Ho! Ho! Ho!-ray for Holiday Parades: the 2013 edition!

Edited to add: Click this link for the 2018 Santa Claus and holiday parade info!

Welcome to one of my favourite holiday traditions, the 8th (!!) annual round-up of Christmas, Holiday and Santa Claus parades for Ottawa and Eastern Ontario! Wheeee!

It’s another busy year for holiday parades – apparently it’s not just on Christmas Eve that Santa needs his magical reindeer power to zip his way around to meet all the excited girls and boys! The parades seem to have inched back a week closer to Christmas, but the only significant jump in date is the Barrhaven parade. Here’s the 2013 Santa Claus parade line-up, in chronological order:

Photo of Santa Claus at the Christmas parade 2013

Continue reading “Ho! Ho! Ho!-ray for Holiday Parades: the 2013 edition!”

The one where Santa rescues her from a ditch in a red tractor on Christmas Day (true story!!)

I swear on everything dear to me that every word in this story is true and absolutely without embellishment. This is exactly and honestly how it happened.

We went to Granny and Papa Lou’s house for a late breakfast visit this morning. My brother and his family were going to stay an extra day, but the pending snow storm spooked them and they left for southern Ontario at noon instead of tomorrow as planned. We were driving back to Manotick shortly after lunch, and chatting about the Christmas Day years ago I drove lazy loops around the Manotick rural roads enjoying my Starbucks coffee while Tristan and Simon snoozed in the back seat. I couldn’t help but laugh when we noticed Lucas fast asleep in his car seat. At four he’s a little old for afternoon naps, but after two days of cousin visits and Christmas, he was pretty wrung out. We stopped by the house long enough to drop off Beloved and the big boys and Lucas and I headed out to drive a few more lazy loops of those rural Manotick roads.

Of course, I had an agenda of my own. We’ve been so busy getting ready for Christmas that I’ve been positively drooling to get out and take some pictures of the thick, pristine snowfall from a few days ago. I was a couple of kilometers from home on Dozois Rd when I noticed how beautifully the sun was hitting the snow in a little forest. I couldn’t resist. I pulled over to the shoulder of the deserted road and reached for my camera — and that’s when I realized it had been in the bag that Beloved brought into the house when I’d dropped him and the boys off.

Mildly disappointed but not completely perturbed, I pulled out my iPhone instead. Lovely, wasn’t it?

Photo 2012-12-25 12 54 46 PM

And then I put down my phone, rolled up the window (I hadn’t even gotten out of the car – call me lazy) and put the car in gear. And my stomach sank as the wheels started to spin. I tried rocking it, twisting the wheel, easing it and flooring it. Nothing came even remotely close to moving the car.

I was completely and righteously stuck in the snow.

All I could hear was Beloved’s voice, see him shaking his head. “Have you learned yet? Picture-taking fool.” We have roadside assistance, but on Christmas Day I feared we’d be at New Year’s Eve before they got around to me. I thought I’d try to get myself out first.

I wasn’t there long when the first Good Samaritan stopped. He and I used our windshield scrapers to try to dig some room behind the (deeply buried) front wheels so we could stick the floor mats under them and get some traction. That plan had just failed utterly and completely when I glanced at in my rearview mirror….

(remember, every single word of this is 100% true)

…. and saw the red sleigh tractor pulling in behind me. I may have giggled a bit in relief as I stepped out of the car, but I swear my jaw dropped open when the tractor driver popped out and I took in the flannel shirt, the long white beard and the (honestly, every word is TRUE!) twinkly blue eyes.

“Having a bad day?” he asked with a smile.

“Not since you showed up!” I grinned back at him. He was already at work attaching a chain to the underside of my rear bumper. I had the presence of mind to grab my iPhone at that point to capture the moment. There is no better blog fodder than an anecdote that makes me look ever so slightly foolish while having a happy ending. With a Christmas twist, I knew it was bloggy gold.

Photo 2012-12-25 1 06 52 PM

He pulled me off the shoulder and back on to the road, and we both got back out of our vehicles. “Can I give you a little something for your troubles?” I asked, thinking of the $20 I have stashed in the dash for Starbucks emergencies.

“‘Course not,” he grinned. “I’d take a hug, though.” Which I gladly gave to him without hesitation.

“You know,” I couldn’t help but add with a shy smile of my own, “you kinda even look like Santa Claus.”

“You think?” he said, with an “aw shucks” sort of tug on his beard. He told me his name is Andrew.

I thanked everybody profusely and climbed back in to my car. Lucas had slept through the entire event, which really only took about 15 minutes from photo to escape. I drove on down the country road smiling to myself and already writing this blog post in my head, but I realized that while it makes a great story, you’d never believe me about the Santa Claus part. So I turned the car around, maybe a kilometer down the road from where I’d been stuck, and headed back the way I’d come, expecting to see him still winding up his rusty chain. I figured I’d impose on his good will one last time and ask if I could take a photo of us together, if he didn’t mind. I crested one hill and then another, and passed the mucked out bit of snow on the shoulder where I’d been stuck and kept on to the intersection with Mitch Owen — but there was absolutely no sign of him or his tractor.

He had disappeared.

Now this makes for an awesome story, but the funny PS is that I am not absolutely convinced that I’ll be able to publish this story on my blog. I tried about 20 times to tweet the photo of the tractor pulling my car out of the ditch in the following tweet: “OMG I just got rescued from a ditch by Santa in a tractor on Christmas day!! #truestory #merrychristmas” and each time, the tweet failed.

Photo 2012-12-25 1 49 19 PM

By the time I was home, I even tried to tweet it from my desktop. I kept getting an error message I’d never seen before, in more than 16,000 tweets.

Screen Shot 2012-12-25 at 1.48.04 PM

Clearly, the big guy wanted to keep his good deed a secret. But I just couldn’t help myself, and so I sat down to tell this story. I was just about to press the ‘publish’ button when it hit me: Photoshop! I could enlarge the section of the original photo with the tractor, and you could see for yourself. I promise you that I did nothing to this photo except boost the resolution to 200%. Check it out!

Santa crop

Not the clearest photo ever, but tell me you can’t clearly see the beard, the grizzled hair, and even the flannel shirt.

Santa rescued me from my photo-taking foibles on Christmas day. Best! Christmas! Story! EVER!!

(and I promise, I swear, I absolutely guarantee — every single word is true!)

Merry Christmas, my bloggy friends! I hope your Christmas is filled with wonder and funny stories. 🙂

Edited to add: how much do I love the Internet? Want a better picture of my hero Santa? Thanks to Laura Jane Photography on Twitter for this much better photo of Santa-Andy. See, he really does look like Santa!! 🙂

Flashback faves: The Reindeer Rant

You can thank CBC Ottawa Morning for reminding me to post the annual reindeer rant today. There’s no way in a year that I’ve started mining my own content for repeats that I would forget to post my favourite seasonal repeat! And props to CBC for getting it right and saying DONDER instead of Donner. : )
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Did you think might get through one Christmas season without the annual Donder reindeer rant? Sorry to disappoint you. As long as I have pixels to purvey my message, the reindeer rant will play out at some time in the month of December.

New around here? Darling, this one is for you!

“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen;
Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…”

As you might know, my last name is Donders. As such, it has been my lifelong quest to set the record straight and right the wrongs entrenched by Johnny Marks and Gene Autry.

Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholas”, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name.
“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!

As explained on the Donder Home Page (no relation):

In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.

In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material. (In past years, I’d been able to link to a Geocities site with the full text, but sadly, Geocities is no more.)

We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.

So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride.

Donder

Okay, time to ‘fess up. Have I convinced you yet? Or do I have to roll this one out again next year too? 🙂

Thoughts on Christmas shopping

So I think I’m finished most of my Christmas shopping. (Although, perhaps unwisely, I will probably continue to buy things for the next week or so at least. Stop me before I shop again!)

1230 pm

What’s interesting to me is not so much that I’m pretty much done two weeks before Christmas (remember, I’m an inveterate procrastinator) but that for the first time this year I think I did more online shopping than bricks-and-mortar store shopping. The only mall I visited was the Rideau Centre, and even that was very task-oriented: I knew what I wanted, I went in to one store, I got it. No endless hours of browsing and agonizing over the choices. I gotta say, I like this much better! And you know what I really love? Watching the parcel tracking online! I swear, shipment tracking is like NORAD’s Santa tracking for grown-ups – I check on all my deliveries at least once a day and love watching them leapfrog across the country to me!

It was only in 2007, the Christmas I was hugely pregnant with Lucas, that I did the first of my Christmas shopping online. Hard to believe it took only five short years for the online shopping to eclipse the mall wandering! With the conveniece of free shipping and an ever-greater selection of stores and merchandise, it just didn’t seem necessary to brave the crowds this year. I did do one particularly big blitz at Indigo kids, but with armed with a 20% off coupon and a store literally across the street from my office, that was none too painful either.

Choosing gifts has always been a meaningful task for me. As in, it’s very important for me to choose just the perfect gift for the people closest to me. I don’t want to steal Santa’s thunder or let the cat out of the Christmas sack, so I can’t tell you exactly what I found online, but let’s just say that 10 minutes on Google is a lot more productive than driving around to half a dozen specialty stores in search of the perfect gift!

Beloved, on the other hand, is not much of an online shopper. Then again, he also doesn’t live with one hand on the keyboard like I seem to do. What about you? Are you an online shopping junkie? Care to share a few tips on snagging a good deal online? Or are you still circling the parking lot, trying to get into the mall before it goes REALLY crazy next week?

Santa? There’s an app for that

(Ha, I started writing this post and then remembered I’d written something similar. I dug around in the archives and found the one I was looking for, from 2009. I’m sure I haven’t looked at it since I published it three years ago, but I had taken exactly the same approach and even used some of the same wording in the original opening paragraph to this post that I used back then. I’m not sure if I’m plagiarizing myself or showing early signs of senility!)

Ahem. So, apparently back in 2009 I wrote this post about five ways to interact with Santa. The five ways were:

– the Portable North Pole
– letters and e-mails to Santa via Canada Post
– NORAD’s Santa Tracker
– follow Santa on Facebook
– follow Santa on Twitter

FWIW, the Portable North Pole is still my favourite, and NORAD’s Santa Tracker a close second. As far as I know, the magic of Christmas is intact in the imaginations of my offspring, and I credit the videos from PNP (and perhaps an unwillingness to jinx the appearance of presents on Christmas morning?) with their utter lack of skepticism.

Because they were so charmed by the PNP (and have even started wondering when their videos will ‘arrive’ this year in Mom’s inbox), I think they’ll be equally delighted with this: you can now make an appointment to Skype with Santa. How cute is that? You can reserve your child’s 10 minute Skype with Santa courtesy of the Toronto Eaton Centre now through December 23.

Although I’ve used Facetime, I am embarrassed to admit that this social media maven has never actually used Skype. Like making a Blurb book, this is another thing I’ve been meaning to conquer but never seemed to get around to, so it will be good practice. Feel free to share Skype tips!

I figure it’s only a matter of time before technology brings us a holographic Santa that pops out of the chimney on Christmas morning…

(Edited to add: and ha, again. Apparently I wrote about Christmas apps in 2010 too. Oy, I really am starting to repeat myself!!)

Christmas Tree Quest, 2012 edition

We are firmly in the ‘cut down yer own’ Christmas tree camp now. I can’t believe we resisted for as long as we did! The problem this year was that December 1 seemed a wee bit early to get one, but December 8 seemed way too late. In the end, we carpe-d the diem and launched the festive season with a vengeance yesterday. First, we went to the Manotick Santa parade, always a favourite. Then, we grabbed our saw and headed out to Thomas Tree farm.

The first year we got a live tree, we went to Ian’s Evergreen Plantation, which is apparently now called “Ian’s Christmas Adventure Park”. It’s a great place! There’s a play structure, a petting zoo, bonfire and wagon rides. We loved the experience. Last year, we went to Hillcrest Tree Farm just south of Manotick. It was a very different and much more low-key experience. If you’re looking to simply get in, get your tree and get out without a lot of walking, I’d highly recommend Hillcrest, and we adored our tree last year.

We debated the ‘experience’ versus ‘convenience’ factor and instead decided to embrace the unknown by trying something new this year, so we headed out to Thomas Tree Farm just a touch south of North Gower. We’ve found a new favourite, and we’ll be heading back there next year!

We bypassed the wagon ride out to the field and decided to walk the path out to get our tree. How lovely is this, they way they line the paths with leaves?

Wintry path (we're hunting Christmas trees!)

We scouted around until we had the perfect tree. I liked this one that Mother Nature had already decorated. (Amy said on Instagram that this one was clearly the lot tramp, prolific little thing. Had I seen that comment earlier, I would have had to take this one home with us. Beloved likes the Charlie Brown Christmas trees, but I’m fond of the trampy ones!)

This one comes with decorations!

Eventually, we found one we could all love. Beloved set to work with the saw while Lucas made sure he was on track.

Christmas tree quest 2012-1

(My children look like they got dressed in the dark, I know. They do have hats and mitts that more or less match their jackets, but they loved the Ottawa 67s logo hats they got from the Riverside South Broadway Restaurant at the Manotick Santa parade. Definitely the funnest parade take-away!)

Christmas tree quest 2012-3

Tristan’s now big enough that he helped carry the tree back! (sob!) But not big enough to actually cut down the tree, despite his insistence otherwise.

Christmas tree quest 2012-3

Christmas tree quest 2012-8

The menfolk enjoyed the hot chocolate and cookies while I took more photos.

Christmas tree quest 2012-11

None shall pass!

Christmas tree quest 2012-10

If you’re hunting and gathering your own Christmas tree this year, I highly recommend both Ian’s Tree Plantation and Thomas Tree Farm. I’d heard the drought this year was particuarly hard on the tree farmers, but all the trees we saw were healthy looking and it was hard to choose among many wonderful choices.

Guess what we’re doing today? I’m willing to bet there will be more photos to come!

Speaking of photos, I lost the thread of my photo-of-the-day project for a while with sporadic posting after we got back from our cruise. I’ve made a fun new project for myself, though: an Instagram-a-day with a Christmas theme every day from now until December 25. Want to play along? I’m Dani_Girl on Instagram, and I’m tagging them with the hashtag #santstagram.

The Huron Carole: raising funds, awareness and hope, one song at a time

Here’s a lovely idea for a night out to kick off the festive season. Next Thursday, November 29 at the Shenkman Art Centre, Tom Jackson’s The Huron Carole returns to raise funds and awareness for Canada’s hungry. Featuring Tom Jackson, Sarah Slean, Susan Aglukark and Del Barber, the concert is filled with Christmas music and stories that embrace messages of peace, harmony and optimism.

From the press release:

Over 20 years ago, Tom began cultivating a network of Canadian artists, who shared a common interest in helping our country’s needy. After many successful years of raising funds through The Huron Carole, Tom put the project to rest in 2004. He spent the next seven years bringing Singing for Supper to smaller communities in more intimate settings. As a result of the increasing need for food banks across the country, Tom is breathing life back into The Huron Carole.

“Today, over 900,000 Canadians visit food banks monthly. Food bank workers, volunteers and supporters – individual and corporate – rely on awareness-building to accomplish their mission of ending hunger,” said Tom. “This year’s Huron Carole will expand our ability to raise funds, awareness and hope, creating change one song at a time.”

The Huron Carole is a project of the Christmas & Winter Relief Association whose mandate is to support organizations doing hands-on work with the homeless and hungry in Canada.

Tickets are on sale now!

A Christmas Story

There I was, minding my own business, playing with the Charlie Brown Christmas tree and taking pictures of the reflections in the shiny red ball …

A Christmas Story (1 of 4)

… when all of a sudden — dun dun DUN — I saw him: the Creeping Mischief Monster!

A Christmas Story (2 of 4)

And even more terrifyingly, at that exact moment, he noticed it. The shiny red ball!!

360:365 A Christmas Story (3 of 4)

After that, you knew this was inevitable.

A Christmas Story (4 of 4)

This is why we can’t have nice things.

😉

The annual reindeer rant – New and Improved! With Visual Aids!

Seriously? You thought you might get through one Christmas season without the annual Donder reindeer rant? Sorry to disappoint you. As long as I have pixels to purvey my message, the reindeer rant will play out at some time in the month of December.

New around here? Darling, this one is for you!

“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen;
Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…”

As you might know, my last name is Donders. As such, it has been my lifelong quest to set the record straight and right the wrongs entrenched by Johnny Marks and Gene Autry.

Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholas”, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas”, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name.
“Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!

As explained on the Donder Home Page (no relation):

In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.

In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material. (In past years, I’d been able to link to a Geocities site with the full text, but sadly, Geocities is no more.)

We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.

So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride.

BUT WAIT! There’s more!! After six years of recycling the same holiday post, I was thinking I needed something a little extra to drive my point home. I’m not sure whether this is a testament to the fact that I’ve been spending WAY too much time on Pinterest lately, or the fact that I need to get the heck out of Photoshop once in a while. I am sure, though, that I am no iminent danger of quitting my day job to become a graphic designer, because designing these damn things is WAY harder than it looks!

Ahem, anyway, for all you pinners out there, do me the favour of pinning this one around? I’m thinking there’s a great untapped medium for my message out there on Pinterest!

Donder

Easy-peasy one-click pinning: Pin It

And to all a good night! 😉