Author: Big Mama

  • A little holiday cheer

    This meme has been all over the place, but most recently I saw it at Barb’s and then over at Bev’s and I decided it was festive. I am also feeling the pressure because what could be better than P and his elk? It’s really more than the mind can comprehend. Well, at least more than my mind can comprehend.

    1. Egg nog or hot chocolate? I can say that I make a fabulous eggnog from a recipe that was given to me by P’s mama (only I add a little more alcohol to keep us all in a festive frame of mind, and really since she only adds a teaspoon of rum per gallon…there’s nowhere to go but up). In fact, P gets completely addicted to the eggnog and has been known to put on 10 pounds in a single Christmas season. That’s the year that he conducted a self intervention and dumped the rest of the eggnog down the drain because while I make a great eggnog, I personally don’t care for it so he ends up drinking it all by himself. Give me hot chocolate any day of the week. And half coffee with half hot chocolate? They’ll be serving that in heaven, I guarantee.

    2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree? Santa just sets the presents under the tree. I can still remember running into the living room on Christmas morning and seeing what looked like a toy store gone wild. I can’t wait to see Caroline’s face when she walks into our living room this year. She is going to lose her mind.

    3. Colored lights or white? White lights for sure. The colored lights are back and a little retro chic, but I think if you’re going to use colored lights they need to be those big old fashioned ones, not just some flashing little red ones that make your house look like a dance club.

    No offense if that’s what some of y’all have on your house…I’m sure they look lovely.

    4. Do you hang mistletoe? There’s enough kissing in this house without mistletoe.

    5. When do you decorate for Christmas? I like to decorate the weekend after Thanksgiving because then the decorations get to stay up long enough to make me feel like it was worth it to get everything down out of the attic. Plus, I think our house never looks prettier than it does at Christmas.

    6. What is your favorite holiday dish, excluding dessert? When I was growing up my favorite dish without a doubt was my Aunt Sandra’s broccoli rice casserole. I have her recipe but no matter what I do, it never tastes as good as hers did. She even started making a whole extra pan for me so that I could eat it leftover for days.

    Now one of my favorites is P’s mama’s cornbread dressing. She makes it in a big dutch oven on the stove so it’s not the kind of dressing that you cut in squares, it’s a moist, delicious slice of heaven. I have the recipe but I’ve never even attempted to make it because first of all, I’d eat the whole pot by myself and secondly, I know it wouldn’t be as good.

    7. Favorite holiday memory as a child? I have so many great holiday memories. I remember the Christmas when I got my blue bike with a banana seat with daisies all over it. That was also the year that I got some stylish gauchos with a shirt that said “Jeans, jeans, jeans”. I also remember getting my Donny and Marie dolls complete with sound stage. Oh I did love me some Donny Osmond.

    But mostly, my best memories are of family and laughter. I loved getting to stay up late, eat candy, and the anticipation of seeing what Santa brought the next morning.

    8. When and how, did you learn the truth about Santa? I was at a Brownie meeting in second grade and Sheila Barker broke the bad news. I was so mad I think I might have kicked her.

    9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? If I can find some cute Christmas pajamas for Caroline, I’ll wrap them and let her open them Christmas eve, but so far my search for cute jammies has been fruitless. Well…unless I want to spend $50.00, which I don’t.

    10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree? Lots of white lights with red ribbon and silver beads for garland. I have lots of different ornaments and try to add a least a few new ones every year. My favorite ornament is a glittery red nest with a little red bird that belonged to my Mema.

    11. Snow. Love it or hate it? Love it because I haven’t seen it since I went to Colorado five years ago. In a cruel twist of fate, it actually snowed in South Texas two Christmases ago and we didn’t get any of it where I live. I keep my fingers crossed every year that maybe this will be the year.

    12. Can you ice skate? Yes, I am ranked in the world in ice skating. My rank would be somewhere in the bottom billion.

    13. Do you remember your favorite gift? I think I already mentioned the Donny and Marie dolls. Does it get any better than that?

    14. What is the most important thing about the holidays to you? Making Christmas a magical time for Caroline. I want her to appreciate why we celebrate Christmas and all the fun things that the holiday season brings.

    15. What is your favorite holiday dessert? Gulley’s homemade iced sugar cookies. In fact, I just asked her yesterday when she was going to start baking them. Last year, you’d have thought I was a crack addict and she was my supplier. I am embarrassed to say that I hounded her daily about my cookie supply.

    I am not kidding when I say that they have some ingredient that is completely addictive and will make you lose any resolve to not consume 26 cookies in one sitting and beg for more.

    16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? I’m still working on establishing some family traditions, but one thing that P and I do every year is walk around our local outdoor shopping center right before Christmas. We wait for a cold night, go out to dinner, get some hot chocolate and walk around and window shop. It’s one of my favorite things we do.

    17. What tops your tree? A silver star.

    18. Which do you prefer, giving or receiving? Giving. It’s a great feeling to pick out something for someone that you know they’ll like. And seeing Caroline’s excitement is the best present I could get.

    Of course, I wouldn’t turn down a diamond ring.

    19. What is your favorite Christmas song? O Holy Night is my favorite religious song, but I do love Jingle Bell Rock for just plain fun. I remember my mama putting our Christmas albums on the console stereo while we decorated the tree and I always loved when Jingle Bell Rock came on.

    Oh, and Blue Christmas because it’s Elvis. What else do you need to know?

    20. Candy canes. Yuck or yum? I’m not a fan.

    Y’all have a nice weekend!

  • Get your elk here…fresh elk

    Last week when I wrote about P’s great new fashion accessory, he told me that I could mock if I wanted, but that hat was going to be the key to him shooting an elk with his bow. We made a deal that if he got an elk with his bow, I would post a picture of him with his trophy. This will now fall into the category of be careful what you promise.

    If any of y’all are a little squeamish or anti-hunting, then at this point you may want to click away or invite your husbands to come take a look if they’re into this sort of thing.

    Now remember, this isn’t EHarmony or Match.com. P, his elk, and that hat are already spoken for.

    The elk weighed 600 pounds. That’s right…the house of Big Mama now has about 200 pounds of elk meat to get us through the long, harsh South Texas winter. Apparently, P wasn’t kidding about the hunt for FOOD!

    All I can think about is the scene from Forrest Gump where Bubba talks about shrimp. We can have elk kabobs, fried elk, elk steaks, elk sausage, elk burgers, elk jerky, elk stew, elk po-boys, elk chili, elk burritos, elk tenders, sloppy elk joes…and I reckon that’s about all we can do with elk.

    It also makes me laugh to think that some poor bow hunter will google “bow hunting elk” and be directed to Big Mama. They’ll never know what hit ’em…much like that elk.

    Congratulations, P.

  • The Gospel according to Caroline

    Just now as I was putting Caroline to bed, I read her a little book about the Christmas story. It’s a toddler friendly version of the story, so I get to the page that says “The angels told the shepherds that they will find the baby Jesus lying in a manger.”

    Caroline grabs my hand to stop me from turning the page and says “Oh Mama, he shouldn’t have been telling lies in that manger.”

  • Not so fresh

    I am currently at a rare loss of words for no reason at all, other than the fact that I’ve had to take 168 tests for work over the last 72 hours. I could write about what I’ve been studying, but honestly, I am trying to entertain, not send y’all into a fetal position while you beg me to make the boring stop.

    So, first let me say that I love the comments y’all leave because where else could I discover that my love of Church’s Fried Chicken and Long John’s Silvers are shared by so many. I didn’t even mention the malt vinegar sauce in my post for fear of being ostracized, but y’all were so open that I can’t help but admit that yes, it is all about the crispies drowned in the malt vinegar sauce.

    And now, I’ll leave you with this.

    The other night, P was scrolling through all of our recorded programs on the DVR when he noticed that there were more than a few episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air recorded.

    He asked me, “Have you been recording the Fresh Prince?”

    I explained that I’ve been recording episodes of Designing Women on Nick at Nite, but because the timer is off, I miss the last few minutes of each episode. So, I have to record Fresh Prince to catch the end of Designing Women.

    P said, “Well thank God, I thought you had undergone a lobotomy and were actually making an effort to watch repeat episodes of Fresh Prince.”

  • C is for Christmas and Capitalism

    Late yesterday afternoon, we decided to go get our Christmas tree. We loaded up in P’s truck and then picked up Mimi and Bops so that they could get their tree at the same time.

    We purchase our tree every year from the same overpriced lot. I’m sure we could get a cheaper tree elsewhere, but there is just something about buying a tree from people who drive down from Michigan in an R.V. every year that seems so authentic and Christmasy to me.

    After careful evaluation I made a selection, and had P come evaluate to make sure that it was the right size and shape. This is a crucial step in our tree picking process due to the fact that the first year we moved in our house, I was giddy at the prospect of having a huge, tall tree since we have 9 foot ceilings. So, we bought a huge, tall tree that was so incredibly gigantic that it didn’t fit through our front door without much sawing of branches and profanity, and once we finally got it inside, we couldn’t close the front door because it took up all the available space in our living room.

    It was a tree better suited for oh, I don’t know…maybe Rockefeller Center.

    We loaded up our trees and headed to Mimi and Bops’ house to drop them and their tree off. Buying the tree had really put Bops in the Christmas spirit, so he tried to get us all in a festive mood by giving us a commentary on how ludicrous it is to spend over $100 on a dead tree.

    It was just like an Ingalls’ family old fashioned Christmas.

    So as Bops is discussing the financial aspects of tree buying, Caroline asks for the 147th time if today is Christmas. I tell her no and then decide to have a little reason for the season moment by asking, “Do you know why we celebrate Christmas?”

    She replied, “Yes, PRESENTS!”

    I’ll be working on that.

  • For lack of a more creative title…this is what I did Saturday

    On Saturday, Caroline and I were slightly bored and desperately needed to get out of the house, so because I am crazy I decided that a trip to Target was a good way to spend the afternoon. I had bought Caroline her own little Christmas tree and had been planning on taking her to pick out ornaments…it seemed like a really good idea at the time.

    I loaded up my little greasy, ranch dressing smelling child and we headed to Target. On the way there, she told me she didn’t like Target because she had to sit in a cart. I told her since this was a very special trip to pick out Christmas ornaments for her tree, she could walk next to me. In theory, it had all the makings of a lovely afternoon…ranch dressing smell aside.

    In yet another sign that she may have inherited her daddy’s taste, she picked out some of the biggest ornaments ever, including a red, feathered bird that is about half the size of her 3 foot tree. But since this was her trip, I only edited a few of her selections because who really needs a glittery ornament that says “Diva”? We headed home with the ornaments and put the tree up in her room.

    Of course, in my Hallmark moment delusions, I had forgotten a couple of key elements. The first being that I was dealing with a napless, opinionated three year old who smelled like a salad, and the second being that the trip to Target and enforcing the walking “beside” the cart and not running off into the throngs of shoppers had already worn me down.

    It basically ended with her telling me to just “leave MY tree alone” and me saying “Fine, but there is NO WAY that huge bird is going to be able to stay on the tree without knocking the whole thing over.”

    If only the video camera had captured this festive mother daughter moment.

    So after she finished hanging all of the ornaments on the same two branches of the tree and tangling the whole thing up in some garland, we headed over to Mimi and Bops’ house because she wanted to spend the night.

    I dropped her off and since P was gone, I found myself at a loss as to what to do with my sudden free time. And because I am a wild and spontaneous kind of girl prone to madcap adventures, I went and got a pedicure. Then, as if the pedicure wasn’t already complete madness, I drove to Church’s Fried Chicken to pick up some spicy chicken tenders for my dinner because I have never been one to shy away for fear of trans fats or chicken restaurants located in a bad part of town.

    I can say in all honesty that for a few minutes as I waited for my spicy tenders, I was more than a little afraid for my life, not because of the partially hydrogenated oil that I was about to consume, but because of the massive amount of seedy clientele that apparently choose to hang out at Church’s Chicken on a Saturday night. I thought how embarrassing it would be when people would say “Yeah, what a shame about Big Mama. If only she would have gone to Burger King like a normal person.”

    I also thought that if something happened, no one would ever think to look for me at Church’s Chicken, except for maybe P because he knows my fondness for greasy, fried meats. He even knows that I like Long John Silvers…and he loves me anyway. (and now that my love of Long John Silvers has been documented on the internet, there is really no end to what other embarrassing information I may divulge)

    Finally, my chicken was ready and I headed home. I propped up my freshly pedicured toes, ate my spicy tenders and caught up on every episode of Brothers and Sisters.

    And I loved every minute of it, but I can assure y’all that I had no desire to dip my chicken in any ranch dressing.