Christmas Eve Advice

Dear Flip - I haven't started my shopping yet and it's Christmas Eve. You seem to have experience in last-minute shopping. What would you suggest I buy for my family?

Since time is short, I suggest you head to a large department store and only buy items that come pre-wrapped in a holiday box. For Dad, try the 18-hole desktop executive golf course. Consider the perfume dispenser for Mom and the Mp3 slippers for your sister. Good luck.


Dear Flip - We want to bring a gift for our friends tonight but hesitate because we don't want to embarrass them if they didn't get a gift for us. What should we do?

Make the first move. Present the gifts to them at the door. This courteously gives the host time to wrap someone else's gift or drive to CVS before they close.


Dear Flip - We have a tradition of opening one gift on Christmas Eve after church. Last year my little brother got to open a cool gift while I opened a sweater.

Try this. Each family member can open one package or "steal" one that's already been opened. This should lead to some quality family time.


Dear Mr. Side - I will get home from college at about 7 p.m. tonight. My old high school friends are having a really cool party tonight as well. How long do I need to stay at my parent's house before I can leave for the party?

There is a formula for calculating PQT (parent quality time). Take the number of weeks it has been since you were last home and multiply times five to get the proper number of minutes. For example, if you saw them at Thanksgiving, you need to make small talk for at least 20 minutes. Showers don't qualify as parent quality time.


Dear Flip - My kids want Santa to bring them a laptop and a Wii and a bike. Santa is magical, they say, so he should be able to bring anything they ask for. Unfortunately, my bank account is not magical. Any advice would be helpful.

It's about time you got some credit here. Tell them that Mommy and Daddy send money to Santa on April 15 every year. Based on how big that check is, Santa decides what he can bring. Show them the cancelled check from last year and explain that IRS stands for I (love) Rudolph & Santa.


Dear Flip - My brother and his wife are great people but they are lousy cooks. It's our turn to go to their home for Christmas and we dread it. What would you do?

Instead of the traditional hostess gift, bring a round roast with mashed potatoes and some mixed vegetables. Explain that you are both are on a strict diet.


Dr. Tim - I will cook for hours tomorrow while my family watches football all day. They will then devour the meal in 15 minutes and return to the TV room. Is there anything I can do?

I would start with a seven-course meal that takes an hour to serve. Then I would set all of the DVRs in the house to record the Little House On The Prairie holiday marathon.

Dear Flip - My sister is still angry that I melted her David Cassidy 45 rpm record in my EZ Bake Oven on Christmas almost 40 years ago. Isn't it time she let it go?

You have one chance to put this conflict to rest. David Cassidy is appearing at the Nokia Theater on Feb. 6 with Davey Jones of the Monkees. Go to the concert and buy a new 45 record for her at the souvenir stand.


Merry Christmas to our readers!

You can find old Flipside columns at http://flipsidecolumn.blogspot.com. Send column suggestions and comments to flipside@tx.rr.com.

I Know Who Let The Dogs Out

If dogs could speak, the discussion would quickly turn to food. If dogs could perform complicated mathematical tasks, they would probably design a park like the one I visited recently.

Kelly Acree has saved them the trouble with a new indoor dog park called Unleashed.

Unleashed is an upscale facility on Samuell Boulevard in east Dallas that offers dog owners the benefits of an outdoor dog park along with the temperature control of an indoor arena.

The most unique feature of the 50,000 sq. ft. facility is the special K-9 turf along with the drainage and flushing system that keeps the park clean. Oversized ceiling fans and dehumidifiers keep the air moving and smelling less like – well - dogs.

Catering to dog owners as well as their dogs, Unleashed includes amenities such as a café, gift shop, grooming salon and doggie daycare center.

Unleashed is the brainchild of Dallas residents Kelly and Cody Acree. The couple regularly visited a dog park near White Rock Lake with Lucas, their Labrador retriever. Watching the packs of dogs and owners each week, they imagined a place that could take the best elements of the outdoor park and eliminate some of the less desirable ones like cold weather, mud and irresponsible owners.

“It took about two years to put this together,” explains Acree. “Our objective was to create a fresh and clean park that would be attractive to owners as well as their dogs.”

The result was a $10 million, 50,000 sq. foot facility along I-30 about 4 miles from downtown Dallas.

Opening day in April attracted over 300 dogs but a typical weekend day brings in 50 – 60 dogs and owners. An up to date vaccination record is required to register a dog on the first visit. Afterwards, a collar tag similar to a toll tag checks the dog into the park and charges the owner’s account.

The play area offers large space for large and small dogs. Movable walls allow the staff to reconfigure the space for events and their growing dog daycare business.

The staff watches 15-20 dogs per day in the daycare program. For a small fee they will also watch dogs in the play park for short periods of time while owners shop or take a break in the adjoining café.

Pampered dogs may also enjoy an evening with friends in the Unleashed bedroom suite that includes a queen sized bed, chairs, couches, dog beds and access to the play park all night long.

The task of keeping peace among the dogs and owners goes to the Unleashed staff. “Our staff members have experience in working with dogs and understand dog behavior,” says Acree. “They try to anticipate problems before they occur and intervene if necessary when fights occur.”

The park does reserve the right to remove overly aggressive dogs and pit bulls are not allowed at all, she added.
Most dogs just enjoyed the chance to run and chase and sniff their way around the park.

Expansion plans are already in the works, says Acree. The café will eventually be expanded and moved to the second level. An outdoor dog water park is also planned for the property.

Admission to the park is $7.50 per day or $150 per month. Daycare runs $25 a day and can exceed $50 if combined with a spa treatment.

Local and national media attention for Unleashed has Karen and her husband Cody pondering requests for new parks in cities such as Phoenix and Minneapolis. They would also like to open a facility in the north Dallas suburbs but their energies are currently focused on Unleashed #1.

“I’m very pleased with the response so far,” says Acree. “This is the first facility of its kind and we have overcome a number of obstacles in getting to this point. It’s very gratifying to watch the dogs and their owners enjoy the park.”
Visit www.unleasheddogparks.com for more information.

Holly Jolly Music Memories

There was a time when Christmas music signaled the start of the holiday season. It usually cranked up in stores on the day after Thanksgiving and continued through New Years.

Some ambitious retailer pushed that to mid November and before we knew it, Christmas music season began on November 1. I had barely gotten the Monster Mash out of my head when Brenda Lee started Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.

I ran into the first song of Christmas this year in mid October. The store with the big red dot opened its Christmas tree and ornament display before the costumes and candy had been packed up for the year. It was a little disappointing but not surprising.

Still, I love to hear Christmas music (in late November) because it has the power to transport me back in time. More than any music in my collection (with the possible exception of Stairway to Heaven), Christmas music puts me back in a time and place that is long gone. That place is generally my parent’s living room where toys magically appeared and gifts were exchanged to the tune of Frank Sinatra and the Ray Coniff Singers.

My parents owned a handful of records and rarely listened to them but each December my mother would pull out the Christmas albums – all six of them.

There was Little Drummer Boy by the Harry Simeone Chorale, Burl Ives’ Have A Holly Jolly Christmas, The Sinatra Christmas Album and A Christmas Album by Barbara Streisand. My favorites were Happy Holidays, the Columbia Records anthology sponsored by True Value Hardware and Great Songs For Christmas by Goodyear Tire. They had all of the popular songs by guys like Johnny Mathis, Al Martino and Bing Crosby.

It wasn’t our favorite kind of music but it set the mood and we all had our favorites. At the same time, our AM radio pumped out the classic “rock and roll” holiday tunes like Jingle Bell Rock, Rockin Around the Christmas Tree and Blue Christmas.

Despite the tens of thousands of Christmas songs recorded by every imaginable artist, the most popular songs still come from the late 1950’s and 1960’s with a few notable exceptions.
White Christmas remains the most popular Christmas song of all time. It was written by Irving Berlin and recorded by Bing Crosby in 1942 for the movie Holiday Inn. It has sold over 100 million copies in 67 years.

WCBS-FM in New York compiled the following top ten list of the most popular Christmas recordings ever. Like them or not, I would bet that every person reading this column could sing along with all ten.

1. White Christmas, 2. The Chipmunk Song, 3. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer; 4. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus; 5. Jingle Bell Rock; 6. The Christmas Song; 7. Snoopy’s Christmas; 8. Here Comes Santa Claus; 9. Little Drummer Boy and 10. Done Esta Santa Claus.
More contemporary artists like Bruce Springsteen, The Carpenters and John Lennon show up in the top twenty list.

For the record – literally – Elvis Presley’s Blue Christmas is the second best selling Christmas album behind Bing Crosby.

I recently asked my teenagers what music reminded them of Christmas and they rattled off songs by Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms. That’s what happens when mom and dad control the holiday soundtrack in your house. It’s the same reason my Christmas memories soundtrack includes Burl Ives.

It makes me wonder if two generations from now, kids will be forced to listen to their parent’s Jessica Simpson Christmas playlist because that’s what mommy listened to when she was a kid.

Pizza For Thanksgiving & Other Improbabilities

Yes, I did have pizza for Thanksgiving many years ago. It seemed like a perfectly logical thing to do in 1976 but I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning and you might need an atlas to follow along.

I was attending college at Murray State in Kentucky when I decided to visit Billy Lees - a New Jersey friend who was at Colorado State in Fort Collins. Lacking reliable transportation, I checked the ride share bulletin board at school.

Someone was looking for riders to Colorado Springs for only $20. It seemed like a good idea to this naive 19 year-old and I could just hitch hike from Limon to Fort Collins.

So – I packed into a small Datsun sedan with three strangers on the Friday before Thanksgiving and headed north and west. It was a smooth start for the 1,050 mile trip that included a breakdown, a snowstorm, Mexican food and an unlikely meeting at a Tennessee roadhouse. Let’s continue.

I spent the first leg of the trip making polite conversation with a sorority girl who was heading home to Colorado Springs for the holidays. She was asleep before we hit St. Louis. The other passenger was a guy from Louisville who planned to meet friends for an impromptu ski trip at Copper Mountain. The driver, who looked to be in his late twenties, was a whole different story.
I caught the front seat just as we hit Kansas and learned that he had served in the US Army in Viet Nam and was then stationed nearby at Fort Leavenworth. The subject of his ex-wife was breached and he ranted from Topeka to Junction City about her getting the kids in the settlement.

He finally cooled down when we realized that our headlights were fading fast. Somewhere along I-70 near Salinas we lost them completely and pulled into a rest area with a dead alternator. If we waited 90 minutes til sunrise and jumped the car, we could drive through to Colorado Springs without turning off the engine.

I was surprised how desolate Limon seemed when he offered to drop me off. Instead I chose to ride on to Colorado Springs and hitch north along I-25.

I reached Denver late that afternoon and nearly froze when the temperature dropped through the floor at sundown. An American Indian family offered me a ride north and I squeezed in the backseat of an old station wagon with their two children. They deposited me at the the Fort Collins exit where I met Billy Lees at a small restaurant and had my first taste of Mexican food (recently explained in The Flipside chili cookoff column).

We spent a few great days driving in the mountains in a Volkswagen Beetle with bad breaks. We also ate poorly like two 19 year-olds would be expected to eat. Did I mention we had pizza for Thanksgiving dinner?

I left Fort Collins just as the snow began to fall. By the time I caught my ride home, the roads were covered but that didn’t stop us. The cramped Datsun crawled across eastern Colorado until we outran the storm. The sorority girl was asleep before Goodland, Kansas. Twenty hours later we pulled back into Murray, Kentucky. Now the story gets weird.

Back in Murray, a friend was entertaining her older brother who was visiting from Denver. He had met a twenty-something waitress at a roadhouse in Tennessee during his visit. I met them all the night I returned.

All the waitress did was complain about her ex-husband and how nice it was that he spent the week at his parent’s house in Colorado Springs.

Go figure.

Chili Fans Converge On Allen

I was 20 years old before I enjoyed my first bowl of chili. It just wasn’t on the menu in the Carroll’s New Jersey household. Pasta was as ethnically diverse as our dinner menu became although we did experiment with cans of LaChoy Chop Suey on occasion.

My first experience with Mexican food came on a Thanksgiving trip to visit a friend named Billy Lees in Fort Collins. I had hitched a ride from Murray, Kentucky to Colorado and now found myself in a small café looking at the strange menu options.

“It’s kind of like Italian food but with a funny taste,” my New Jersey friend explained.
He proceeded to compare enchiladas to manicotti and chili con carne to pasta e fagioli so I cautiously tried both. His description of enchiladas was accurate but the chili really had no comparison. I had never tasted anything so spicy and despite the initial “discomfort,” I grew to enjoy the stuff.

Contrary to popular belief, chili con carne is not a Mexican dish. A writer from San Antonio once remarked that chili – as we know it in the U.S., cannot be found in Mexico. If it had come from there, it would still be there.

The International Chili Society (www. chilicookoff.com) explains that “if there is any doubt about what the Mexicans think about chili, the Diccionario de Mejicanismos, published in 1959, defines chili con carne as (roughly translated) “detestable food passing itself off as Mexican, sold in the U.S. from Texas to New York.”

Chili pepper and meat dishes have been in Latin America for hundreds of years but cooks on the early Texas cattle drives popularized it. Chili was a convenient way to flavor or hide the flavor of game caught along the trail. If beef wasn’t available, a pot of chili might include buffalo, armadillo, venison or even rattlesnake.

The chili website adds that cattle trail chili grew in popularity throughout the tiny Texas trail towns. Frank and Jesse James are said to have eaten a few bowls of "red" before pulling many of their bank jobs. Pat Garrett is supposed to have said of Billy the Kid: "Anybody that eats chili cant' be all bad."

As the weather slowly turns cool and the football season heats up, chili will be cooking in many Allen kitchens this weekend. Gallons and gallons of the stuff will also be simmering outside Dodie’s Sports Grill this Saturday as the Rotary Club of Allen kicks off the 1st Annual Allen Chili Cook-Off.

Sponsored by Dodie’s Place, the Courtyard Marriott, Miller Light and Visionary Marketing & Design, the cook-off is being held to raise funds for the Allen Rotary Club’s various community service projects.

Organizers are expecting about 20 entries from local restaurants, businesses and individuals including Davidson’s Auto Care – our team sponsor.

That’s right - using a lifetime minus 20 years of experience, I will be competing in this gastronomic Hiroshima along with local chili fans Keith Taylor and Barry Lanier.
Can a team of rookies compete? Can a guy from Jersey actually make a pot of chili without oregano?

All will be revealed this Saturday, October 25 in the parking lot between Dodie’s and the new Allen Event Center. The event is open for public tasting from 12 noon – 6 p.m. Visit www.allenchili.com for details.
#

Two Dots and a Dash

Two dots and a dash were all we needed for entertainment during the Christmas of 1975.

My friend Tom Casey’s family had invested in a home version of the arcade game Pong and it was a big hit. Being the oldest brother, Tom had wrestled it away from his 7 siblings so we could get our first taste of home video games.

Watching my son play FIFA Soccer on a high definition television last night, I was reminded of that Christmas afternoon. The Casey kids and a few stragglers like me were sitting in front of that black and white television watching a dash chase two dots up and down the screen.

Pong actually wasn’t the first video game but it was the first game to be adapted for home use. Alan Alcorn, an engineer for Atari Incorporated, created the game in 1972 based on an electronic ping pong game included with the Magnavox Odyssey system.

Pong was first rolled out as an arcade game and later marketed in 1975 as Home Pong. The game was sold exclusively by Sears because no other merchandiser felt it had a future.

The future arrived in 1977 when the Atari 2600 game system was introduced. That was followed by the Odyssey 2 in 1978 and Mattel’s Intellivision system in 1980.

By 1980 I was a college graduate and married. I had written video games off as children’s toys and we didn’t have enough money for such luxuries anyway. That Christmas, we visited some old friends who had just bought Intellivision for themselves. They even owned a color television set!

They were hooked on Intellivision and had already built up quite a collection of games. We played football and baseball, raced horses and leapt over alligator infested ponds that night.

By today’s standards, the 8-bit graphics would be laughable but all we had for comparison was Pong.

It wasn’t long before we saved up and bought our own Intellivision. We bought the sports titles along with silly games like Frogger, Pitfall, Worm Whomper and Donkey Kong.

Our favorite though was a simple game called BurgerTime. The concept was simple enough. Chef Peter Pepper had to build a hamburger without being harmed by Mr. Hot Dog, Mr. Pickle and Mr. Egg.

In the days before children or pets, we found ourselves consumed with BurgerTime. It bordered on an obsession for both of us as we beat the game and played on and on.

BurgerTime was such a hit that its developers created versions for competing game systems like Atari and ColecoVision as well as video arcades.

We both eventually tired of the game and bought a fifty pound, top loading video recorder in its place. Today we could buy a rack of VCR’s for the price of that first one but it was quite a luxury in 1981.

Daydreaming about the old Intellivision system this past week led me to Ebay where all nostalgia lives on. Apparently an entire game system with a few odd games is running about $50. I could even pick up a stack of games for only $12.99 if I bid within the hour.

The prospect of repurchasing classics such as Frog Bog, Sea Battle and yes – BurgerTime tempted me. Then I walked into the game room and heard the roar of that high definition virtual soccer crowd and I forget all about Intellivision again.

I do wonder what Burgertime would look like in high definition though.

Front Yard Sports Comlex

As I was mowing the grass last week I concluded that either my yard is shrinking or my trees are growing. I know because I spend much more time ducking branches and circling trees than I used to.

There was a time when mowing wasn’t necessary. The grass was trampled by endless games of soccer and football and baseball on the fields of the Carroll Multisports Complex.

As the head groundskeeper at the complex, I was able to quickly convert the playing surface from a soccer stadium to a Frisbee golf course in just minutes. Trim a few branches and we were ready for football or wiffle ball depending upon the season.

The Carroll Multisports Complex included a little less than Olympic-size pool for swimming competitions and of course pool basketball. Unfortunately the pool consumed our backyard so other field sports were moved out front.

Using the trees as imaginary defenders or mid fielders, we were able to simulate Super Bowls and World Cups right in my front yard. The crowds were much smaller but the parking was free.

Adapting sports to the landscape is nothing new for kids. Baseball fields have been cut into corn fields and shaped around abandoned city lots. Soccer is played by kids around the world in just about any space and surface that can hold a ball – if there is a ball at all. Regardless of the location, the rules are basically the same with a few considerations for local hazards.

I learned to catch a baseball and dodge cars the same year. We had no yard so we played catch in the city street outside our house. The stream of moving cars was only one of many challenges. Parked cars could be just as dangerous and so could their owners if balls landed on them. Sewers and fenced yards simply increased the odds that an extra game ball might be needed.

In the days before PlayStation, we spent almost all of our outdoor time playing sports. In the fall we played touch football in the street. On short winter days we even played “under the lights” although the best passes often flew over the lights and reappeared halfway down the street.

Basketball season was re-enacted on my friend’s driveway with clotheslines and curbs officially out of bounds.

Once the baseball season rolled around, we alternated between playing running bases in the street and stickball in the schoolyard down the block.

No matter what sport, the distance between two telephone poles was just about the right distance. A “football field” would extend the length of three telephone polls and manhole covers made great home plates in baseball. Trees or cars served as first and third base while second base was anything that wouldn’t blow away.

The Carroll Multisports Complex saw a lot of action in its early years. There was ASA soccer practice and that game where dad throws the ball at his kid’s baseball glove in the hope that it gets stuck there. We graduated to running football passing routes during halftime of Notre Dame games and later created a very tight Frisbee golf course.

These days the sports complex lies silent like Texas Stadium. My kids are more likely to drive 35 miles to Arlington than they are to play ball in our front yard. I’m not complaining though. At least the grass is growing again.