, and grew.

So, what did we do exactly? Well, the fun started LAST weekend when my not-easily embarrassed husband INSISTED that we decorate a full WEEK before Christmas in July. I hated to drag down one of our full-sized fake trees, BUT we were in luck. Last Saturday morning we found a 36" incandescent tree that worked perfectly on sale for $1. So we took it home and got to decorating. We moved the lamp from one of our end tables in the living room and replaced it with this tree. David insisted on wearing his Santa hat while decorating, and once the tree was decorated we added seashells around the base to tie in the summer theme. Yes, we lit it up, and yes, everyone going down our street this whole week could see it. haha!









We even added our new pickle ornament to it...



We added some more inside decorations, including some more seashells...





Have you ever seen Rudolph in a bikini? You have now!



The funniest part was when it came time to hang the wreath on the front door. Yes, I'm serious. My husband, in his Santa hat, t-shirt, and shorts stood on our front porch and hung out Christmas wreath (I later added seashells to it). Then he wore the hat while he used the leaf blower to blow off our porch, AND he stood in our yard and waved, saying "Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas!" at the top of his lungs to cars that went by. In the middle of July. Mind you, I DID NOT tell him to do this, he came up with this extremism on his own. One minivan literally almost had a wreck watching him from the road (I think the driver was trying to figure out if he was hallucinating). What a nut. I've never laughed so hard! Everyone please remember we live in the middle of the city, so there were plenty of neighbors around to see this, lol.











Later this past week, I told some of my coworkers about our funny celebration. So Carla, the wife of my coworker Benton, made us a Christmas In July box. HILARIOUS!!! It has a picture of a snowman in a bikini on top of it. Inside was a modified Christmas in July card, a mini stocking, and a sweet Christmas ornament, which on the back said "Christmas in July 2011, Love, The Neeses." HAHA! We have our first official Christmas in July ornament! Thanks y'all!!!







My parents put up their little tree, too. I guess they are just as nutty as us. So, here you have our preparations. Keep reading our next two posts - "Christmas in July Part II:'Christmas Eve' Activities" and "Christmas in July Part III: The Big Day!" to see the rest of our celebration!

Monday, July 18, 2011

Why Heritage Matters

“It is not the honor that you take with you, but the heritage you leave behind.”
-Branch Rickey quotes (US baseball player, 1881-1965)



This post has been a long time coming, and had I been smart I would have written this BEFORE I started posting about all of the unusual “heritage” celebrations and traditions that take place in our household. You’ve seen them – the Walpurgis Night post, Midsummer post, and many others are still to come throughout this year and many years to come. So, you may ask, why celebrate traditions that your relatives and ancestors may have done, not just 20 years ago, but maybe 200 or 2000 years ago? Isn’t that a little…um…weird? Go ahead and admit it – it’s a little – cuckoo! Well, that’s what I wanted to explain in this post – why heritage matters.

I have always been interested in two things – genealogy/family history, and traditions. My parents used to joke that they didn’t dare start anything new on a particular holiday when I was young, or we would end up doing it over and over and…OVER. This little quirk of my personality explains why my family ended up sitting in the cold and yes, sometimes icy or snowy, weather in Bog Garden (a nearby park/natural area) each January 1st in the morning. One unseasonably warm New Year’s Day when I was young we came up with the fun and random idea to have a “breakfast picnic” at Bog Garden. It was so much fun that in my mind it immediately became a “must do” for each New Years – warm OR rain, snow, ice, whatever. And it did. Much to my parents chagrin, as they had to choose between sucking it up, bundling up, and doing it, OR listening to my whiny little self say over and over, “But y’all, it’s a tradition!” If you had known what an annoying kid I could be, the bundling up and doing it was the easier option. So they did.

So, when you combine such love for genealogy AND traditions, you get someone who loves to research the traditions of the cultures and countries that their ancestors came from. From the limited research that I’ve done and hearsay that I have from previous generations, my genealogic makeup in an absolute European smorgasbord of Scotch-Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, Welsh, German-Dutch, and French. Whew! David’s family, from what I can tell, is at very least part Irish with British thrown in (as I recently found through some research – not sure why we didn’t get invited to the Royal Wedding ;-) ). I’m hoping to know more specifics about all of these mixes soon as I am planning to get started with some serious family tree research on Ancestry.com. I hope to find out more about David’s family background for sure. But for now, the nationalities are a pretty easy guide to go by when researching customs.

SO, I have a ball spending downtime researching what customs, traditions, and holiday celebrations from these cultures we can celebrate and pass down to our kids. I have a Norwegian cookbook, for example, and one of David’s favorite recipes so far of our marriage has been the Norwegian Meatball Casserole I made the first winter we were married. And the holidays – oh the holidays! I have had an absolute blast with these. Most of you will remember our post on celebrating Walpurgis Night, which is a primarily a German and Swedish celebration. Or, our relatively recent post on Midsummer, celebrated all throughout Europe but particularly in Sweden and Norway.

You see, I don’t want David and I, or our future children, to forget where we came from. Whether it be through genealogical research, stories of family members passed down for generations, fun things our families did with us as a kid, or celebrations from a distant European land long ago and far away where, maybe, just maybe, our relatives did some of the same things we are doing in our NC backyard these days. Not only is it fun, it’s IMPORTANT. It’s part of our identity. It’s not enough for me for my children to know that their maternal grandmother’s family is from West Virginia; it’s only enough when they know that their great great grandfather purchased an entire WV coal mining town and split it into parcels to be sold. It’s not enough for them to know that all four great grandfathers (both of my grandfathers and both of David’s) fought in WWII; it’s only enough when they know that their Great Grandfather McRae was an army tank gunner that served under General George Patton, and that their Great Grandfather Andrews witnessed many of his close friends getting killed on the front lines right next to him in Japan). It’s not enough for them to know that they have Norwegian in their blood; it’s only enough when they know the taste of Norwegian dishes that their ancestors probably ate long ago, chosen by those ancestors with specific nutrients to help them get through a life of long cold winters close to the arctic circle. Knowing some, but not all, is just not good enough for me. I want David, myself, and our future children to know the perseverance and strength of those in our family that went before us, as well as the love and laughter, and that, when things get hard, they have these traits in them, too. And why wait until we have children? I want David and I to be able to have that type of pride, now, in where we came from. That’s why heritage matters to me. And that’s why there will be so many blog posts in our future of “weird” holidays and odd customs. Some from long ago and far away, and some from our own parents and childhood. Like the sausage balls David’s family always ate during the Christmas season, which I learned to make during our first married Christmas.

There are so many things to learn about our past, and to pass onto the next generation. When we have children, we will find time to teach them about these things as we continue to learn about them ourselves. They will know where they came from and how they became who they are. Maybe we’ll even teach them on New Year’s morning – shivering in the ice and snow – while we eat leftover sausage balls. :-)

Sunday, July 17, 2011

A Few Recent Things

"A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world." -Joseph Addison

There are a few new things this week from our household. For one, we started a "Blessings Board." We both talked about how we want to take note and pay more attention to the blessings, big and small, in our everyday life. So, I bought a cheap whiteboard to keep in our kitchen called the Blessings Board. Each day David and I write down, throughout the day or at the end (depending on if it's a weekend or a workday) specific blessings that come to mind. The next day, we erase and start with new blessings. It's already proven to be a GREAT reminder of all of the amazing things that God does for us every day! This is a picture of yesterday (Saturday)'s board...by mid morning, we had written down Aunt Mary Jo (David's aunt)'s birthday (because we love her and love celebrating her life), the Christmas decor we bought for cheap at a yard sale (see lower part of this post) AND I had written the fact that David brought me breakfast in bed (because he is AWESOME!) :-)



I also bought a second whiteboard to be used for our "Thought O' The Day." Every evening, I pick an inspirational quotation to write on this board to try to live out or think about during the day. We keep this in front of our bathroom mirror, so it's the first thing we see when we wake up each day. The quotation changes daily...



Also, yesterday morning we, as usual, went "yardsaling!" We found a pickle Christmas ornament for $0.50, which is something I've been wanting for a long time. It's a German tradition, and you can read more about it here if you are curious or think it's something you'd like to incorporate into your own Christmas traditions ( http://www.pickle-ornament.com/history-pickle-ornament.htm )



Also, for $1 I bought the cutest little "Goodies for Santa" set. It's a plate to leave cookies for Santa on and a mug for milk or hot chocolate. I really wanted it for when we have kids, because both the mug and plate are painted with pictures of children of different nationalities. So I figured it could serve not only as a fun tradition but as a diversity lesson!



So anyway, these are some of the fun things we wanted to share from this weekend. I know I have been a lazy blogger recently, but I fully intend to catch up soon. Posts to watch for that should be coming in the next few weeks...Coupon Organizing (I know, I have promised this for months...I have no real excuse, just not on the ball), Why Heritage Matters, Watching Our Spiritual Diet (And Why We Should Watch What We Put In Our Minds as Much as What We Put in Our Bodies, and, yes, CHRISTMAS IN JULY!!! :-) So stay tuned, everyone! LOTS of stuff coming up soon!

Saturday, July 16, 2011

4th of July Weekend

"It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you." -Author Unknown

We had a nice 4th of July weekend. It started with a laid-back, fun Saturday. In the morning, we went swinging at Lindley Park not too far from our house (yes, we like to pretend we're kids again)...



It got pretty hot at the park, so we came home and decorated our house for 4th of July. A banner in our den, flags on both sides of our driveway, and of course patriotic leis to wear around our necks!




That Sunday, we went swimming at Lindley Pool, the public pool we go to nearby. It was a great way to get some exercise and to stay cool!




And since I was so obviously worn out after the swim...



We went to Sonic for a little treat - a grape slush for me, and a Diet Cherry Limeade for David...



That Sunday evening, we went to my parents house for a pre-July 4th cookout. David did the cooking at my parents house, but we ate on my grandparents patio (they live next door to my parents)...









The next morning, on the actual 4th, David and I got up and went to downtown Greensboro for the Fun Forth Festival, which started with the parade...







After the parade, we walked around the festival for a while, which included (of course) stopping by the Guilford County Republican Party and getting a VOTE REPUBLICAN sticker!!! We love showing our Conservative pride!



We finished up the weekend by doing a cookout with our friends Shane, Jaclyn, Brian, and Marsha (at Brian and Marsha's house) and then going to the Greensboro Grasshoppers game with them. LOTS of fun. We had to leave before the fireworks because an earlier rain delay had made the game run so late, but the sky was pretty enough to be better than any fireworks!







We are so thankful for the men and women that have fought for our freedom so we can enjoy activities like these!