Another Holiday Tradition

I managed to stagger off to an eight o'clock Pilates class this morning and got home just in time to chat with Matt and Amy and the girls who were eating mashed potatoes for breakfast, and wave goodbye to them as they took off for the drive back to Los Angeles. Or, as it turned out, the gas station down the road where Matt discovered he had left his phone behind.

Some people go to Black Friday sales at 4 am or some utterly ridiculous time and fight over heavily discounted merchandise. It is called Black Friday, I was told this morning, because it is the day when businesses to go from red numbers in their bottom line to black. It sounds like pure hell to me. As long as 'the littles' remain interested in making gingerbread houses, we will go to Powell's on the day after Thanksgiving where Maya and Owen pick out the candy they want to use to decorate  the houses which I have been making every year since my own children helped to decorate them.

 Powell's is in the town of Windsor just north of us which has no big box stores, no Black Friday sales events and plenty of parking. In a little candy lined alcove  are three theatre seats and a television with a continuously running  loop of Gene Wilder in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. While the kids chose their candy, I happened in at just the right moment in the film, when Gene Wilder comes limping out the front door of his factory ....I won't tell you what happens next just in case you want to watch it.

We came home to a lunch of leftovers before Tim and the kids took off, leaving us to take the folding table and chairs back to the basement and decide what to do with the glass skull, the barf flavored jelly beans, the Anubis mask (suitable for hanging) and the Pokemon lighted tree ornament...all gifts from our white elephant gift exchange the only gifts we  exchange during the holidays. There is a $10 maximum limit and elaborate rules for the choosing and opening the ugliest gifts we can find. Most of them are stashed out of sight somewhere in our house until the recipients can make a clean getaway. The gifts that changed hands the most often were the Nuns Having Fun calendar and the golden pineapple...which Will decided was the perfect amenity for his dorm room....

Peter's pumpkin pie was the best I have ever tasted. I regret to say that he took the remain home with him, so it looks like I will be having mashed potatoes for dinner....