A Christmas Cult Classic

It's December! Time to sit back and enjoy some classic Christmas movies like It's a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.

I never realized there were Christmas cult classic films, until a few years ago when someone gave my kids a collection of Christmas movies. The motion pictures included were not well known, to say the least, but all were good for a laugh. 

The strangest--and corniest--was Santa Clause Conquers the Martians.  It's a 1964 science-fiction movie that regularly receives the honor of being listed as one of the worst films ever made. A featured player is ten-year-old Pia Zadora.

Here's a part of the plot from Wikipedia:

The story involves the people of Mars, including Momar ("Mom Martian") and Kimar ("King Martian"). They're worried that their children Girmar ("Girl Martian") and Bomar ("Boy Martian") are watching too much Earth television, most notably station KID-TV's interview with Santa Claus in his workshop at the North Pole. Consulting the ancient 800-year-old Martian sage Chochem (a Yiddish word meaning "genius"), they are advised that the children of Mars are growing distracted due to the society's overly rigid structure; from infancy, all their education is fed into their brains through machines and they are not allowed individuality or freedom of thought.

Chochem notes that he had seen this coming "for centuries", and says the only way to help the children is to allow them their freedom and be allowed to have fun. To do this, they need a Santa Claus figure, like on Earth. Leaving the Chochem's cave, the Martian leaders decide to abduct Santa Claus from Earth and bring him to Mars. As the Martians could not distinguish between all the fake Santas, they kidnapped two children to find the real one. Once this is accomplished, one Martian, Voldar, who strongly disagrees with the idea, repeatedly tries to kill Santa Claus along with the two kidnapped Earth children. He believes that Santa is corrupting the children of Mars and turning them away from the race's original glory.

It goes on, but you can tell from this that it's pretty bad, very funny, and not your average Christmas movie! Do you have any Christmas cult classics you'd like to share?

Thanks for visiting and have a great week!

Originally posted 12/8/14

Cranberry Chicken

I'm still in Thanksgiving mode! I love turkey and cranberry sauce and I love chicken and cranberry sauce too!  Here's an easy recipe for the crock pot from the cookbook Fix-It and Forget-It to keep you thinking about all that yummy Thanksgiving food. Enjoy!

Cranberry Chicken

3-4 lbs. chicken pieces
1/2 t salt
1/4 t pepper
1/2 cup diced celery
1/2 cup diced onion
16 oz. can whole cranberry sauce
1 cup BBQ sauce

Combine all ingredients in slow cooker. Cover and bake on HIGH for 4 hours, or LOW for 6-8 hours.

Cooking can't get much easier than that. Sound good to you?

Thanks for visiting and have a great week!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm taking today off but will be back next week. Hope you'll be enjoying family and lots of great food come Thursday!

A History of Veterans Day

To all veterans being celebrated today, thank you for your service!

For those of us who aren't veterans, have you ever wondered about the origin of Veterans Day? I have, so here's some history about it from History.com:

Veterans Day originated as “Armistice Day” on Nov. 11, 1919, the first anniversary of the end of World War I. Congress passed a resolution in 1926 for an annual observance, and Nov. 11 became a national holiday beginning in 1938. Unlike Memorial Day, Veterans Day pays tribute to all American veterans—living or dead—but especially gives thanks to living veterans who served their country honorably during war or peacetime.

When Is Veterans Day?

• Veterans Day occurs on November 11 every year in the United States.
• In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower officially changed the name of the holiday from Armistice Day to Veterans Day.
• In 1968, the Uniform Holidays Bill was passed by Congress, which moved the celebration of Veterans Day to the fourth Monday in October. The law went into effect in 1971, but in 1975 President Gerald Ford returned Veterans Day to November 11, due to the important historical significance of the date.
• Great Britain, France, Australia and Canada also commemorate the veterans of World War I and World War II on or near November 11th: Canada has Remembrance Day, while Britain has Remembrance Sunday (the second Sunday of November).
• In Europe, Great Britain and the Commonwealth countries it is common to observe two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. every November 11.

Was any of this information new to you? Thanks for visiting and have a great week!

Mae West: How She Got Away With It

Mae West

Mae West had quite a way with words, yet most people nowadays have probably never heard of her. So just to provide a little background information, she was born Mary Jane West on August 17, 1893 and died on November 22, 1980. 

Her career spanned seven decades and she was an actress, singer, playwright, screenwriter, comedian and sex symbol.

She’s best known for her lighthearted use of, shall we say, suggestiveness.

I watched a documentary about her recently and it mentioned that if she’d been slimmer and more glamorous, like Marlene Dietrich for instance, she probably could not have gotten away with the lines that made her famous.

She wasn’t particularly beautiful and her figure was rather matronly, but she certainly had a way with words that kept bringing audiences into the movie theaters of the Depression era 1930s.

When presented with a script, she’d re-write all her lines which certainly seemed to pay off at the box office. 

Marlene Dietrich

Up until 1934, movies were not censored.  But even after they were, Mae West still continued to write provocative dialogue (curtailing it only slightly) to the delight of her audiences. However, in the late 1930’s the Censorship Office cracked down on Mae West’s unique use of words. And after that, the magic of her movie performances disappeared. 

When her cinematic career ended, she wrote books and plays and went on to perform in Las Vegas, the United Kingdom, and on radio and television. 

As far as her opinion on censorship, she said, “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it."  

Here are some of Mae West’s most memorable lines:

"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before."

"Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly."

“Don’t ever let a man put anything over on you except an umbrella.”

"He’s the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of."

"I believe that it’s better to be looked over than it is to be overlooked."

"Opportunity knocks for every man, but you have to give a woman a ring."

"A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up."

"Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you."

"A woman in love can’t be reasonable – or she probably wouldn’t be in love."

"When women go wrong, men go right after them."

I've only seen one Mae West movie, 1933's She Done Him Wrong. All I can say is that there will never be another Mae West! Have you seen any of her films? Thanks for visiting and have a great week!