National Lampoon's Christmas Light Contest

My all time favorite Christmas movie is Christmas Vacation. One of the main parts of the movie is the decorating of the house with lights. One of our families favorite activities during the Christmas season is driving around looking at lights. In an ode to these two Christmas traditions, I have decided to enlist my family's help with a Christmas light contest. Here's how its going to work. Each day from tomorrow through the twenty fourth, we will post pictures of random Christmas lights that we see hanging around Southern Utah. These will range from the completely awesome, to the not so awesome, to the down right odd. Anyone will be eligible to be nominated during this time. So if you don't have large amounts of cash handy right now to really spruce up the yard, do not fear, just spread lights out randomly across the yard like an old neighbor of ours used to do and you will find a soft spot in our hearts and a place in the gallery. Now we come to the best part, the actual contest. Your job is to vote, by comment, on your favorite decorations and the day with the most comments will be the winning day. From there, we will take the comments and randomly pick the winner of an extremely sweet Christmas present that will be hand delivered on Christmas. Trust me when I tell you, this will be worth the time you take to enter. So have fun and check back for the best and worst Christmas decorations in Southern Utah. And one more thing, if anyone happens to spot a good or bad set of lights and wants to nominate them, send me a comment and we will have a special prize for you as well.

(If your house happens to appear in our top twenty-four, please don't take offense, we're laughing with you...not at you.)

It Was A Good Day

Today was a good day for our family, particularly for our son Brandon. Today he won first place in the harvest of talents show at school. He played a piano piece and ended up getting to play it in front of the whole school! The very best part......he got a cool trophy.

Then to top off such a wonderful day he won the on time drawing at scouts tonight and won his dream toy, a small toy basketball hoop. I feel like most of the credit for that part lies with me though, and I'll tell you why. I somehow manage to make our family never on time for these things. Just last month, even though my phone said 5 minutes to 7, we were late because the clock at the church was fast. My objection to this, based on hard cell phone time evidence fell on deaf ears and we weren't allowed to enter the drawing. This month thanks to me, we were on time and he was able to secure this awesome prize. You're welcome son. All in all it was one good day!

So Much Different Than I was

I had the opportunity to accompany the deacons on their camp out this last Friday night. I spend most of my time with the older boys and don't associate nearly as much as I should with these four youth.

I have to tell you, I am completely in awe of how much different these boys are compared to how my group of friends were at their age. They are so strong and close with each other, regardless of what anyone of them did or said, they stuck together and acted like the kind of young men we always want them to be. There weren't any favorites or any that received any undue teasing from the others, such a far cry from the way our groups behaved when I was that age.

We were a pretty tight group ourselves but there were times and more specifically, boys, that for some reason seemed to received the brunt of our unprovoked teasing more than they should have. There are those that I helped tease that I no longer know where they are and can probably never apologize to, and for that I will always be sorry.

But this Friday I was pleasantly surprised with the strength of the four youth I got to hang out with. They didn't seem to care that others may be what I consider more challenging to deal with, they didn't seem to care that everyone was different in one way or another, and they didn't seem to care when one made weird comments. They didn't care at all, they accepted and encouraged everyone, something I wish I had been able to do at their age. They are so much different than I was, and I'm grateful for that.