a blue christmas
Filmed by Kent Taylor in historic Roswell, Georgia at locations scouted by Mary Lynn Taylor, the video stars Kassandra Taylor. (Katrina Taylor and Reid Leslie do not appear in this year’s video due to travel calendars.) Featuring cameo appearances by Dr. William ‘Jitterbug’ Morrison and the renowned singer Amber Tatum, choreography is by Kassandra Taylor. Music is “Come Around” by Tim & Jean (part of Australia’s incredible music scene). Note: Much of this is freestyle—Kassandra isn’t responsible for my attempts to dance near her. Wait for the entire video to load, please, as I tried to use every iMovie filter and transition.
Before Christmas and the filming of the video, we all celebrated Kat and Reid making it through a flight cancellation from Portland, Oregon and arriving in time for Dad’s birthday, when Mom always makes a lemon cheesecake with her secret recipe.
Kat and Reid brought with them their formidable French toast skills,
and challah and panettone were dipped in egg and placed in a hot pan,
then topped with strawberries, pecans,
and a beautiful raw honey made by my mother’s student’s grandfather (you know how I feel about the importance of local honey).
Kat dressed up as a mod Santa,
Kass smiled as she opened her stocking, and we collected our first batch of little presents before readying for the meal.
Soon, the kitchen began to smell of roast pork (I’ll go into our family genealogy another time, but we are partly British),
with a lovely garlic-rosemary salt crust Mom made for those of you into that.
Roasted brussels, a bibb salad (Bibb lettuce is usually grown hydroponically now, so I find those are the only heads with soft leaves in the winter) with an improvised lemon-mustard-honey vinaigrette,
my usual smashed potatoes (this is a variety sold as Buttercream, the obvious choice for most potato recipes),
and wonderful chocolates Kat brought from Cacao in Portland.
Reid took our family Christmas picture outside by the lake (both Kat and Kass are wearing vintage dresses, which makes me very happy),
and we cut the cake. Jesus’s birthday cake. Kat decorated the cake with a crown and the usual lettering on the top—
we added a new phrase to the side of the cake that confused my grandfather, who asked me to give him a Christian side hug.
Instead, Kass, Kat, Reid, and I gave our new Snuggie™ blankets a trial run,
conferring like fleece-clad Druids,
creating a tableaux (we scared the dogs),
returning to our Gleeful show choir days,
and laughing at our very blue Christmas…
More pictures in the Flickr set.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply
Posted by Kristen Taylor on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009, 10:44 am * Filed in Dance, holiday, Video. * Tags: atlanta, christmas, family, kristen, kthread, taylor. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 31st, 2009 at 2:02 pm
If that video has not gone viral by New Years, I will lose all faith in humanity ;-). Ah, it’s not New Years until I’ve seen your grandpa dance. Happy New Year’s Eve, Kristen!
January 1st, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Happy 2010 to you, John! May it be a very productive and busy year (will be looking for the link attached to your name when you comment). I think my grandfather just gets better at the dancing—we had so much fun taping this video, thanks for watching it—