What I Love about December 2011

Well, good gracious, what’s not to love about December? It is the most Wonderful Time of the year. So let’s just jump right on in:
1. On Thursday night, December 1st was our annual J&J Foods Christmas Party at the Gainesville Civic Center. Actually, annual may not be the correct word because we didn’t hold our Christmas party in 2009 or 2010. Those were hard years for our stores as well as the country as a whole and D made the decision that only “mission critical” (as he called it) expenditures would occur. The Christmas Party? Not mission critical at that point. While we are adjusting to a new normal way of doing business, D decided that it was necessary to honor this our 35th year in business with a little holiday cheer. One of the highlights of the party for me is the presentation of the service awards. For a company of our size, it is amazing that we have several employees that have been with us 10, 15, 20 and 30 years. While those are all impressive, we honored one employee who had been with us 35 years. J&J opened in June of 1976 and this gentleman came to work that August. He’s a fine one to be sure. He are honored that he chose to work with our company for all these years.

2. On Friday night, the 2nd, D and I headed down to Emory University where our niece is in school. She was participating in the Choral Concert through their Department of Music. While she is not a music major, she has a beautiful voice and was selected to sing in their 100+voice choir. Now if an old church, with beautiful stained glass windows, lit by candlelight, filled with Christmas trees isn’t enough to get you in the Christmas spirit, add to that a choir singing like angels accompanied by a full orchestra. It was fabulous.

3. That afternoon before the concert, D and I got to thinking that if we were going to Emory in Decatur for the concert then back to Atlanta on Saturday, perhaps we should just stay in the Atl for the evening. So my every economical husband goes on the Priceline app on my phone to find us a hotel. I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole Priceline procedure, bidding on a hotel without prior knowledge of the actual hotel. So the thing about that is that you never really know what you’re going to get as far as quality of hotels go. You get to pick the number of star rating that you desire but let me just say that a four star hotel say in New York City is a little different than a four star hotel in Statesboro Georgia. No offense to Statesboro but it’s a fact. Believe me, I know. Anyway, D put in the info and out came our hotel. Well, this time we got lucky because for a whopping $69 we stayed at The Westin at Perimeter. It was fabulous and I just wished I could have slept in that bed for longer than 7 hours. This bed was so good that D and I might have pulled off the sheets to see what the brand was. Okay, we did. It.was.that.good. oh my word, I didn’t want to get out of it. Except for the fact that if we didn’t get to that Dome in time, we wouldn’t get to see the BULLDOGS PLAY IN THE SEC Championship!!! And if you can’t tell already, I was just little bit excited about the whole adventure.
You know, after looking at the length of that above paragraph, I probably should have devoted an entire post to this but oh well, too late now. We dragged ourselves out of the One. Fabulous.Bed, put on our red and black, loaded up the car and headed downtown. Now, I love the Bulldogs and the energy on this particular game day was enough to cut with a knife. It was great. Oh and the best part, we realized from talking with one of D’s employees that we had two more tickets than we originally thought. So who can we call that could come last minute? Oh yes, E and N. Yay! I think before D could get off the phone with her she was already in the shower getting ready. I honestly could go on and on about the great time we had at Fan Fare because who wouldn’t when there was complimentary fried macaroni and cheese and an appearance by the Red Coat Band and Hairy Dog (who I hugged by the way). And that was all before the game even started. We had fabulous seats in the Dr. Pepper suite. Now I usually don’t name drop because well, I don’t have any names to drop, but I will say that there are perks for selling 50,000 cases (give or take a few thousand) of Dr. Pepper every year. The folks there were so gracious to invite us to sit with them and we could not have enjoyed it more. You know the absolute best part about sitting in a suite? The private bathroom. Oh yes. Thank you Lord. This made the fact that we lost the second half of the ballgame a whole lot more bearable.
On a totally unrelated note, I love to go to events like this and just people watch. Oh at the cute fashions you see. I’ve never seen the like of cute dresses, boots, sweaters, sweater dresses, tights, scarves, etc. I could go on and on but the highlight for me (and I so wish I would have taken a picture) was the LSU fan with the gold-sequin encrusted cowboy boots. Boy, howdy, those were a classic I tell you. You just wonder where she might have bought those or was this a do-it-yourself project with an industrial strength Bedazzler. We’ll never know.

4. On Monday night, the 5th D and I had another great music opportunity. When D opened his music store in 1984, one of his first employees was a very talented trumpet player. So talented that he had just come off a 4 year travel gig with the Christian music group, Truth. I loved Truth.   Still do. I always dreamed of singing with them because they always had the best looking guys in their group. (I was very spiritually mature).   I was and still am, a sucker for a good-looking man who can sing. Oh, I digress. Anyway, I had Truth’s albums (and they were actual vinyl albums) back in the day. Then I had their 8 track tapes in my car and then I had their cassettes. This year Truth is celebrating their 40th anniversary. They actually stopped traveling back in 2004 but decided to tour one last time for this, their anniversary year.  And on Monday night, they came through Gainesville to Blackshear Place Baptist Church. And our longtime friend, the trumpet player, was invited to play in their trumpet section. It was a very special evening.

5. On Tuesday, the 6th some girlfriends and I headed out for our annual trip to see another good-looking man who can sing, John Berry. I won’t go into once again how much I love John Berry but I will say that he has a new gospel CD out and it is awesome. You should get it. I have it in my car and cannot stop listening to it. We had a great night of music, laughter, and Mexican food. And, in my humble opinion, it just doesn’t get any better than that.

We’ll friends, I’m going to stop there for today. There’s lots more to tell but I’ll save it.  I think that’s all the rambling one person should be subject to for one day.