Merry Thanksgiving

The week of Thanksgiving is one of my favorite weeks of the year. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and I'm sad it's over. At least we have the Christmas season to cushion the blow.

Only one of my classes was scheduled on Tuesday, and that just consisted of group work--the professor wasn't even there. After work, I got prepared to leave. I had offered to take a girl in my ward, Larissa, up to Salt Lake to meet her aunt for Thanksgiving. Even with my GPS, I managed to get lost a few times. But then I went home. And it was great to be home--I did no homework whatsoever during my time at home! I'm excited that in two and a half weeks I will be home again for longer, and I won't even need to feel guilty about not doing homework! I'm just worried about all the muddy homework projects I have to wade through before that time.

Wednesday consisted of getting ready for Thanksgiving. I went running in Bountiful. It was great to run on Bountiful Boulevard again; on that day and on Saturday I ran the furthest I've ever run in Bountiful. I discovered a cord I could use to hook up my laptop to the stereo, which meant that I could play my Thanksgiving music on good, loud speakers. (If only I had more good, loud Thanksgiving music!)

We had a bunch of family over to our house for Thanksgiving. We brought up a folding table and a former eating table (it got replaced by a smaller table and was banished downstairs) in order to fit everyone. We had all sorts of Thanksgiving foods; it was great to wake up to the smell of turkey cooking. After dinner and after some people had left, I introduced my family to Loaded Questions, a game that some equine acquaintances introduced me to this summer. It's like a combination of Apples to Apples and the Ungame, which makes it ideal for my family. That evening we watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and an episode of The Munsters, "Low Cal Munster," which I have had for eight years but haven't yet counted as a Thanksgiving show (because it originally aired in October).

Then Friday started the Christmas season! We didn't do a whole lot of decorating, in part because we are planning to be out of town for Christmas Day. But we did some. I have been glad to start listening to Christmas music. I have four Christmas albums this year that I didn't have last year. One is the Lower Lights' Christmas album, which I bought at their concert in October. I also listened to the MoTab's latest Christmas concert album, Once upon a Christmas with Nathan Gunn. I'm kind of disappointed. A long time ago, they mostly had operatic guests for their Christmas concerts. The only one of their concerts I've seen was in 2005, when they had Renee Fleming. I didn't care much for her because she was so operatic. I think the only people who like that kind of singing are those who have been educated to like it, and what's the point of that? This was back in the day before they started releasing entire concerts as albums. Then something changed, and for five years in a row they had non-operatic guests: Sissel, the King's Singers, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Natalie Cole, and David Archuleta. I've collected all of their Christmas concert albums, and some of them are great. But Nathan Gunn is operatic, and I think their guest for this year is also operatic. I hope they return to non-opera singers next year. The new president of the MoTab has said he wants to be on  "young people's playlists," but picking opera singers is not the way to do that.

But I don't just listen to religious Christmas music. Amazon gave me $2 of MP3 credit, and I had $2 on the Amazon gift card my sister got me, and they had Colbie Caillat's new album Christmas in the Sand for download for just $4. I usually like to get physical CDs, but since I could get an entire Christmas album without paying anything, I just decided to go ahead and download it. It's good, although I'd say I'm neither impressed nor unimpressed. By far my favorite new collection this year is Christina Perri's EP A Very Merry Perri Christmas.
 

I also made a discovery. Last week I ranted about how terrible Christmas radio stations are. Well, I discovered that 98.7 is now an all-Christmas station, and it is much better than FM 100 and 106.5. In all my time listening to it the last few days (which admittedly isn't a whole lot), including my hour drive to Provo, there have only been five songs I've heard before, and one of those is Cherie Call's song "Gifts." I've only heard it because I own it; I've never heard it on the radio before. The other four were fairly typical (Beach Boys, Mannheim Steamroller, Carpenters, and "Feliz Navidad"), but at least they weren't "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," "Jingle Bell Rock," or "Christmas Canon." So if you are a Wasatch Front person who likes all-Christmas stations, I recommend 98.7 instead of the old standbys. I think they are more likely to play local artists than FM 100, which is ironic because FM 100 is owned by Deseret Media Companies, which also owns Deseret Book and some of those Mormon recording labels. I don't usually like all-Christmas stations, but I might convert to this one. (I only discovered it because they are usually a mainstream station and I went to listen to them.)

I'm sorry this post has sounded like an advertisement for Christmas music. I'm sure this week was more interesting than I make it sound.