Christmas Is Coming...

Okay this is my annual seasonal blog about "Christmas is Coming". This isn't about the jingly jangly song by the under the radar Canadian band The Payolas though I could go on for a couple of paragraphs on this great song and the wonderful lyric "wish you were here". I do wish my Mom was here. Christmas for me was always a time that I would drive up to Montreal or Hopewell to see her. This will be the 10th one since her passing. Time really does fly. Unbelievable.

Anyways onto happier things. Yesterday I brought H to the optometrist to get his eyes checked and to get a new pair of glasses. He has the Schlewing eyesight gene that we all inherited from my Dad. When you're a Schlewing, you get the height gene (good thing) and you get the vision gene (bad thing). For some reason he chose not to tell me that he had duct tape keeping his glasses together. That is definitely taking the "Red Green Show" motto one step too far. So now I am $354 poorer but at least H will have a pair of glasses not being held together by Schlewing imgenuity.

I wasn't planning on spending that much yesterday so I said to myself I deserve a little something. So off I went to find myself some tealight candles that smell nice. LOL. Okay I know that looks weird reading that. Here's this guy almost 6 & 1/2ft. tall weighing 275 lbs of not rock hard muscle that shaves maybe once a week that likes nice smelling tealight candles. Queer Eye For The Straight Guy Alert!!! LOL. So anyways I bought 16-packs of Cranberry Mandarin, Pecan Pie and Pumpkin Spice tealights so chances are when you walk into my house it is spelling nice. So there! I also rewarded myself with new CD versions of Bob Seger's "Live Bullet" and "Nine Tonight". Going to be blogging on those CDs real soon. Smiles. So I spent all of $20 on myself. $7 each CD and $2 each tealight package. Okay promising never to use the word tealight in any future blog ever! I swear. LOL.

Okay some of you may wonder why I called the blog what I did when I am barely referring to the title so far. Well I am in charge of the typing here so I can type what I want. LOL. I do tend to go there and then here and then back there when I type.

Oops I inadvertently hit "publish post" and I am not yet done. Time to edit.

J and I went to Greenville's Santa Claus Parade. Turns out that my 40-something yr. old GF is around 12 yrs. old at this time of the year. Smiles. She wanted to go to the parade so off we went.

The last Santa Claus Parade I went to was back in Montreal when H was a toddler and I only brought him to one of those. His Mom used to pick him up from my place and bring him to the parade with her friends. It became their little tradition.

Back to the present. So we went downtown for the parade that starts at 6pm and given that this is Greenville we had pretend winter weather. It hit 65 during the day so it wasn't exactly cold last night. It wasn't warm but it wasn't cold. I would not have said no to a nice warm cup of coffee to hold onto. It did get down to 45-50 degrees I would think. J had a scarf, hat, gloves and jacket on being the weather wuss that she is and I was wearing a henley jersey and that's it. Okay I was wearing levis also as only wearing a henley jersey would have been inappropriate attire for attending a parada. LOL.

The parade was fun. It isn't really supported by the business community as such from my viewpoint. There was one float from Target and one from the discount pharmacy Rite-Aid. There were lots of marching bands from the local universities and high schools and those are always fun to hear. I love the sound of drums. It's a primal thing I think. There were several church floats and this being the Bible Belt it makes sense. They're wholesome and they have nice choral singers and they aren't preachy then at least. There was a group of people that decided to walk the parade as a group representing one of the local female roller derby teams. That was interesting. Some of the ladies had KISS makeup on. LOL. Their group was walking right in from of Shriners' guys. Boy oh boy they had sourpusses on. Not a smile to be seen from those guys. Live and let live is a good motto to follow Shriner guys. The coolest float had a Star Wars theme. That was really cool. They had lots of characters from the movies like the random soldier guys, Ewoks and Darth Vader. No R2D2 though. Unless I missed him. Chewbacca wasn't there I don't think either. It was a cool float though.

This parade is a really a community thing rather than a commercial thing. Pretty much anybody can register to walk as a group or enter with a float. There were groups asking us to stop handgun violence and another one to stop family abuse. Weird to see that at a parade but it does open our eyes and remind us that in this time of joy and happiness there is a lot of crappy stuff that still goes on. J and I were talking afterward and thought that maybe next year we will partake as participants in the parade with a float and all. My only condition is that we have a bunch of people walking with us and our theme be a happy one tailored to the thousands of kids that were on the parade route. It is something to see the joy, the happiness, the curiosity and the glimmer in a young person's eyes when they see something they like passing by in the parade.

We need more of that in life!