When the Lights Come On

We spent Thanksgiving at Beth's mom's house, although hardly anyone else came over for dinner. I don't love turkey, but I always have some anyway, as it's traditional. There was also ham, which is more suited to my tastes. On the next day, we went to the Creamy Acres Night of Lights, which again this year was a drive-through instead of a hayride. You get a better view and it's easier to take pictures with the latter, but I guess they're still trying to play it safe, and maybe save on some expenses. They have more lights every year, but I mostly noticed the ones they have every time, mostly with Santa doing various things: fishing, driving a train, shooting a pretzel from a cannon, riding a dinosaur, being a lobster man, etc. I've taken better pictures of most of these things on earlier visits, but I might as well share some more anyway.

They didn't have the Snow Miser and Heat Miser displays they did in previous years. There was, however, a creepy singing and dancing tree in the gift shop.

Afterwards, we went to eat at a diner, and I had the pizza steak. There's a place near where we live that makes a good pizza steak, but overall it seems to be more common in the Philadelphia area. I usually get that at a diner if I don't get breakfast. Also, Beth's mom gave me a haircut.


This past Thursday, we saw the only live Kevin Geeks Out show of the year at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg. There was another one planned for earlier, but it fell through.

This was the Christmas special, with several guests. Another Kevin, Kevin Cecil, talked about Ernest Saves Christmas, for which the original plan was for Ernest to become Santa; but Disney, who distributed the film, insisted they change it. As such, he's kind of a supporting character in his own movie. Cecil discussed the history of the character, how advertising executive John Cherry based him on an annoying guy who worked for his father, and how Michael Eisner helped bring Ernest from commercials to film. There was also discussion of how someone being locked out of a house on Christmas was a recurring theme for Cherry and Jim Varney's projects. Dan McCoy and his wife Audrey Lazaro hosted the Kindest Cut, of A Dogwalker's Christmas Tale from MarVista Entertainment, introduced as making stuff similar to Hallmark but with way lower quality. Gena Radcliffe discussed Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa, a weird special from 2002 done partially to promote cheap animation software, and it very much looks cheap. Strangely, it had some famous voice actors, including Nancy Cartwright, Jodi Benson, and Mark Hamill (who's apparently only in it for forty-five seconds). Glen Heroy, who's worked as both a clown and Santa, showed slides of other Santas whose promotional pictures were kind of disturbing. We saw the premieres of two shorts Kevin Maher worked on, one where he played a car dealer who was traumatized by his son's death, and an animated bit about an aging Santa learning it's okay to get help. Glen was the narrator in the latter, and there were references to several other specials where someone had taken Santa's place. And we played the game where we had to guess whether there were easily available pictures of certain celebrities in Santa suits (Photoshop or just the hat didn't count). I've been to three shows where we played this, and both this time and the first I was out on, like, the second one; but I was the last person standing for the second. I guess it's largely luck, unless you have a photographic memory for famous people in Santa suits.

Not too much happened this weekend, although we did go out to New Jersey to shop at Kmart and Shop-Rite, and to eat at the Olive Garden. At Kmart, there was some guy doing a promotion for jewelry with Swarovski crystal, and we ended up buying a ten-dollar necklace with a lobster-claw catch. Beth wasn't able to get it open, but she did have a promising start for a Childlike Empress cosplay.

We walked a little on the Mill Creek Marsh Trail, but they're supposed to close at sundown and we didn't want to be locked in, so we were only there very briefly.

I'll sometimes take pictures of things at the store that I find weird or notable, but I suspect they're very normal to a lot of people who shop more often than I do. This time, it was Mexican (I think?) Cocoa Krispies with an elephant on the box.

Also, these female nutcrackers look kind of cross, but I guess I know better than to tell women to smile. No one ever says that to the male nutcrackers, do they?

But they crack nuts not with their jaws, but with their cleavage? I guess that's the same kind of energy as this.

And on that note, Gruss vom Krampus!