CHRISTMAS COUNTDOWN!
Good day, faithful readers! We find ourselves at December 22nd and it still seems like no time has passed at all since Thanksgiving. Christmas is sneaking up on us with a fury. Fortunately, my shopping is done and our fun old-fashioned Heath Family extended-Christmas has passed. All that's left to do during this vacation is to relax. I must admit that I'm ill-prepared for today's entry so, in lieu of a lame photo session about something that nobody cares about, I'll go with another video entry. I'm drinking boxed wine from a plastic glass with a fish for a handle and don't feel like being terribly articulate, so let's talk for a minute about Christmas Eve traditions.
Every family has its own set of Christmas Eve traditions. Some folk open their presents at midnight. Some folk go to midnight Mass at church. Others have a Feast of Seven Fishes or eat pizza. In the Heath household we have two standbys: an annual game of Risk, the game of world domination, and a viewing of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. The Risk typically follows dinner, and the movie follows the Risk. If you're familiar with the game of Risk, you can understand how this can cause a problem: Risk can take 20 minutes or it can take 3 hours, depending on how you play. When the rest of the family is sitting around and waiting to start a movie they usually don't care about whether or not Western Europe can fend off one more attack from Eastern Europe. But that hasn't stopped us before! My brother Al and I are each preparing our troops for December 24th's Battle for the World. Sadly, Dave can't be here...he's in Afghanistan playing Risk for real...but he's always here in spirit. I won the game last year, as best as either of us can remember, so I'm looking to go for a repeat here. Anybody have any Risk strategies to share? And don't tell me to take Australia, because yes, everybody knows you want to take Australia!
Moving on, I want to share my love of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We've been watching it for as long as we've owned it on VHS. In recent years it's made the upgrade to DVD, but the time-worn old VHS is still around someplace. I love pretty much everything about this movie but I'm not going to slow you down with a whole bunch of still frames. Somebody out there has taken the liberty of making a pretty concise collection of clips from the film, and I'd like to share that with you now. It doesn't have all of my favorite scenes in it, but hey, pretty much every scene is a favorite. Have a look with me, won't you?
Click to viewMy only major gripe with this montage is the criminal absence of Cousin Eddie clips. I would have gone with a "Bingo!" rather than the "Play ball!" at the end, but hey, that's just me. To each his own! It's such a great movie. I'd encourage everybody to go out and rent it before Christmas hits. It's on TV every now and then, but it's just not the same when TBS cuts it into a million pieces for content and takes out all the curse words that were allowed to sneak past a PG-13 rating in the 80's. What's your favorite scene? Lemme know!
Alright kids, we're in the home stretch for commercials, and all we've got left are top-quality spots. This one you may not remember, but it's very nostalgic for me. In fact, this is the commercial that prompted me to launch the Countdown and take you all on my little trips down memory lane. In addition to sharing pictures of me making faces at various foods and drinks. Have a look!
God, look at Mario make his way through that mini-mart! I remember seeing this on TV. I remember going to a convenience store with my Dad and I remember desperately looking for that Pepsi display to see if I could win a "sensational" new Game Boy. This is what Christmas Consumerism is all about...filling a demographic with desire to go buy something. In this care, Pepsi. Because I really really really wanted that Game Boy. I think we did come home from the store that night with a case of Pepsi. Alas, I won nothing. Still, the magic of going to the store and finding that display really did a number on me. 8 year-old Paul got his first taste of the consumer bug thanks to this commercial. It was a milestone for me - are there any commercials that changed your world? I wanna hear about 'em! Don't be shy...let's get some real comments going in the run-up to the 25th! Have a great Saturday, friends!
Paul