Super Bowl Update

• Candy canes (I used regular size but small would work too)
• Pretzel Rods
• White melting chocolate (it goes by many names)

Bake for 5-7 minutes. The candy will flatten slightly and the broken pieces will meld together. Remove from pan when cool.That's it!

• a half a bag of white chocolate melting chips, melted according to package directions
• 2 crushed candy canes

• 1/2 bag of white chocolate chips
• 2 candy canes, crushed into fine pieces
• 1 bag of Pretzel Rods

(Nothing Says "Happy Holidays" like a Bumble and a Dude falling off a cliff!)

My favorite Christmas Holiday Special is Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. They are showing it on TV tonight. I won't be home, but I've got it DVR'ed. Can't miss it. I mean, TECHNICALLY it's still November and we could've waited a little longer into the season, CBS, but we'll take what we can get. I'm assuming they will not be showing the remastered version, and opt instead for the horribly degraded version where the underscoring sounds like it's being played on a playskool record player from 1978 and butchered editing that makes less and less sense as they continue to increase the amount of commercials they cram into the hour-long format. Maybe one day they'll release "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer: Extended Edition" on blu-ray, and I can get to see all my favorite songs played out in their entirety. Today is not that day.

It should be no big shocker I like the Rudolph special. Lots of people do. But upon reflection, maybe I liked it for all the wrong reasons. Let's review my favorite parts:

1. Donner being an asshole of a father to Rudolph, and making him cover his nose.
2. The part where Hermey is (rightfully) fired from Santa's Workshop because he doesn't want to make toys, so he can follow his dream of being a gay dentist. Oooh, I hate that snot-nosed Hermey!
3. The super-sad song Clarice sings (There's Always Tomorrow) after Rudolph is nose-bashed by the other reindeer. It's the first song I listen to when it's seasonally okay to listed to Christmas carols each year.
4. The Bumble almost killing everyone throughout the story - but I was always especially delight in Yukon Cornelius's assumed death. And his stupid dogs too!
5. The totally sad opening to the "Island of Misfit Toys" Song. They make it happy at the end, but the beginning is the best. A total precursor to all the damaged toys in the Toy Story movies. And OMG aren't you in love with King Moonracer?
6. Mrs. Claus angrily trying to force feed a Skinny Santa. Eat! Eat!
7. The snow storm that almost takes out Sam the Snowman.
8. The fog that almost makes Santa cancel Christmas and disappoints everybody.
9. The pissed off face Santa makes when Rudolph's nose is blaring away in front of him, before he realizes Rudolph can guide the sleigh.
10. The singing of Holly Jolly Christmas when everyone is happy at the end. (Okay, so there's ONE nice thing I like about the show.)

So obvs. I have issues since I spend most of the hour-long show wishing failure and death upon the lead characters, and victory for the Bumble. I still count myself as being Team Rudolph, however. Maybe I don't always get the Christmas Special I want, but I get the Christmas special I need.

Martha note: There's a tremendous amount of news coverage these days (including on NPR)   about devastating head injuries incurred while playing football. I'm with Jason; I'm a football fan, both college and pro. But his essay made me think hard about what being a football fan really means.

It’s that time of year again: football season. I enjoy watching the NFL as much as the next person, and in our household, a Thanksgiving without the distant cheers of a stadium in the background is just plain, well, weird.


Even so, I have a different reaction to football. More and more, it seems, players are going for the “big hit,” the crushing blow of the opponent that will end up on the highlight reels, increase their name recognition, increase their marketability, and even their monetary value.

If I speak in business terms, I do that on purpose: football, like any other sport, is a business, and, perhaps more than any American sport, the players are very aware of the business of selling themselves. When we see replay after replay, or go onto YouTube and watch, in slow motion, a brutal collision, we remember the player’s name. Some of us will cheer for him just a little more loudly; others will buy his jersey after his reputation as a “hard hitter” is established.

When there is a hard hit, though, I have the opposite reaction from many others: while they are cheering and high fiving and watching replay after replay, I can’t help but look away.

As a child, I was fascinated by football. I would sit in one chair, my father in the one beside me, and we would watch the players. I basically discerned the rules on my own about downs and penalties and the line of scrimmage and so on—you simply didn’t interrupt my father during a football game.

I would check out books from the library and read about the great football players: Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, Knute Rockne, Jim Brown, Raymond Berry, Johnny Unitas. These players seemed larger than life: people who went out on the field, and gave it everything they had. It was a sport. Though football at the time was a far more brutal sport, it was highly glamorized and sterilized for the consumption of a child.

As a result, I decided to put my gangly, six foot four, one hundred and fifty pound frame to the test: I joined the junior varsity football squad at a local high school. I quickly discovered that football was far less than fun to play, when I managed to play at all.

Most of my brief two-year football career consisted of seeing or experiencing hazing, bullying, and sometimes sexual harassment, on both the part of the coaches and the players. I still clearly remember one coach stomping on my hand and pushing into the mud—it had rained all day that day—during stretching exercises. When I told him I’d rather quit the team, he poured a cup of Gatorade over my head. Stupidly, I stayed on the team and earned myself a few concussions along the way.

This isn’t sour grapes, though, this is reality. Go to a high school football game. Watch the players closely: many of them aren’t playing the sport of football; rather, they are doing the same thing their modern idols are doing: looking for the big hit. With the current emphasis in the NFL on preventing concussions, I have to wonder how we managed to get into this situation to begin with: one of the first rules players should be taught is to look at the person you’re tackling. It may not be the glamorous, pad cracking, jaw dropping hit, but it keeps your head up so you don’t get a concussion making the tackle. With our current spate of famous (or infamous) players in the NFL, I wonder if coaches in high schools and colleges have simply stopped teaching this simple rule, and themselves, congratulate the “big hits.”

Again, I continue to be a big fan of football, and I still enjoy watching the game on the big screen, especially when snow is falling outside and something is cooking in the oven. It’s classic Americana, and I’m not immune to it.

But there is something darker lurking in the background that makes football a more problematical pleasure for me these days: There are thousands of children watching the same game. For them, it is less a sport and more of a celebrity show. I hope, somewhere along the way, their parents or guardians or siblings balance out the glamour of the game with a heavy dose of the reality that exists away from the camera.

--Jason Barr, who won First Place in WMRA's Short, Short Story Contest, teaches at Blue Ridge Community College.

I am a boomer, a child of the sixties, an unabashed survivor of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and a penchant for self-importance and self-destruction.

In my late teens and early twenties, back when I was busy loading myself down with hippie-dippy affectations, I used to read Walden as regularly as some Christians read the Bible. Being increasingly pretentious myself and increasingly uncomfortable in my own head and skin, I suppose I was looking for guidance on how to live a more authentic life, and believed Mr. Thoreau’s book could help. Then someone told me his mother cooked his Sunday dinner and did his laundry, and he regularly took a break from his famous solitude to go gadding about with the Concord Transcendentalist crowd. I immediately pegged Mr. Thoreau as just another poseur like myself.

Mr. Thoreau’s most famous words (I say this because they’re posted at the tourist trap Waldon Pond has become) are: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

From what I know of the Concord Transcendentalists, they were an impractical bunch, who made philosophy rather than necessity and reality the basis of action. Mr. Thoreau seems to be saying he took himself off to the woods because of an idea. If he’d had another idea, he might have moved to New York City instead. So, Mr. Thoreau wasn't so much poor and free-spirited, as he was opinionated.

I just finished a really lovely Thanksgiving break, and hope you have as well. My contact with the Real World was officially re-established this morning with an on-line look at newspapers. Two articles particularly caught my eye. The first one is by Karen Tumulty in this morning's Washington Post on the concept of American exceptionalism; in which she writes:

The proposition of American exceptionalism, which goes at least as far back as the writing of French aristocrat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, asserts that this country has a unique character.

It is also rooted in religious belief. A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 58 percent of Americans agreed with the statement: "God has granted America a special role in human history."

[Newt] Gingrich says Obama fails to understand that "American exceptionalism refers directly to the grant of rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence," and that it is a term "which relates directly to our unique assertion of an unprecedented set of rights granted by God."

 The other was an editorial in yesterday's New York Times ( I had some catching up to do) titled "The Unemployed Held Hostage, Again," which begins:

It is hard to believe, as the holidays approach yet again amid economic hard times, but Congress looks as if it may let federal unemployment benefits lapse for the fourth time this year.

Lame duck lawmakers will have only one day when they return to work on Monday to renew the expiring benefits. If they don’t, two million people will be cut off in December alone. This lack of regard for working Americans is shocking. Last summer, benefits were blocked for 51 days, as senators in both parties focused on preserving tax breaks for wealthy money managers and other affluent constituents.

This time, tax cuts for the rich are bound to drive and distort the debate again. Republicans and Democrats will almost certainly link the renewal of jobless benefits to an extension of the high-end Bush-era tax cuts. That would be a travesty. There is no good argument for letting jobless benefits expire, or for extending those cuts.

What struck me while reading these two articles is what poseurs American politicians are; how easily they can flee from the real problems of real people into comfortable flights of rhetorical fancy. Can those two million unemployed people who are set to lose their benefits in December eat "American Exceptionalism," or use it to pay the rent?

SillyBill.com

I wonder if Mr. Gingrich, who seems to have an in with the Almighty, would let us know what God thinks about keeping tax cuts for the wealthy in place while cutting off unemployment benefits? And as for those Democratic lame ducks, they may be lame ducks, but they're not dead ducks, are they? At least not for today. So, I'd like to know from them what they really think is the right thing to do for the American people, as opposed to the right thing to do for their political futures.

To me, Mr. Thoreau's Walden is a literary classic in which rhetoric trumps reality. And it does seem to me we've taken Mr. Thoreau's literary license a bit too much to heart when our politicians dare to claim God-given "exceptionalism" for a country that leaves its unemployed to founder.

Your thoughts?

Second, find a cute coordinating fabric for your straps. I had some red and white check fabric in my stash. Cut the fabric into two 1 yard by 4 inch strips.
Third, fold over your strips lengthwise (right sides together) and sew the open sides 1/4" from the edge.
Next, with a safety pin on one end of elastic piece, thread through top pocket of curtain, gathering as you go.
Please play along. If you have something red and white to share, please leave a comment below. It could be something on your blog or a find from another website. Share the red and white love.

We've had a lot of exciting events going on both in and out of the office over the past two weeks!

Two week ago we had our Passionately Pink Wednesday for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. We had supported the charity by making a donation and helping to raise awareness for the foundation. Everyone in the office was wearing pink in some way, whether it was the special wristbands we had ordered, or by wearing a pink shirt or tie. We also had lots of pink food to celebrate the event!

Last Sunday we had our 4th annual turkey bowl and it was just as much fun as it usually is! We all met at a park in Royal Oak and spent the afternoon playing some fun, yet competitive football. Neil and Mike were the quarterbacks and everyone else was either blocking or trying to make the next big catch. We had some impressive talent out there on Sunday- that's probably why the guys usually take home the trophy in their flag football tournaments also!

We celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday on Tuesday with a turkey dinner for everyone at the company! We had a potluck style dinner with all of the traditional dishes- turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, rolls, pumpkin bread, and much more! After we had stuffed ourselves with appetizers, dinner and desserts, we spent the rest of the evening playing the hat game and hanging out together. We had some new faces in the crowd since some people brought more friends with them.

Our dinner on Tuesday was a great way to celebrate the holiday since we weren't all together on the real day. Since most people were spending Thursday with their families, we took advantage of the opportunity with have our Thanksgiving a little early. Apparently we have some great cooks who work here because the entire dinner was WONDERFUL!

We will have many more exciting events coming up soon!

Did you know "Small Business Saturday" is tomorrow? The designation is intended to remind us that more of the money spent in local small business stays in the community.

Our sunset that night

The menu changes slightly from year to year, with certain items that have been maintained for the 3 years or so that we have been going.  We got a little amuse bouche of blue crab claws in a truffle vinaigrette. One little bite of deliciousness.   Then for starters, I ordered the Hudson Valley foie gras, because I was in the mood for something rich and decadent after many days of eating mainly seafood.  Hubby ordered the truffled oysters.