One of my favorite things to start thinking about at the beginning of the Christmas season every year is what we’ll do for our Christmas card. The first few years of our marriage our cards were pretty bland (and last year’s was Analie’s birth announcement), but I’m getting more and more interested in making unique cards that express (some of) our personality.
This year, we had tons of fun with our card.
And I would have loved to be able to mail it to all of you. But as it is, our Christmas card list has 100 names on it and postage was getting super expensive.
SO, please enjoy our Christmas card in blog version. (Incidentally you will not find the phrase “Merry Christmas” anywhere on it, because we were getting so down to the wire that we weren’t sure it would be going out before Christmas. Hehehe.)
We love you! Even you blogosphere friends I have never met and/or don’t know are creeping on my blog.
Merry Christmas!
(This was a 5×7 front and back flat card in real life. But the internet version can be whatever the heck you want it to be. POSTMODERN!)
Did you grow up doing Black Snakes on the Fourth of July?
I totally did.
I think they’re amazing. Joey thinks they’re super lame. (Sometimes I think JOEY is super lame. I told him this in the fireworks store when he was making fun of me for freaking out about the black snakes, so don’t worry. He knows. And he’s cool with it.)
Anyway, I happened to be talking to The Brother about a totally different topic on Sunday afternoon, and he suggested that I try something one of his compatriots grew up doing. Smash up 10 boxes worth of black snakes and put them in a coffee can and light it on fire.
Um, YES PLEASE.
So yesterday, I bought 13 boxes because they were on sale for super cheap.
And we don’t buy coffee that comes in cans so I used a diced tomato can, which is a little smaller and I figured would intensify whatever happened with the crushed snake powder.
I put the 78 Black Snake pellets into a freezer baggie (for extra durability) and took them out to the driveway and crushed them up very good by walking on them. It’s the one time in my life that I have found it convenient that I weigh over 100 libs.
Then, I went inside and informed Joey how many snakes I had bought. I didn’t think he would care about my experiment so I’d planned to do it while he was at work because:
a.) he had told me black snakes were stupid
and, b.) he had told me black snakes were stupid.
I didn’t figure he’d want to waste his time on watching something stupid. HOWEVER. When I informed him how many snakes I’d bought, he was all, “Wow, that sounds really stupid. Uhhhhh, you’d better wait until I get home to do it.”
Yeah. He obviously think it’s really stupid.
(How many times can I use the word “stupid” in a blog post? LOTS! and LOTS!)
I also invited Angel to come over, because she had seemed skeptical that I’d really try this and she kept being the voice of caution, suggesting I could blow and arm or eyeball off. (That’s obviously why we moved so close to a hospital. Safety first.) At 6:00 yesterday evening, conditions were right to light my can of smashed up snakes on fire.
It was my favorite.
Angel’s commentary in the background was totally worth the $3.00 I spent on the snakes. It’s pretty much the 2nd best part of the video (hi Angel!), a close second only to the erupting mound of flaming snake.
And of course we had to destroy the flaming mound of, um, Black Snake after its fire was extinguished.
