Merry Christmas, from Dinosaur Dracula!
I’m half-crocked on wine that tasted a little too much like vinegar, so apologies in advance if I make eighteen typos.
Christmas Eve is here. My favorite day of the whole year. Everything leads up to it, and everything after it leads up to the next one. Weird!
I haven’t posted as much as I would’ve liked to lately, but it’s not for any bad reason. Some of my more distant relatives are in town, and this whole past week has been filled with “Mini Christmases.” I didn’t want to miss any of them for the sake of one more candy review. Shit happens.
Today was nuts. We made a hundred stuffed mushrooms, and when I say “a hundred,” I don’t mean “a pile that looked like a hundred but was actually thirty.” I mean a literal HUNDRED stuffed mushrooms. I haven’t chopped that much parsley since I needed hair for my life-sized edible Joker.
Then came the last minute shopping. There was a lot of it. The stores actually weren’t too crowded, but when you’re shopping for gifts this late in the game, chances are that you have no idea what to buy. At least, I didn’t.
Some lady at Target asked if I needed help with anything. My impulse was to hug her ankles and scream, “I need SO MUCH help with EVERYTHING.” Instead I said “no” and continued walking in mindless circles for another twenty minutes. Hope you like cheap chocolate fountains, Sis.
When all was said and done, I took care of my to-dos, and even had enough time to come in 2nd in a surprise Scrabble game. (I lost to my nephew, but that’s okay, because I beat my brother. All I cared about was beating my brother.)
I’ve had a great Christmas season. Had a great Halloween season, too. You’ve heard my spiels before. September, October, November and December – those are my months. When I think of the “holiday season,” it’s that whole four-month stretch. It ain’t over yet, but this has definitely been one of my favorites. The wine says so.
But it’s not just the wine. I’m so thankful for the friends I’ve made through doing whatever the stuff I do here is. I’m so thankful that people still read/watch the stuff I do even though I’ve been doing it for a hundred billion years. I’m so thankful that I named my site Dinosaur Dracula, because it’s so much fun to draw that with crayons.
I want to wish everyone a merry Christmas, or whatever it is that you’re celebrating. Have a blast. Thank you to death for being a part of my anthill empire. I love you even if I have no idea who you are.
If I remember to charge my phone, I’ll be posting photos of tomorrow’s crazy nonsense, so remember to follow the site on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. If I managed to make all of those words link correctly, it’s a fucking miracle.
I’m so looking forward to seeing where the site goes in 2014. Even if it’s nowhere new. I don’t care. If nothing else, I’m slated to write about Snaliens in January. So yeah. Snaliens are coming.
Um.
See you in a day or so!
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a zzzzzzzzzzz
PS: Feel free to use the comments as your personal Christmas confessional. TELL US EVERYTHING. Who you’re seeing, where you’re going, what you’re getting. SPILL IT.
Video: Sugar Cookie Pebbles Cereal!
The 2013 Christmas season hasn’t been especially hot for weird food, but if you look hard enough, there are a few big time players.
Like this one, for example. Post’s Pebbles cereal with a limited edition SUGAR COOKIE flavor. It looks good, it tastes good, and the box features Dino wearing Grinch dog antlers. I have exactly zero complaints.
Get the whole story in this sickly sweet video review:
For the life of me, I could not find this in stores. Still haven’t. I got so fed up with the fruitless department store runs that I gave in and ordered it from some third party seller on Amazon. If you’re dying for a box, try there!
Freezy Freakies: Gloves of Glory.
Freezy Freakies. The one time I had any opinion at all about gloves.
Made by Swany, they were decorated with everything ‘80s kids cared about, like robots and jets, and cute little animals. On that merit alone, they were destined for big things. 99% of gloves were boring, and if a child had to pick between normal gloves and GLOVES WITH ROBOTS, well, duh.
But that wasn’t the half of it. The real reason Freezy Freakies became so legendary is that they had magical powers. See, only when you wore the gloves outside would their cartoony symbols fully materialize.
This bizarre old commercial tells the story:
In the house, your Freezy Freakies might have had the image of a rocket ship on them. Sounds okay, but check this: Once you got those fuckers outside, the rocket ships grew blazing red exhaust trails.
Don’t pretend like you don’t want to clap.
Okay, yeah, if you weren’t a part of the fad, I guess they wouldn’t seem like such a big deal. Believe me, they were. Those gloves marked my first-ever interest in fashion. You could’ve dressed me in mismatched sneakers and a shirt that said “My Life Is Bingo,” and I wouldn’t have cared. But GOD HELP YOU if you sent me onto the snowball battlefield without Freezy Freakies.
Me, my friends, we all had them. I don’t know who started the trend, but once Freezy Freakies turned up in our neighborhood, none of us wanted to be the jerk without ’em.
A snowstorm isn’t a good time to be the odd man out. Not when you’re seven, at least. Everyone liked a good snowball fight, but we liked unfair snowball fights even more. The ones when you totally outnumbered your opponents. There was no quicker way to make five antsy boys throw snow at you than to be the only kid out there without color-changing gloves. It was like walking into Crips HQ without the blue bandana. Read More…
Christmas, 1988. A Photo Journey.
Christmas Eve, 1988.
I was nine years old.
Our whole giant family spent most of the day in the dining room, like we always did on Christmas Eve.
Actually, it wasn’t just the dining room. That dining room wouldn’t have fit even half of us. Instead, our regular table was joined by two folding tables, effectively spreading the disease that was us to the entire living room. Even then, a few people had to eat in the kitchen.
The tables are what I remember most about those parties. They were such glorious messes!
Even with the three tables lined up to form one Super Table, you could still identify the components by their tablecloths. In 1988, one was white, one was red, and the third was green.
The main table was reserved for my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. It was always covered in strange liqueurs and burnt walnut shells. If you wanted cigarettes or punchlines you’d never get, you visited Table 1.
The middle table was for my older siblings and cousins, plus their significant others. There were never enough seats for everyone who had the arguable right to sit there. It was first come, first serve, and extremely competitive. If you left the table for too long, you lost your seat. Table 2 always felt the most alive.
The third table, not shown in this photo, was where I would’ve been. That was the table for kids, and for the people who didn’t have enough fight in them to make it to Table 2.
Even though we were all technically sitting at one big THING, the different tablecloths created a clear caste system. If you were at Table 3 and someone from Table 2 talked to you, it was only because they had Christmas pity.
Fortunately, I was nine, so none of this really concerned me.
I didn’t care about where I sat, or if there would be any crab legs left by the time the big foil platter hit Table 3.
All I cared about was midnight.
Sweet, glorious midnight.
Midnight was when we opened our presents. Christmas Day was only moments old.
That year, we opened them downstairs. What you see under the tree isn’t even a third of them. Everybody gave everybody presents. I can’t handle the math, but it was something like 8 x 2 + 6 x 2 + 3. That many presents.
By 1988, even I was probably in on the fun. This may have been the year that I gave all of my brothers and sisters $5 glassware sets from Bradlees.
Absolutely none of them needed glasses, but those sets came in big heavy boxes. If you didn’t know better, you’d have sworn I paid four times as much. Basically, I gave everybody glasses because it made my Lincolns wear Jackson costumes. Read More…