Kickin' It Old-School

The girls are pretty stoked about the holiday season—and really, who could blame them? Is there anything better than Christmas when you are four (or two, for that matter)? Waaaaaay back in October when stores first started putting out their holiday stuff (which always prompted Sadie to exclaim rather loudly upon entering ANY store, "They have their Christmas decorations up ALREADY? It's not Christmas YET!!"), the girls decided that they wanted an outdoor decoration this year—something a little splashier than the simple lights we hung last year. Of course, they are hugely attracted to those monstrous collapsable holiday decorations that almost everyone sports these days. You know, the ones that are nearly always collapsed in a heap on the ground. Sure, those are cute. And inexpensive. But Dean and I (especially Dean) are weird about weird things, and this happens to be one of those things. We both stood firmly against the notion of anything monstrous and inflatable standing guard outside our house.

Enter the Christmas blowmold, the holiday decorations of our long forgotten youth. After some vigorous research (which included learning a new word, "blowmold," that sounds kind of dirty and is apparently not recognized by spell-check but actually refers to plastic molds), I located a Santa on eBay that was local (and also discovered a little-known world of blowmold collectors). No shipping? Sign me up!

Dean picked up Santa on Saturday. Sadie's reaction? "Oh-my-god-a-roo!" (Ella informs me that it's not nice to say "Oh my god!"—something I was actually already aware of from my own days as a Catholic school girl, but I'm not sure where the church stands on "Oh-my-god-a-roo!")

Yep, we're kicking it old-school at the R household. The only problem now is that Santa looks a little lonely. If you're looking for Dean, he's busy searching for a Mrs. Claus to add to our collection.