Christmas in August

The tradition every year for Jacob's actual birthday is to see a movie. We always have his party with his friends on a different day but on November 7 every year, we see a movie. It's perfect timing because it's usually the beginning of the holiday movie season. Well, last Christmas season we watched the old Christmas Carol with George C. Scott. I had never seen that version and I figured it would be way too old-timey for the kids to enjoy or understand. Alexa liked it and Jacob LOVED it. We had to pause it several times to explain things and by the end Jacob was talking about how good it was. (He also loves It's A Wonderful Life). So back in the spring, Matt and Jacob were doing their Saturday morning surfing online for movie trailers and found that on November 6 A Christmas Carol (with Jim Carrey) comes out. Right then and there it was settled: that's the movie we will see on Jacob's birthday.

Way back in May, we found out that Disney was going to do A Christmas Carol train tour and they were coming to Houston. Matt and I said we had to take the kids and he planned ahead and took the day off. So one muggy August morning, we got the kids up and dressed and told them we had a surprise for them. They begged to know where we were going and we told them we would give them two clues. The first clue was we had brought a CD of Christmas music to listen to in the car. (For those of you that don't already know this, Matt and I are HUGE Christmas nuts. We usually break out the Christmas music around October. We don't play it every day...just when the weather starts to get cooler and it gets that FEELING in the air.) So anyways (although strange with the August sun beaming down on us) it was fun to sing along in the car with the kids. The other clue was we had stopped at Starbucks and got hot chocolate to drink on the way there. They never ended up guessing the surprise and were very happy to discover the train parked in downtown Houston. Matt was feeling very triumphant at this point...a day off, we had gotten out early, he thought it would be a quick wait...NOT!!!! We waited in line for 3 hours in 100 degree heat. At one point, I took the girls into the Amtrak station to get out of the heat, while Matt and Jacob stayed in line. Natalia's sweet little curls were absolutely drenched. When we finally made it to the train, we got to look at how they made the movie, models of the Dickensian town (which Jacob thought was the coolest), and got to morph each of our faces into the characters using this really cool technology. I'm not sure what we enjoyed more...the train tour or getting out of the heat. All in all, it was a fun day...just HOT, HOT, HOT!!!!