How Enterprising!

As I was driving home from WalMart after one final run this morning as I neared an intersection there were half a dozen people standing out with signs...

Mistletoe for Sale!

When we were growing up my family would go to Coalgate, OK, for Thanksgiving with family friends. Each family, there were three to four families that would go each year, would bring something and my momma and the other mommas would be in the kitchen cooking up Thanksgiving dinner and us kids were outside playing and the men would be talking and catching up. We'd all get to the table and stuff ourselves and then visit more until bedtime.

On Friday, daddy and Mr. Whitley, the friend who hosted us each year, and myself and any sibs that wanted to go, usually Bennett and me, would get the single shot .22 and Mr. Whitley's coon dogs and head out into the fields to exercise the dogs and go for a walk. It wasn't coon hunting season but the dogs needed to be exercised and if we saw squirrels we could shoot them. We'd take them home with us and Mr. Whitley would skin them and momma and Mrs. Whitley would fry them up. What a wonderful break from turkey and we felt like even though we were little we contributed to a meal for our families.

But I digress... mistletoe. When we would be out on our big game hunt if there were no squirrels about or we'd already gotten three or four we would try to shoot mistletoe out of the trees to take back with us for Christmas. To GIVE to friends and family...

Why didn't I think about selling it? How enterprising that would have been. I guess none of us thought about it because it is the state flower of Oklahoma and there is an abundance of mistletoe all over and even more so back then. Notwithstanding the fact that it was a lot of fun to make up little bundles of the mistletoe and give to folks to get them into the spirit of Christmas.

Well things are building to a fever pitch around here. Carol and our friend Datha have been in the kitchen since 10 or 11 whipping up food for our Christmas Eve. Traditionally we have snack things like Rotel Cheese dip, cheeses and crackers, chips and other dips like Knoors spinach dip and a spanish dip made with black olives, green onions, tomatoes and oil and vinegar, little smokies in bar-b-que sauce and whatever other snacking stuff that Carol has been making all week, Texas trash, oyster crackers with dry ranch dressing mixed cooked in the oven like the Texas trash, fudge with and without pecans, peanut brittle and on and on. About four o'clock we are doing puppy Christmas. Everyone is bringing their dogs over for dog toys and treats then they will go back home while the big folks get back together for our Christmas. This sounds like we need to get a life, doesn't it... Out of our friends that are coming over, Carol is the only one that had a child and he's now 37 and doesn't yet have a wife or a child, so our pupsters are our little ones.

Anyway I have NORAD Santa Tracker on my computer. He's already been through New Zealand
and Australia, is currently in Finland and headed next to Estonia. So I'm heading to the kitchen to get me some snacks and plan to be back with one more post before Santa makes it to Oklahoma.