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As every one knows, this is my favorite time of year. I hold onto the idea that there is magic and sacred meanings to the season, regardless of all the hype. After a lovely little Thanksgiving meal with Hubby and Lil’ E, we woke up Friday morning with the intent to go see the downtown Macy’s After-Thanksgiving Parade. Intentions, intentions.

Instead we awoke to Lil’ E standing outside our bedroom door calling out, “Mama. Open the door, please, mama. I went ca-kee in my bed.”

Luckily, it was not the smelly brown mess I envisioned upon hearing the word “ca-kee”, but rather lots and lots of pee-pee. Poor baby had drank way too much sparkling apple cider- I should have seen this coming. So we took the time to strip his bed and get it in the wash, while I cleaned him up in the tub. When we finally made it downtown, we could see Santa’s sleigh from the MAX line window, jumped off at the next stop and ran up to the sidelines just in time to put Lil’ E on Hubby’s shoulders to see Santa. Whew!

From there we headed into the mall, where Santa was arriving to have children up on his lap. Since we didn’t want to wait in line and we don’t have money to pay for the pictures anyway, we just pointed him out to Lil’ E while we strolled around. We did get to see some Victorian Carolers, who upon request from Lil’ E sang “Jingle Bells” to him. They were not so obliging when he called out “ABC’s!” for the start of a subsequent song set.

But we didn’t shop on Black Friday, being that we: A. are doing this Advent thing with our church and B. have very few local folks to purchase for anyway. So we walked around, had lunch at the Greek Cusina, and watched Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium (Lil’ E did great!)

We were really just stalling until 5:30 when the annual Christmas tree lighting would take place just outside at Pioneer Square. But because they started with a local radio DJ thanking all the sponsors of the event in what seemed like several every known languages based on the time it took to do so, we ended up leaving before they even lit the dang tree, much to the gratitude of my absolutely frozen pinky toes, (it was about, oh, 35 degrees or so.) So I don’t have any great shots of that, but another blogger did really well with photos of the tree lighting- so check it out if you want to see a bit about what you (and I!) missed, lol.

Afterwards, I caught up with Misty at Fox Tower and defrosted to a showing of I’m Not There, which was excellent, and probably would’ve been more so if I had known anything more about Bob Dylan than the fact that he wrote/sang, “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “How Does it Feel?”. I’m now asking for some sort of major Bob Dylan greatest hits compilation for Christmas, lol. Misty put some of his quotes on her blog, so I’m guessing she was moved too.

Well, that’s it ladies and gents. And we’ve got a bus to catch to get to church this mornin’ so that will have to be my parting farewell.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Current Events, Family Fun, Holidays, Photos, Portland-centric