One of the biggest holiday traditions in my family, outside the usual overindulgence of greasy food and gifts nobody really needs:  Board games.  Every Christmas Eve for as long as I can remember, my family would gather around the table for their post-dinner black coffee, grab some wooden letters out of a sack and spend an hour or two trying to become the Scrabble Christmas Champion.  Other times, Monopoly got the nod.  Fact was, we were all growing older, and save for our family ties, maybe we were growing apart.  With less and less common conversational ground between relatives, there’s nothing better than a board game to get everyone mingling.

Course, there’s one small problem with this ideal if you come from a family as large as mine – and certainly, many of you come from large families.  Board games take up a lot of room, and not everyone at the table can actually play them.  You’re faced with a situation where the players eat away at 50% of the holiday table’s real estate, knocking over all the wine decanters and coffee cups, completely oblivious to the fact that the non-playing folks were openly mapping their demise at the very same table, annoyed with having to use the Vermont Avenue deed card as a coaster.

Don’t fret – there’s a perfect solution.  If you haven’t been to a toy store in ages, you’ve probably forgotten that Milton Bradley (the company that makes pretty much every board game worth devoting three hours of our lives to) produces travel sized versions of all their biggest hits.  Now you can play Connect Four at the dinner table without invading Uncle George’s personal space!

Obviously, games like Monopoly aren’t too conducive to being shrunk down, but virtually every other game Milton Bradley relies on for their annual net revenue has been given the mini treatment.  Even childlike wonders like Hungry Hungry Hippos have been shrunk down to a more negotiable size, and before you run to the toy store with your fingers crossed, yes, they actually make travel-sized Battleship, too.

The travel games generally follow the same rules and schematics as their larger counterparts, save for a few changes that make playing in such a small area easier.  (Hungry Hungry Hippos, for instance, eliminates two of the original four pastel colored hippos in favor of a strictly two-player game)  The Milton Bradley Travel Games are incredibly affordable (most of them retail for just five bucks), and they continue to be a great way to make an already special holiday celebration all the more…well, competitive.

PS: I love you dream woman.

PPS: Milton Bradley Travel Games make exxxcellent stocking stuffers.  Even Milton Bradley says so — check out this entry from last year's Advent Calendar, including a short review and download of a Milton Bradley T.G. commercial featuring Santa rolling the dice.

The gods must like me this week — I found genuine lymon sitting in the back of the fridge.  Bleu cheese isn't the only good rot.  No, I didn't intend for things to turn out this way.  Sometimes, the gods just like you.

Somehow, the babbling you’re about to read through pertains to the dragon robot dude shown above.

We hit the department stores this past weekend, ostensibly to shop for gifts but really because I try to clock as much time as possible in the retail world during the holiday season.  I love it.  I love the holly trim all over the stores, the lights, the endless stream of Christmas music playing softly over the speaker system.  I love all of it.  My love for it is so intense that I’m already getting depressed thinking about how it’ll all be gone in a month.

Sigh.

Anyway, we ended up at K-Mart, which normally isn’t something I’d confess to the web crowd because it just ain’t hip, but go frig yourself – the 7-11 Slurpee hasn’t got shit on K’s Icee.  I live in a veritable sea of department stores,  from the chic, to the affordable, to the upscale, to K-Mart.  I have no clue if this is a running trait amongst all K-Mart stores, but the two within driving distance of our apartment (also the two I grew up knowing) are just…I dunno…sad.  I’m not talking about the cleanliness or staff courtesy, though we could speak on either topic at length and have oodles of fun using descriptive adjectives.  I’m talking more about the people who shop there, and how without fail, I always leave the store swearing up and down that I’m going to give up my playboy lifestyle to work with old/poor/sick people.  I wouldn’t consider myself the type under normal circumstances, but K-Mart really brings it out in you.  Let me explain.  Please?
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I didn't grow up in a Christmas stocking kind of household.  At least, not at first.  I was a spoiled brat, but my parents never got into stuffing stockings.  We had them only for decorative purposes, and it drove me fucking crazy.  Since my family opens gifts at midnight after an eighty course meal on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day itself was never too important to me.  In some ways, it was actually quite depressing — we had nothing to do and more or less atrophied until New Year's Eve.  I'd usually spend Christmas morning at my best friend's house across the street — his family opened their shit in the morning, and every year, I'd watch my buddy and his two brothers have multiple orgasms while sorting through their stocking loot.  Stocking loot?!  What was this?!  Where was mine?!I hated having a reason to cry on Christmas morning.

Eventually, I persuaded my parents to make use of our red socks.  Never really wanted anything big outta the arrangement — just some Crayola crayons, miniature Milton Bradley games, stickers, yadda yadda.  There's just something inherently cool about plucking mystery gifts out of a big furry sock.  If Christmas is Christ's big birthday bash, the stocking is the loot bag you get before the drive home.  Sometimes, there's Chapstick inside.

One of the more notable stuffers?  Silly Putty, man.  Now out in a holiday two-pack, containing putties of both the red and green varieties.  Neat, but nothing beats the original flesh color, capable of lifting Jeffy right outta The Family Circus.  Oh well — they're still bouncy, with the same weird odor that makes Silly Putty in all of its many incarnations impossible to put down.  Nobody thinks to ask for two Silly Putty eggs for one occasion, but lemma tell ya, it's terrific.  No matter how much you screw up one of the mounds — no matter how much carpet hair, Windex, spit or sand you manage to get on it, there's still another waiting to be dismantled.  This is what Christmas is all about.

Random Putty Facts: Silly Putty been around since the 50s, and its original retail price of a buck hasn't appreciated much in over half of a century — most stores sell Silly Putty for less than two dollars "an egg" these days.  It's been available with glitter enhancements, in fluorescent shades and with metallic hues.  The bouncy wonderful gunk existed without a purpose for quite some time before becoming a toy.  Initially, researchers tried to develop a scientific use for it.  Never happened, but many years after its debut as a plaything, astronauts found a new use for Silly Putty: as an adhesive to hold down their doodads in zero gravity environments.  Perhaps I should've done this in bullet point form.

PS: No, I couldn't resist mashing 'em together to see what new mutant color would surface.  I'm just like you.

Just in the nick of time, here's a look back at the 1987 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.  I was actually at this one live, but my best memories of it are being painfully cold and poorly dressed.  Though not as jam-packed with strange cool shit as some of the previous parades I've reviewed, this one isn't without its charms: California Raisins, Marvel Comics, Clifton Davis, need I, say more?  Two page review with an additional two page look at many of the commercials that aired during the parade, along with dozens of video clips.  Enjoy!  Happy Thanksgiving, all!  I'm off to stuff mushroom and sleep.

So I checked out Seed of Chucky on behalf of Box Office Magazine (and because I really, really wanted to), and while I had several typical complaints and couldn't possibly recommend the movie to a broad audience, I worry that I may have been too hard on it.  It wasn't boring, it wasn't a retread — I guess it just didn't click together into something that could keep my attention diverted from the asshole chair-kicking kids who were somehow stationed directly behind us in an otherwise empty theater.  Definitely loving the Tilly, though.  Certain moments of dopey dialogue aside, Chucky's clearly the coolest of the slashers these days.  Not necessarily my favorite, but hey, Freddy, Jason and friends haven't earned enough stripes to make Britney Spears jokes yet, and apparently, Chucky has.  We must also concede that the final two installments of the Child's Play series revamped the original idea using one of the better methods in horror history.  When you've got Jennifer Tilly voicing a killer doll who's trying to impregnate Jennifer Tilly with a dripping turkey baster full of Chucky's sperm, there's at least some small thing here to make you stand up, raise a glass and shout: "Okay, I didn't see that coming."  For audiences who aren't going to be in love with this type of movie no matter how bad it is, no way, can't tell ya to see it.  You'll want outta there after fifteen minutes.  Likely better on DVD with a bong nearby.

To celebrate a movie I'm just not sure about, here's a saucy gallery featuring Jennifer Tilly's best…heh…"assets."  _1_ _2_ _3_ _4_ _5_

I'm still working on the parade review, trying to get some bits and pieces done after work for a night-before-Thanksgiving launch.  Not as early as I would've liked, but not late.  Meanwhile, survey: what are you doing for Thanksgiving this year?

Yeah, yeah, I'm alive, and working on that Macy's Review.  It's long, it'll take a while.  Meantime, get a load of this here that.  Last night, as has been tradition since I was a child, we hit this Christmas fair at a local church.  There's never anything good there, but I have to go.  Tradition, see.  They've been hocking the same gross cupcakes since before I was confirmed, and their white elephant table (like a yard sale of donated crap) is always out of the good stuff by the time I get there, but whatever, if I can kill an hour in God's house watching all the kids beg their parents to buy them that one bunny from the pet table that's always present for no apparent reason, that's good enough for me.

The biggest aspect of the fair? Raffles.  They get all of the neighborhood folk and schools to donate various baskets full of gifts, toys, doodads and whatnot, and all visitors find themselves sucked into buying multiple tickets for them.  The larger raffles were for 400 dollar TRU gift certificates, a six foot stocking packed with toys and games, DVD/VCR/TV combos, game systems and so on.  The rest of the raffles weren't crappy, either — I had my eye on a wicker basket full of really strange DVDs that I couldn't believe made their way into the place I usually see babies baptized at, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I wanted a whole lot of stuff, and I bought a whole lot of tickets.

No, I mean, A LOT of tickets.  To put things into perspective, I found myself to be such a compulsive gambler that, even after casinos in Atlantic City were throwing hundreds of comp dollars, free rooms and meals and all that other shit my way, I couldn't bring myself to go back in fear of what I'd do to my bank account.  I'm really, really bad with this kind of stuff, and the amount of raffle tickets I bought last night is too embarrassingly high to admit.  Point is, I totally should've won everything I went in on.  But there was one little catch…

The especially large prizes were raffled off singularly, and no, I didn't win any of those despite having more tickets in those jars with my name on them that the total sum of tickets without my name on them.  The smaller baskets, which were still generally filled with awesome stuff and very, very numerous, were raffled off in groups.  So, like that basket full of DVDs I wanted?  That was one of five baskets in "Group U."  At the end of the night, they pull five names out of the "Group U" coffee can, and the prizes are assigned in accordance with whomever they pick first.  It's kind of a crapshoot — your chances of winning something are in theory increased, but your chances of winning what you're actually trying for are criminally decreased.  Still, with the amount I spent, I just wanted to win something, anything.

And, I did.  Since you write your name on phone number on each ticket you enter, there's no reason to stick around for the five-hour drawing ceremony at night.  We headed home, and sure enough, I get a call an hour or so later.  "Hello, is this Matt?  Your name was drawn for basket 'U2.'  Please pick it up tonight if possible."  Obviously, we zoomed back over there salivating at the opportunity to fetch this esteemed major award.  I couldn't remember the basket titles, of course, and had no idea what wonderful gifts "U2" would bring.  But it was a prize.  My prize.

Click "more" to see the contents of Church Christmas Fair Raffle Prize Basket #U2.
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