Happy New Weird

OTIS in 2015 Makes Me Happy Sad like Jeff Buckley’s Dad

Spent the last few days in a house on Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where much of these thoughts coalesced.

December 31, 2015 — It’s that time again where the planet occupies a point in space relative to a giant flaming ball of gas that makes those of its denizens on the Gregorian calendar reminisce en mass. And on OTIS, 2014 was a madcap year. Here are the stats to prove it:

• Number of OTIS articles: 88 
• Number of photos posted: ~700
• Number of words mutilated: ~80,000
• Number of oddity news stories stolen for Facebook likes: ~275
• Number of new states visited: 9 
• Total number of states visited: 30
• Number of new countries visited: 2

Now, in between all that writing and posting and what ended up being the most travel I’ve ever done in a single year (including two road trips, one of 1,621 miles and one of 3,267 miles), I spent the first two and a half months of the year finishing up all the travel, writing, and editing for my book Poe-Land, which debuted in October. Add to that my second daughter, who debuted in March, and I’m pretty sure I must have lived 827 days in the past 365. Oh, and of course all of that was around a full-time work schedule at my day job. I need to remind you of that because I’m a jerk.

That’s a lot of living and a good bit of producing, and it makes me happy. But some of it’s depressing. Let’s start with this stat:

Number of oddities visited in 2014 but not written about yet: ~35

That’s a bummer for me. After all, these aren’t cutting-room-floor oddities. I wasn’t so disappointed by them that I didn’t want to add them to OTIS. It’s just that my time is a piece of wax falling on a termite who’s choking on the splinters. I mean, check this out—I never got around to writing about visiting the birthplace of Kermit the Frog or an abandoned factory in Alabama or the place where Robert Johnson sold his soul or a lake of acid or the St. Louis children’s attraction where I actually felt my life was at stake or the place where they filmed the credits for Northern Exposure. Unforgiveable. And all out of proportion to my level of excitement at experiencing them.

The other part that brings me down is that I’d like the site to be as real-time as possible. Most of my value in this field where travel oddity websites are rampant and steadily making travel oddities common knowledge is that I’ve been to every one of the oddities on OTIS. Personally. And can tell you what it’s like. Today. With, admittedly, a threshold of error that makes the rest of those benefits pretty much moot. I like to call it “charm.”

But it gets worse. Check this stat:

Total number of oddities visited (including previous years) that I’ve yet to add to OTIS: ~100

Yeah, I keep a list. And that’s everything from the Vatican to the General Sherman sequoia to a ring of stones in a Massachusetts park that, well, probably doesn’t deserve to be written about. So a lot of stuff. And a lot of cool stuff. And time, time, time, see what’s become of me.

OTIS has been around 7.5 years. It’s long enough that I regularly wonder how much longer it goes. That doesn’t mean I want to stop searching out oddities. Those experiences add too much to my life to give up unless I’m forced to by circumstances beyond Congress’s control. But the heavy question is whether I invest so much of my spare time blogging about them. Especially when this type of blogging can be somewhat of a hamster wheel: Spend hours researching, writing, and formatting photos. Post. Get a few hits, maybe a couple of likes on Facebook, and then it’s on to the next bout of researching, writing, and, formatting like the other one never happened…and hoping that people are reading.

It gets me down. Mostly because OTIS isn’t really what Alexa would call a “growing site.” As a one-man shop of original content, I can’t keep up with, well, anybody and add that to my style of writing and the topic itself and that all minuses up to making me extremely niche. And while that’s fine, I would love for some stronger growth. After all, a bigger OTIS means better opportunities to visit oddities, more publishing interest in my books, and just keeping the hamster wheel going for another year.

You guys can help. And are, in fact, the only ones who can. Sharing my stuff on the socials helps 20 tons (although not this one...let’s keep this between us). That kind of encouragement is worth its weight in credit cards to me. And for those who already do that, whose avatars regularly appear on the OTIS Facebook page or who RT my tweets like I’m paying you per character or who send me pics of my books that you’ve bought or drop me emails about your own travels, thanks so much. Without you, OTIS would’ve long ago become a diary that I kept hidden under my pillow. It would have a home-made collage of Gilligan’s Island characters on the cover.

So is 2015 going to be the year of the Gilligan’s Island diary on OTIS? I have no idea. I know I’ll be taking some time off from it here and there this winter to work on a novelish-thing that’s been scratching inside my head for a while…just to kind of jar that hamster wheel a bit. We’re doing a long Southwest road trip at the end of January, which is particularly exciting as we’ve never been to that part of the country and particularly depressing as it will put me that much further behind on OTIS posts.

Meanwhile, as the utterly faithful among you know, I’ve tried off and on for some time to get an agent for my completed novel Death and Douglas. It’s about a 12-year-old boy who helps his parents run their New England funeral home and whose morgue is suddenly filling with murder victims. It reads too old for the Middle Grade genre and the main character is too young for Young Adult, so I’m basically the only audience for it. I was told by one agent that it has too much death in it. Starting with the title.

I’ve also recently landed on what I want my next nonfiction/travel book to be about, so I’m busy putting together a pitch for it. I’m way jazzed about the concept (although I’m still trepidatiously researching to make sure it’s not been done yet) and think most of you will really dig it. I am, unfortunately, less sure if it’ll catch my publisher’s interest. It’s a weird one, and the entire publishing staff has changed in the past couple of months, including the people who really supported my books at a place where they didn’t really fit in. And if it doesn’t work out with the new guys, I have no other connections in the publishing industry (see above note about no agent).

So that’s the Happy Sad of OTIS right now.

And, honestly, the downer parts of this post you can probably write off. It could very well be my between-book blues instead of my another-year-of-blogging-with-no-end-game blues. It’s most probably my holiday-weight-gain blues. Truth is, I am absolutely ecstatic that so many of you made OTIS a part of your 2014. And you’re under no obligation to stick around for 2015. But you will miss out on a church dedicated to dogs…that I visited two years ago.

Happy New Year. Try not to laugh at that baby with the big ears.

Foggy, Spooky, Witchy: Ceres Bethel AME Church

December 27, 2014 — “Hey. Fog.” We don’t actually say those words, but any looming thickness outside the window has always been the signal for my wife and I to jump into the car so she can take awesome photos of gray-mantled things. Last week it happened again.

“Do you know where we could get some good shots?” My wife did say those words. At the time of this particular blurring we were staying at my parents’ house in Maryland for some of the holiday. As it was an area I myself had lived in for about five years, both with them and on my own, I had a pretty good idea where we should go.

“Oh yeah. Let’s take the Blair Witch Trail.”

I’ve written before about living near Burkittsville, MD, the fictional home and real-life filming location for the 1999 horror film The Blair Witch Project and about how my first apartment in the adjacent town of Brunswick (home of Beans in the Belfry) overlooked the street where most of the interview footage from the beginning was taken just a few years before I moved in.

So I knew a route that would look good in the fog. I’m calling it the Blair Witch Trail. Nobody else does. We drove through the crumbling town of Knoxville to Brunswick, where we stopped by my old apartment, on the top floor of a building that had seen better days beside a train station and, apparently, above an abandoned Mexican food joint. When I first moved there it had been an abandoned bar. When I left, it was a Chinese restaurant run by a young Asian couple and their six-year-old boy who was always the one to take my orders. I only bring it up because it was in that ramshackle apartment with its cigarette-burnt carpets and rickety balcony that OTIS was first dreamed up (although it didn’t evolve into a website until I moved to Fairfax, Virginia, a year or two later).

Why did I have to break in? I only came here to talk.

From there, we headed past farmland to Burkittsville, down Spook Hill, and on to Gathland State Park, which is a Civil War site, an Appalachian Trail segment, and home to a towering and medieval-looking War Correspondent’s Memorial that dates back to 1896.

The fog stuck with us the entire time. A great fog. A real John Carpenter-worthy fog. We don’t often get those kind of heavy, wet, enveloping fogs where I live in New England, and this one was perfect, looking exactly like the intersection of dimensions that the best fogs do.

Between Burkittsville and Gathland, on the side of the road across from a trio of historical signs explaining the origins of Burkittsville and the historical significance of the area in general, is a small abandoned church and graveyard set just below the plane of the road. I’d passed the church many times when I lived there, but had never stopped to visit. No reason, really. But this time the fog and the memories of horror movies past and the wet forest and curvy roads and all the lessons learned from OTIS since I’d moved away conspired together so that after we visited Gathland, we doubled back to investigate.

In front of the church is a tiny graveyard with just a smattering of stones. It dates back to the construction of the church, around 1870, although I did see one interment that dated to 2010. Still, this was one of the rare occasions where the church was more interesting than its graveyard.

I’d always assumed the place was boarded up, but on closer inspection the large plywood plank that had once shuttered the front door was lying on the concrete-block porch, the entryway gaping and dark. Inside were massive spider webs and pervasive decay and crooked pews all facing an organ that had been picked to pieces like some carcass in the desert. Holes in the floorboards warned us to step lightly, and the inevitable graffiti that adorned the walls was relatively restrained. In one corner, a rent in the roof had allowed the weather to rot the wall clear down to the floor.

In the opposite corner a short stretch of stairs led into the basement, which also had an outside entrance. There we found rows of connected folding seats made of wood and iron decomposing into ambiguous softness. A pentagram painted on the back wall gave the whole scene a nice flourish.

The church was originally an African Methodist Episcopal Church built by freed slaves. I’m not sure when God started hating it. Today, it seems isolated, but is only isolated in the sense that Burkittsville itself is isolated, as I could see houses through the thin belt of bare forest that surrounded it on three sides, as well as across the road from it.

When The Blair Witch Project phenomenon’d, the fans and the bored and the opportunistic descended upon Burkittsville, stealing its welcome signs, filling its cemetery, and discovering to their chagrin that the place was more quaint than scary. Since the nearby abandoned church was the closest thing in town to a horror set, they vandalized it, I guess, hastening its deterioration considerably. Websites often state that the church shows up in the movie, but it doesn’t. Maybe people would’ve had more respect for the place had it, as opposed to it being a mere holy and historic place.

Knowing there was no way we were going to top an abandoned church on a foggy day, we headed back home. The whole trek spanned little more than a lunch break. But sometimes that’s all you need to make a memory...and get some great photos.

All Through the Summer House: The Clement C. Moore House

December 25, 2014 — That’s me in front of a house decorated with Santa’s face. Being that it’s Christmas Day, that’s not much of an oddity. Except that the photo was taken in May…in the mansion-infested city of Newport, Rhode Island.

Wait. It’s Christmas. You’ve got toys to play with. Let me cut to the Chevy Chase. This is the house where the man who wrote ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas died.

Clement C. Moore was born in 1779 in New York City and became a distinguished literature and theology professor there. He was an august man who generally did august things, but became immortal doing a December thing.

On December 23, 1823, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas—or, as it was originally known, A Visit from St. Nicholas—was anonymously published in a Troy, New York, newspaper…and just never stopped being reprinted. By 1837, Moore’s authorship was widely known. He’d written the poem for his children. He hadn’t intended on changing Christmas as we know it.

That’s right. ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas isn’t just the most famous poem in the English language. It’s the text that more or less codified much of the—children, close your eyes—Santa myth as we know it today.

Apparently, before Moore’s poem caught fire the sugar plums dancing in the heads of both children and adults, our secular Christmas mythology was all over the place. Borrowing from sources as far and wide as the story of St. Nicholas to random Dutch nomenclature to Washington Irving (who doesn’t get near enough credit for the creation of the modern Christmas), Moore gave us a chimney-dropping Santa who delivers toys on Christmas Eve while being pulled through the sky by eight reindeer with names that “you know.” He also gave so many elementary school students the chance to say “breast” in school without being reprimanded.

Of course, the oddity of the poem compared to Santa circa 2014 is that Moore made Santa and his reindeer tiny and elfin. See, that’s how he could get down chimneys. But we like our Christmas bigger-than-life, so we added more jolly to our Santa’s holly and made him a big fat man with a presence so palpable it could alter planetary orbits.

Back in Rhode Island, there’s not much of a story to the house or my visit. Moore bought the Newport house as a summer home long after he became famous for the poem—according to the plaque, sometime in the 1850s. However, the place does bear the honor of being his death site, as he was staying in the home when died in 1863. He’s buried in Trinity Cemetery in Manhattan.

I’m just glad the mansion bears a festive plaque on its wall testifying to its Christmas connection. That makes it for me. The house is right downtown at 25 Catherine Street, and is a private home. Actually a few of them, as it looks like it’s been divvied up into apartments. So all you can do is go, yell out “Merry Christmas” regardless of the month, and then move on to the mansion that housed the Dark Shadows clan or the faux-remnants of Viking explorers.

Anyway, that a literary and theology professor created a poem about a deity isn’t surprising. That it changed the most wonderful time of the year, that’s just plain old Christmas magic.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Frosty the Ice Man: Gaylord’s National Harbor ICE!

December 21, 2014 — Under normal circumstances, if you want to play with Frosty the Snowman, you expect a nipped nose. But when he’s made out of two million pounds of colored ice sculpted by Chinese artists in a tent kept at 9 degrees, well, it’s more than just your nose that’s nipped. Also, it’s less nipping than it is gnawing.

I’m talking about Gaylord’s annual ICE! event, where the convention hotel chain hosts a massive series of ice sculptures by those same guys who do the China’s Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, all based on various Christmas stories.

Four years ago, I went to see the Grinch incarnated into colored ice at the National Harbor Gaylord in Maryland and loved every eyeball-freezing second of it. So when my wife’s parents wanted to treat us all to it this year, I was in like Quinn…the Eskimo.

This year, the four Gaylord properties—Tennessee, Florida, Texas, and Maryland—were featuring ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, The Nutcracker, and Frosty the Snowman, respectively, the latter of which was at both the Texas and Maryland Gaylords and was based on the Rankin/Bass special. As we spend much of Christmas in the Mid-Atlantic, that meant we were going to Frosty the Snowman, which, for obvious reasons, is a story particularly suited to that media.

The experience hadn’t changed much since my time at the ICE! Grinch. You don an oversized blue parka, gasp as you enter into a coldness that’s almost surreal, and then try to get through before your core temperature drops to 10 degrees south of cadaver. Basically, you have the opposite problem that Frosty himself had.

As we were heading toward the large white tent that housed the sculptures, we were passed by people exiting the event, all of whom were obviously excited by what they had just experienced, but were also just as obviously wondering what permanent damage they’d wrought to their skin and lungs.

And then we went inside.


Now, it would be easy for me to paint the crowds and the below-freezing temperature and the many white Frosty sculptures that capered maniacally like frost demons into a unique vision of hell…except that everyone was having too good a time.

And good times are enough warm the heart long enough to take in the wonders of ice manipulated and colored into beloved holiday forms. I actually skipped a hat and gloves, and my only regret comfort-wise was not wearing any long johns.

From there, it we went from room to room watching Frosty come to life that day, see how inhospitable life was to him, die, and then get resurrected and exiled. You know, the whole story that inspired/depressed me enough to write Frosty the Woe-Man years ago.

This time, I actually tried the ice slide, using my long blue coat as a toboggan. It wasn’t as fast as you’d think ice would be. I just remember it being hard. And cameoing in all the footage being taken by parents of their kids coming down the slides.

My favorite part, and the one I wondered how they were going to pull off, was Frosty’s puddly death scene. They did it straight. The hat-topped puddle of Frosty water, Karen crying into her mittens, Santa staring aghast. The way the softened it was to sequentially light it with a scene behind it of Karen and Frosty cavorting around. And then, of course, the next scene was the jolly old red Deus ex machina himself taking Frosty to where he’ll never melt and will still be fashionable after Labor Day.

Just like last time I visited, they ended with a large, life-sized nativity scene carved out of clear ice, but they also had a room called the Frostbite Factory where thy explained how the spectacle was created. They even had one of the artists live-carving in the room.

And then we exited out into 30-degree weather that felt almost Caribbean in its warmth.

Without a doubt, we had a [arctic] blast there, but I’ll never watch the scene where Karen freezes in the refrigerated box care the same again.

Five Things Christmas Could Learn from Halloween

December 19, 2014 — I love Christmas. I do. Every tinsel-strewn branch of it. Every overplayed carol of it. Every ho ho ho and fa la la of it. But it has its problems. Problems that my other favorite holiday, Halloween, doesn’t suffer from. I’ve always said that my favorite holiday of the two is whichever one I’m celebrating at the time, but the below five points often tip the scale from peppermint to pumpkin. And while certainly Santa could teach Samhain a thing or two about how to run a holiday, right now tis the season for St. Nick, not Old Nick.

1. Celebration, not Obligation

Christmas often becomes more of a to-do list than a holiday. Figuring out what to get and then buying presents for an evergrowing list to rival Santa’s own takes up an enormous part of the season. Then there are all the family obligations. Heck, even the simple little tradition of Christmas cards can be stressful. Overall, we spend more time running Christmas errands than celebrating Christmas.

Halloween, on the other hand, is filled with haunted houses and corn mazes and pumpkin patches and apple orchards and leaf peeping and graveyard skulking and horror movie watching. Not an obligation in sight. Other than the easily met/skipped ones of costumes and candy.

One way to fix this issue would be to place an age limit on receiving gifts—like the vague age limit we have around trick-or-treating. Once you’re too big to sit on Santa’s lap, you’re too old for shiny boxes. Besides, kids are much easier to buy for than adults, and it’s much more gratifying to watch them open the presents, anyway.

Sure, you've seen the jack-o-lantern in this scene, but what about the Munsters lunchbox below it?

2. Sentiment for Sale

I hate that our culture is surrounded by an eye-aching wall of ads and commercials and logos, but if it’s gotta be there, I want it participating in the holiday. In other words, if it’s going to be my backdrop, I want it decorated. However, Christmas commercials are invariably sappy and, worse, disingenuous as they try to present heartwarming Christmas moments that are nothing more than salesmen shoved in Santa costumes. Even the best commercial this year, the Strange Magic reindeer farm one, has the unavoidable lead lining that its entire reason for existence is to get you to shop at Kohls. Halloween commercials don’t have to pretend to be anything that they’re not: Product pitches with spooky ambiance.

3. Calendar Space

There’s not much Christmas can do about this one. I mean, its end-of-year placement is ideal for nostalgia and would be perfect…if it weren’t squeezed between two other major holidays. On the other hand, the Halloween Season signals the end of a terrible, terrible holiday drought. We're so ready for it when the season rolls around. But Christmas just becomes the next holiday on the list.

Of the two holidays that bracket Christmas, the worse offender is Thanksgiving. That Grinch of a holiday steals Christmas’s thunder of family get-togethers and scrumptious eats and first snows. And, between you and me, I want to celebrate Christmas for two months (like I celebrate Halloween for two months), but the buckled-shoe speed bump of Thanksgiving trips me up every year.

4. Let’s All Party

Christmas is getting better at this one, but the holiday is still a hugely religious one. That alienates some serious potential mistletoe moments. If you don’t believe that 2,000 years ago, a skin-covered universe-maker was tortured and killed because sometimes you imagine Hollywood actors naked, then you might feel uncomfortable rooting for Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye to dance snow down in Vermont or erecting a dying tree in your living room. And that’s too bad, because it’s a good time.

I mean, if you’re looking for even more Christmas obligations (see Point #1), then religious ones are the way to go. But Halloween is for everybody. It’s a death celebration, so if you have death somewhere in your future, you’re in. Do you have a skeleton? Great, here’s a skeleton costume. Do you bleed? Good, here’s a vial of fake blood to dribble down your chin. Sure, if you’re Duncan Macleod of the Clan Macleod, you can F off. But the rest of us can feel free to partake of the candy bowl.

5. More Christmas Character

Christmas needs desperately to widen its palette of characters. It’s got elves, reindeer, snowmen, angels, and Big Red himself. That’s basically it. Halloween has an extremely diverse and growing assortment of monsters and ghosts and fiends to pull from. This means Halloween stories have more variety, while Christmas has to recombine those same characters over and over, which is why 50% of Christmas movies are about saving Christmas and the other 50% are about learning its "true meaning." Certainly, some storytellers over the years have valiantly tried to fix this problem. Rankin/Bass gave us the Bumble and the Miser Brothers. Dr. Seuss gave us the Grinch. Dickens gave us Scrooge and his ghosts. And Krampus seems to be making a run to the front of Santa’s sleigh these days.

That’s a lot of monsters. Maybe Christmas is already learning from Halloween.

Your Ceiling’s Haunted: The Ghosts of Jordan’s Furniture Store

December 14, 2014 — While I was visiting Jordan’s Furniture in Avon, Massachusetts, yesterday for their Enchanted Village Christmas display, I wandered through the foyer of the store’s Motion Odyssey Movie theater (actually, I hope you’re coming to this post from this article, otherwise, all that background will make no sense). I want to write this next line as “I glanced at the ceiling,” but I’m pretty sure my eyeballs were pulled directly out of my skull toward it. Because there, standing upside-down all over the ceiling like they were mirror images of the crowd around me…were ghosts.

At least, they looked ghosts. They were pale, life-sized, and headless. Like bad guys from a Scooby Doo episode with costumes that are one part flour and two parts mirrors.

They seem kind of art installation-y, but I can’t find anything about them online. And I did like a good five minutes of searching. I’m guessing that since they’re in the foyer of a theater, that they represent generic movie costumes and characters. But even if the idea was, “Let’s put weird-o ghosts all over the ceiling,” that’s just as valid.

So headless ghosts…at a 4D theater…in a furniture store…renowned for its Christmas village.

Excuse me while I go update the OTIS Map of New England Oddities.

Merry Couchmas: Jordan’s Furniture Enchanted Village

December 14, 2014 — Christmas villages are the haunted attractions of Christmas, a way for adults to interact with a holiday throughout the month and outside its signature child-centered event (trick-or-treating and Christmas morning, respectively). When done right, these holiday displays transport you deep into a Christmas world full of snow and lights and carolers and gas-lamps. You wander around Christmas-the-Way-You-Want-It-To-Be for a bit and then you exit back into the terrible light of reality and your half-finished gift shopping list and drab weather and complicated family plans.

I like ’em.

Heck, yesterday I went to a furniture store to see one.

But now just any furniture store. A Jordan’s Furniture store. I’ve already regaled you with the wonders of this bigger-than-living-room chain of New England shops. How they want to sell you spectacle with their settees, fireworks with their futons, marvel with their mattresses. And not in a cheesy, salesy way. These cats go all out. I’ll paraphrase the same thing I said in the Natick Jordan’s article: I’ve never bought a stick of furniture from them, but I’ve given them a lot of money.

Jordan’s Avon location, just south of Boston, is known for throwing a killer Christmas party.

We arrived about ten minutes after opening time, racing against strollers and people in their red and green Christmas best toward the back warehouse where they keep their clearance furniture. There we found an extremely long line wrapping around itself like a string of Christmas lights about to get all tangly. So crowds are an issue. Especially on weekends. There’s no way around that, so if you’re the type to Scroogify over mass-merriment, prepare to be haunted when you go to bed. While in line, we were entertained by TVs playing Frozen while an employee in an inflatable snowman costume gave awkward high-fives to passersby.

And, then, about 30 minutes later, we were in Jordan’s Enchanted Village.

All the elements of perfect Christmas ambience were there: the lights, the garland, the cottony snow, the scarfs and mittens, the plates of cookies, the shimmering trees, and the shiny presents. Every once in a while snow machines would start up and blow soft, sudsy flakes down on us, reminding us that they’re the greatest Christmas inventions since blow molds.

Interestingly, the scenes in this village were all populated almost solely by children, animatronic, life-sized children, running shops and trimming trees and delivering Christmas parcels with the slow repetitiveness of their internal servos. But what was immediately apparent was that there was no pandering to modern sensibility in this village. No Rankin/Bass characters, no Santas with Coca-Colas. Not a registered trademark as far as the eye could see. As much as I love that stuff, it was kind of a relief, honestly.

And that’s because this Enchanted Village has a pedigree.

It was created in the 1960s for the holiday trimming of a now-defunct Boston department store called Jordan Marsh (no relation). After about a decade of trying to out-Macy Macy’s, they shuttered the village in 1972, keeping it closed until 1990, when they started up the tradition again. Another decade later, and the chain was bought and dissolved by Macy’s itself. Since Macy’s had enough Christmas PR, the Enchanted Village was sold to the city of Boston for civic displays in 1998. By 2003, Boston had to cut back on the holiday budget, and stopped using the display. It was eventually put up for auction, where it was bought by Jordan’s Furniture. Since 2009, it’s been an Avon Christmas tradition, making Santa cheerfully circle the name of that town on that list he checks twice.

Speaking of Santa, he was next on our itinerary, the time-tested tradition of letting our kids sit on a stranger’s lap and then afterwards being forced into the discussion about whether he was the real Santa or not. This time, we didn’t even need to have that discussion. He was great. Great costume, great attitude, real beard, and great children’s skills. I mean, look at this photo he pulled off. Keep in mind, my infant had been fussing in line for the past ten minutes and my older had been using that time to plot all manner of ways of embarrassing us. But that dude’s lap was magic. Don’t quote me on that.

Other activities included a 4D showing of The Polar Express in their Motion Odyssey Movie (MOM) theater, a holiday light show, and a small ice skating rink with artificial ice. My ankles still ache.

Oh, and the ceiling of the theater foyer was covered with ghosts. And while Christmas and ghosts go together like moose mugs and egg nog, these guys looked permanent and not at all part of the holiday decor. I posted more photos of them here because otherwise they’ll derail this Christmas post.

Getting back to that, what should be a bland furniture store is transformed by magic into a reason to do something with your Saturday. I mean, that’s what the season’s all about right? Transforming boring stuff with magic.

Yeah. That’s Christmas.