Well, yesterday was fun. We had our own personal Thanksgiving yesterday with our family here in Kansas because over Thanksgiving Break we're going to Kentucky to my aunt's place and having a Thanksgiving there.

You know that wave of Christmas anticipation you feel when Thanksgiving ends?

Yeah. Boom. I got a major case of it yesterday.

My sister made some absolutely amazing food. The turkey was great, the stuffing was excellent, and it was so good I was about ready to puke by the end of the day. My grandparents and cousin shared our Thanksgiving, and it got to a point where there was food spraying across the table because we were laughing so much.

Now here I am, in tomorrow-land, with it feeling like Christmas should take over the wheel.

Oh, and I guess I should explain something. Every year my siblings and I put on a little performance for our parents on Christmas night. Sometimes it's heavily rehearsed, sometimes it's almost completely improvisation. We've had many memorable plays with Court TV, game shows, commercials, talent segments, and yours truly doing a spastic rendition of "I'm a Train" as performed by the King Singers. Our parents have taped all of these performances so that today we watched them and just about went into another foodspray.

Granted, part of the humor was that the first play was in '02, back when I was a head and a half shorter, about an octave higher, and wasn't developing facial hair.

But besides that, I've realized that almost every play we've done has been based off of the audio series 'Adventures in Odyssey'. It's a great series and we get some great plays from it, but we haven't done a lot of very...original skits.

This year, with the middle sibling taking over the writer's position, that changes.

Our theme this year is fairly simple. Here's the situation:

Five/four (depends on whether my little brother will count or not) people are out Christmas caroling. They go around "town", almost always being split up (since we only have a cast of five) and experiencing some strange situations. From wrestling with a bell ringing Santa to the tune of Carol of the Bells to irritating "neighbors" with a terrible rendition of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!, this will be a fun play to put on. Not only will there be singing (as we have attempted to put into every play) but we can actually do bad singing.

The problem?

All of the scenes (most of them, anyway) have to conform to a Christmas carol.

Thus far, here's what we have on the drawing board:

-Carol of the Bells: Fight with bell-ringing Santa

-Hark! The Herald Angels Sing: Some "out-of-tune angels".

-Silent Night: A soloist who doesn't understand the meaning of piano singing out to a very noisy neighborhood.

-It's Cold Outside: A rewritten version where a freezing caroler is trying to persuade a sleepy homeowner to let him in for a few minutes.

-Silver Bells: A lulling piece, save the fact that one of the caroler's picked up the wrong set of handbells.

-Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: A carol that would be cute if the dog who was supposed to be Rudolph didn't suddenly decide to have a revolution.

-It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: The one carol where absolutely everything just goes wrong.

Those are our ideas. If you have anymore, please post them! We'd greatly appreciate it.

Cheerily,

Dr. Bionicle