We’re celebrating our daughter’s birthday today. Her actual birthday is on Saturday, but that is the day that she will be heading back to Massachusetts for the winter session. It’s not actually the semester that is typically called “spring session” >>> It is a three week class session, which (apparently) all the students are required to take. (We will miss her University of Texas undergraduate five-week winter holidays!)

We are going out to dinner at our very favorite restaurant in San Antonio: Pappasito’s. Love it! (I know you would think the correct spelling would be “Papacito’s”… but it’s not!) We all love Mexican food, and we don’t think it gets any better than this place!

Anyway…

Knowing that this is a mystery site blog, I probably should be writing about the mystery book I am currently reading. My audio book is John Mortimer‘s Rumpole at Christmas and my “real book” is Margaret Grace‘s Christmas mystery – Mayhem in Miniature. (I actually saved this book, even though it is only the second in Grace’s Miniature Mystery Series. I wanted to enjoy it during the holiday season.)

I hope you all are still enjoying the holiday season, and that you are especially enjoying the books you’re currently reading!

Hope everyone is still enjoying the holidays… This should be my last rant and rave of 2009:

On to our second Christmas movie…

When the four of us actually get together to watch a Christmas movie, there is a lot of thought involved. We have a lot of movies to pick from, since we have a lot of Christmas movies that we enjoy. My daughter and I tend to enjoy more movies than the two boys enjoy… Christmas in Connecticut (with Barbara Stanwyck) is one of the Christmas chick-flicks we love.

This year, I mentioned A Muppet Family Christmas, and the boys agreed that it had been several years since they saw it. (My daughter and I watched it last year, which reminded us how good this Jim Henson movie is.)

Again, my husband is a “technical gadget, wide-screen, perfect picture” sort of guy. So, I was a little hesitant when I got out our very old VHS version of A Muppet Family Christmas. I taped it years ago when it originally aired on television… which of course means that I have all of the television ads (brought to us by Osh Kosh B’ Gosh and M & Ms!) as well as the VHS tracking problems. I knew that it would not be up to my husband’s “perfect picture” taste, but I also knew that it is a terrific Christmas movie.

We all really enjoyed seeing the Muppets in all of their splendor… Miss Piggy braving the snow storm to be with her true love – Kermit (or as she would say “Kermie”), Big Bird making a home-made gift for the Swedish Chef  – who was measuring Big Bird for the roasting pan, Fozzie Bear’s grandmother welcoming all of the unexpected guests into her home while ditching the warm-weathered plans she was looking forward to, the Fraggles explaining their “Pass It On” holiday, ETC.

After watching the movie, my husband decided that we do indeed need the DVD of this great Christmas movie, so off he went to buy it online. What a disappointment! Remember what I said about messing with perfection?!? Apparently, when Disney decided to sell the DVD (remember my previous entry: Disney bought the Jim Henson Company…) they would not/could not buy the rights to several of the songs, and instead simply decided to cut out many scenes from the original movie.

Let me keep this brief: If you have a VHS copy of the original movie, enjoy it AND treat it with care! Needless to say, my husband did NOT buy the DVD. I’m guessing that Disney must not have the money to pay for the rights of those Christmas songs… (Right! They certainly have the money to pay for all sorts of computer-generated movies, etc.)

Shame on you, Disney Studios, for messing with perfection!

I hope you all are enjoying the holidays! I don’t want to start out the year with another of my “rant and rave” entries… so thought I should hurry up and post my next two entries… which of course >>> are rant and raves!

My family picked two holiday movies to watch this year… and both of them were Jim Henson productions! I am SO glad that we got these movies years ago… when our children were little (during the ’80s) because, apparently, Disney is distributing them ALTERED!

You know the expression… “Don’t mess with perfection.”>>> Well, apparently when Disney bought the Henson Production Company, they thought that they (Disney!) could make “perfection” even more perfect! They (Disney!) were wrong!

We bought our DVD of  The Muppet Christmas Carol years ago, right when it was originally released. Unfortunately, it was released in the “pan and scan” mode. My husband, (I have “spoken” about him before… with his love of technological toys…) decided that we “need” to get the wide screen DVD version, so he decided to buy it. He was in for a big surprise!

Apparently, it is now being released by Disney without a very crucial song/sequence, which makes a critical transition time in the movie. You know longer are able to see Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine) sing a song with the fiancée who lost out to his love for money. We don’t know exactly why this scene has been deleted from the wide screen version. The good news is that the (Disney) distributors did deem this scene important enough to include in the “bonus scenes.” So, you can watch the wide screen version until the crucial moment, go to the bonus scene, continue watching the movie AS IT WAS INTENDED in the bonus scene, and then, when you get to the precise moment, you can go back to the wide screen version.

Needless to say, my husband did NOT buy the new and “improved” wide screen version of the movie. We will continue to watch it each year in the pan and scan mode… since we prefer seeing all of the scenes VS all of the scenery. Although each time we watch the movie, we see more of the small details that producer Brian Henson added to the movie scenery.

Shame on you, Disney Studios, for messing with perfection!

PS… I’m on a “3 Rs” >>>Rant & Rave Roll! A Muppet Family Christmas DVD in my next entry!

I just want to send a quick holiday greeting to ALL of you. 

Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just simply because winter is here:

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and/or Season’s Greetings to all of you!