celebration

What I’m writing elsewhere.

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th-1Consider yourself fortunate if your kids have summer birthdays, because they can have their parties outside.

This means they can rip and roar without doing much damage, vs. those winter parties when Pin the Tail on the Donkey turns into “blindfolded kid runs into table and knocks over vase,” or when sugared-up kids spill juice, smear frosting on the rug and otherwise rip up the joint.

Party supplies are just about to go on sale, which is one of the topics of my current post at RetailMeNot. In addition to birthday parties we’re also looking at graduation parties, the barbecue season and maybe even wedding-rehearsal dinners.

Disposable dishes and cutlery have improved considerably since I was a kid. The paper plates I remember had the feel – and the staying power – of a No. 10 envelope. They folded up in the direction of the heaviest foodstuff, and baked-bean juice always leaked through. The forks were wimpy little things too, tines snapping off when you tried to lift a bite of potato salad.

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Celebrate the Iditarod start: Win a hat!

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thThe Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has its ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage on the first Saturday in March. People line the streets, which have been prepared by having snow put on them and which are aflame with barking, leaping, howling dogs.

If you happen to speak Canine, you’ll be able to hear what they’re saying: Let’s GO! Let’s GO! Let’s GO!

Come to think of it, you don’t need to know what a dog’s saying — just check his body language (See “barking, leaping, howling,” above.)

I hope to be there myself, although it will be a late night on Friday — I’m reviewing the touring company of “The Addams Family” for The Anchorage Daily News (my former long-time employer), and I’m expected to put the review up on the Arts Snob blog that same evening. The show probably won’t let out until about 10:30 p.m., which means I won’t even start to write until 11 p.m. Who knows what time I’ll get to bed?

I’ll be there in spirit if nothing else, having attended Iditarod starts in the past and enjoyed them hugely. I’ll also check out photos on the Daily News website of both the ceremonial start and then the next day’s re-start in Willow, Alaska. You should, too: The ADN shooters are masters of the art.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about a hat.*

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A midwinter’s tale. (Okay, a digest.)

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thThe snow is clean and new, the temperature is 18 degrees, daylight is increasing (we get 9 hours, 43 minutes today) and the annual winter carnival known as “Rondy” (short for the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous) is underway. When I lived here before, February was always the month when winter turned around. Still is, even though it’ll be months before we can garden.

The carnival includes a three-day dogsled race that starts and ends downtown. As I’ve noted before, Anchorage is the only city I know of that puts snow on the streets. And they’ll do it again on March 1, when the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has its ceremonial start downtown.

Yep, it’s a weird place.

I haven’t posted anything particularly deep lately due to having first a virus and then a head cold (still got it, yay), and also having accepted a magazine assignment and been in negotiations with another magazine editor. The latter involved a long phone conversation and then sending a fairly lengthy outline on a very personal subject, only to be told this wasn’t specific enough: What did it feel like?

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This just in: Men prefer sex to a Valentine gift.

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thStop the presses, right? It certainly doesn’t surprise me that 66% of the men polled by Retail Me Not would choose the pleasures of the flesh over, say, a teddy bear holding a red sateen heart embossed with “I Wuv You.”

They’re likely to be disappointed. In the same survey, 70% of the women said they’d much rather have a present than an extremely personal moment.

Selfish? Maybe. But let’s face it: Most women in relationships can get all the sex they want. Gifts, on the other hand, are a surprise.

Well, sort of: Apparently it’s expected that we’ll be getting gifts on Valentine’s Day. Just flip through any store circular, turn on the TV or surf the Internet to be bombarded by ads that shriek some version of, “Feb. 14 is at hand! Buy the right gift or you won’t get laid for the rest of the year!”

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Gift Card Exchange Day: A chance to fix Christmas.

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thShow of hands: How many of you have received an inappropriate gift card at Christmas?

Maybe it’s a steakhouse card from the grandparent who doesn’t understand what “vegan” means, or a gift card to a store where you’d never willingly shop.

Or perhaps a well-meaning pal sent a movie theater gift card, but your new apartment is an hour-long bus ride away from that particular chain.

The easy answer: Sell the gift card on the secondary market.

The best day to do it: Dec. 26, aka Gift Card Exchange Day. 

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Giveaway: Wearable art from Alaska.

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photo 1(1)My friend Linda B. has a sideline making beaded items, mostly jewelry. She doesn’t just string beads in straight rows, however.

Linda has been known to bead-weave around seashells, interesting rocks, copper plumbing parts and  aluminum flashing she picked up for a song at the Habitat ReStore.

She also likes to pound metal. Boy, does she. I was her roommate when I returned to Alaska, and sometimes I’d go to sleep hearing the tink-tink-tink of one of her hammers pressing shapes out of flat metal and then, sometimes, texturizing their surfaces.

It was like “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” if the shoemaker had made boots out of aluminum or copper.

Recently I helped her set up for a crafts show and decided to be the “lucky money,” i.e., the first sale of the day. Rather than get one of the bigger beaded pieces I opted for two lovely pairs of earrings, which I figured would have more mass appeal — and would also make good last-minute holiday gifts.

Thus I’m giving away two prizes this week.

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Interested in a free gift card?

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thLooking to save money during your holiday shopping? Gift Card Granny can help. The aggregator site finds the best deals among the many discounted gift card resellers.

Shopping with a discounted gift card is like having a coupon without an expiration date. You can save anywhere from 2% to 20%, and sometimes more, depending on the retailer.

Gift cards are available for special purchases but also for everyday wants and needs such as groceries, gasoline, toiletries, vitamins, fast food, pet supplies and movie tickets. (My midnight movie jaunts — and their attendant buckets of kettle corn — are a bit more affordable this way.)

I shop with discounted gift cards all year round. Just about any time you check my wallet you’ll find at least one card; right now I have three (Walgreens, McDonald’s and Cinemark). However, these cards are particularly useful during the holidays — and Gift Card Granny is sponsoring a giveaway of a $25 gift card, to help defray your shopping costs.

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Buy yourself a merry little Christmas?

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thFewer of us plan to “self-gift” this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. Of the 6,415 U.S. consumers surveyed by the NRF, only 57% will buy themselves somethin’ pretty, compared to 59% in 2012.

Still, that’s quite a few folks assured of getting at least one gift they really, really like.

Nothing wrong with wanting to treat yourself, especially given some of the prices on Gray Thursday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and every other sale from now until Dec. 24. Not that every “sale” price is a good one; in fact, some aren’t really good deals at all.

But if you’ve been tracking prices, especially for bigger-ticket items like technology and appliances, then I can think of only one reason not to self-gift.

 

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Lighting the tree on Alaska time.

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SnowyChristmas_EN-AU2022031457It was zero degrees when I left the house at 4:30 p.m. yesterday, but I was determined to get my nephews to the city tree-lighting ceremony downtown. Make sure they wear snowpants and wool socks and hats and that they have both mittens in their pockets, I pleaded with their mom.

That’s because at a long-ago tree-lighting I neglected to put on a hat or, apparently, to pull my coat hood up far enough. Or maybe it was just so cold that year (below zero, can’t remember how far) and my coat was so insufficient that my body had to make an executive decision: The torso is essential; the ears we can live without.

The burning throb of frostbitten earlobes kept me tossing and turning all night. Since then I’ve been more careful (usually) about dressing when I know I’ll be standing around in the cold. I also bought a better coat, essentially a small building made of goose down, for really cold trips like the Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition.

I needn’t have worried about the boys, though. The first thing they did at Town Square Park was head straight for a snow pile.

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Coming up: The Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition.

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IMG_3567I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Come up and join us at the Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition and you’ll dine out on those stories for years.

True, it’ll be winter* — Dec. 7, to be exact — and that means it’ll probably be cold. But that’s the whole point! You’ll be in Alaska in the winter.

You’ll survive. I promise. There’s a bonfire at which to warm yourself during the competition, and the auction and after-party are actually pretty warm due to the hootin’, hollerin’ and dancin’.

Besides, Talkeetna has a doctor.

I wanted to link to my first-ever article about Talkeetna, published in 2010, but my site was migrated to a new server and that first piece doesn’t seem to have made the jump from hyperspace. So I’m excerpting from that piece to explain the absolute hilarity of the event:

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